Technical standard | EPFL Graph Search

A technical standard is an established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, and related management systems practices. A technical standard includes definition of terms; classification of components; delineation of procedures; specification of dimensions, materials, performance, designs, or operations; measurement of quality and quantity in describing materials, processes, products, systems, services, or practices; test methods and sampling procedures; or descriptions of fit and measurements of size or strength. It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes, and practices. In contrast, a custom, convention, company product, corporate standard, and so forth that becomes generally accepted and dominant is often called a de facto standard. A technical sta

Devanagari Character Recognition towards natural Human-Computer Interaction

Sapan Diwakar, Pulkit Goyal

Human-computer interaction is a growing research area. There are several ways of interaction with the computer. Handwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in the day to day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Due to the growth of technology in India, it becomes important to devise ways that allow people to communicate with computer in Indian languages. Hindi being the national language of India, we present a way to communicate with the computer in Hindi or more precisely, ‘Devanagari script’. Due to absence of a global font to represent Devanagari characters, it is important that the computer recognises the characters written by the user in order to interact with him. The algorithm implemented for character recognition first segments the image containing Devanagari text fed to the software into lines, lines to words and words to characters. The obtained characters are then brought down to a standard size. The Kohonen Neural Network based recogniser then comes into action and recognises the text character by character and provides the output in Unicode format. The network has been designed with no hidden layer to support quick recognition. Apart from text recognition from an image, we also provided the option to recognise individual handwritten characters drawn using a mouse. Such a system provides keyboard less computer interaction. The technique is implemented using Java. The overall recognition rate for a fixed font machine printed characters is 90.26% and for hand written characters, it is 83.33%.

2010

Pump-storage small hydropower as an example of co-evolution between institutions and technologies

Nicolas Crettenand

The aim of this paper is to explore the storage and pump-storage application of small hydropower as an example of co-evolution between institutions and technologies. The context of the research is given by the liberalisation of the electricity sector and the government’s aim to increase the part of renewable energy technologies (RET) within the electricity production mix. As a consequence, the part of intermittent RET such as wind and solar power is increasing significantly. Furthermore, the electrical grid is becoming “smarter” with the implementation of ICT which may significantly change how the electricity network is operated locally and regionally. Within the facilitation of RET, quantity (i.e. kWh) as well as ‘quality’ should be promoted. RET need to contribute to peak electricity, be available on demand and also be part of the balancing of the electrical grid frequencies. If this is not the case, the facilitation of RET is incoherent as it focuses only on quantity, and not on the sector specific technical aspects such as the real-time balancing of demand and supply. The storage, and where technically and environmentally feasible, the pump-storage application of small hydropower (SHP) appears to be an option for distributed peak electricity, regional integration of intermittent RET and grid balancing. SHP being part of the facilitated RET, the storage and pump-storage application should be taken into account in the institutional frameworks. With the conceptual background based on the literature of co-evolution between institutions and technologies and the coherence framework, the technical and institutional feasibility of the implementation of storage and pump-storage SHP has been evaluated in the case of Switzerland. The technical potential was evaluated with an explorative approach. Using qualitative research methods, institutional instruments were identified which allow the economically viable deployment of storage and pump-storage SHP. The implementation of such instruments leads to policy recommendations. Finally, the analysis on this concrete example gives an illustration of the coherence framework and contributed to further develop it.

intersentia2011

Pump-storage small hydropower as an example of co-evolution between institutions and technologies

Nicolas Crettenand

intersentia2011