Spatial facility location problems (SFLPs) involve the placement of facilities in continuous demand regions. One approach to solving SFLPs is to aggregate demand into discrete points, and then solve the point-based model as a conventional facility location problem (FLP) according to a surrogate model. Solution performance is measured in terms of the percentage of continuous space actually covered in the original SFLP. In this dissertation I explore this approach and examine factors contributing to solution quality. Three error sources are discussed: point representation spacing, multiple possible solutions to the surrogate point-based model, and round-off errors induced by the computer representation of numbers. Some factors—including boundary region surrogate points and surrogate point location—were also found to make significant contributions to coverage errors. A surrogate error measure using a point-based surrogate model was derived to characterize relationships among spacing, facility coverage area, and spatial coverage error. Locating continuous space facilities with full coverage is important but challenging. Demand surrogate points were initially used as a continuous space for constructing the MIP model, and a point-based surrogate FLP was enhanced for extracting multiple solutions with additional constraints that were found to reduce coverage error. Next, a best initial solution was applied to a proposed heuristic algorithm to serve as an improvement procedure. Algorithm performance was evaluated and applied to a problem involving the location of emergency warning sirens in the city of Dublin, Ohio. The effectiveness of the proposed method for solving this and other facility location/network design problems was demonstrated by comparing the results with those reported in recently published papers.

The pattern reduction (PR) algorithm we proposed previously, which works by eliminating patterns that are unlikely to change their membership during the convergence process, is obviously one of the most efficient methods for reducing the computation time of clustering algorithms. However, it is limited to problems with solutions that can be binary or integer encoded, such as combinatorial optimization problems. As such, this study is aimed at developing a new pattern reduction algorithm, called pattern reduction over continuous space, to get rid of this limitation. Like the PR, the proposed algorithm consists of two operators: detection and compression. Unlike the PR, the detection operator is divided into two steps. The first step is aimed at finding out subsolutions that can be considered as the candidate subsolutions for compression. The second step is performed to ensure that the candidate subsolutions have reached the final state so that any further computation is eventually a waste and thus can be compressed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we apply it to metaheuristics for clustering.

During this period of high technology, designers are eager to create environments that have strong emotional appeal to people's physiology and psychology. Our exploration of the natural living space has become all the more an elusive search as modern technology advances. Interior design, in its concern for environmental engineering, endeavors to exploit the spiritual aspect of human resources. Through this message, people are inspired to higher planes of existence.A. PROJECT To design a Chinese Cultural center. B. PURPOSE 1. To introduce the traditional and contemporary Chinese culture to western people. 2. To illustrate and describe the philosophies of Chinese life and thinking to visitors of the center. 3. To create a new space and form combining oriental and western design. 4. To incorporate the use of contemporary materials, structure and technology. 5. To integrate the interior and exterior environment, and the building into a total design concept. 6. To satisfy the functional requirements needed in an exhibition area, guest house facility, restaurant, gift shop, and office area.

abstract: Due to environmental and geopolitical reasons, many countries are embracing electric vehicles (EVs) as an alternative to gasoline powered automobiles. Other alternative-fuel vehicles (AFVs) powered by compressed gas, hydrogen or biodiesel have also been tested for replacing gasoline powered vehicles. However, since the associated refueling infrastructure of AFVs is sparse and is gradually being built, the distance between recharging points (RPs) becomes a crucial prohibitive attribute in attracting drivers to use such vehicles. Optimally locating RPs will both increase demand and help in developing the refueling infrastructure. The major emphasis in this dissertation is the development of theories and associated algorithms for a new set of location problems defined on continuous network space related to siting multiple RPs for range limited vehicles. This dissertation covers three optimization problems: locating multiple RPs on a line network, locating multiple RPs on a comb tree network, and locating multiple RPs on a general tree network. For each of the three problems, finding the minimum number of RPs needed to refuel all Origin-Destination (O-D) flows is considered as the first objective. For this minimum number, the location objective is to locate this number of RPs to minimize weighted sum of the travelling distance for all O-D flows. Different exact algorithms are proposed to solve each of the three algorithms. In the first part of this dissertation, the simplest case of locating RPs on a line network is addressed. Scenarios include single one-way O-D pair, multiple one-way O-D pairs, round trips, etc. A mixed integer program with linear constraints and quartic objective function is formulated. A finite dominating set (FDS) is identified, and based on the existence of FDS, the problem is formulated as a shortest path problem. In the second part, the problem is extended to comb tree networks. Finally, the problem is extended to general tree networks. The extension to a probabilistic version of the location problem is also addressed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 2020

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No description available.

The purpose of language models is in general to capture and to model regularities of language, thereby capturing morphological, syntactical and distributional properties of word sequences in a given language. They play an important role in many successful applications of Natural Language Processing, such as Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine Translation and Information Extraction. The most successful approaches to date are based on n-gram assumption and the adjustment of statistics from the training data by applying smoothing and back-off techniques, notably Kneser-Ney technique, introduced twenty years ago. In this way, language models predict a word based on its n-1 previous words. In spite of their prevalence, conventional n-gram based language models still suffer from several limitations that could be intuitively overcome by consulting human expert knowledge. One critical limitation is that, ignoring all linguistic properties, they treat each word as one discrete symbol with no relation with the others. Another point is that, even with a huge amount of data, the data sparsity issue always has an important impact, so the optimal value of n in the n-gram assumption is often 4 or 5 which is insufficient in practice. This kind of model is constructed based on the count of n-grams in training data. Therefore, the pertinence of these models is conditioned only on the characteristics of the training text (its quantity, its representation of the content in terms of theme, date). Recently, one of the most successful attempts that tries to directly learn word similarities is to use distributed word representations in language modeling, where distributionally words, which have semantic and syntactic similarities, are expected to be represented as neighbors in a continuous space. These representations and the associated objective function (the likelihood of the training data) are jointly learned using a multi-layer neural network architecture. In this way, word similarities are learned automatically. This approach has shown significant and consistent improvements when applied to automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translation tasks. A major difficulty with the continuous space neural network based approach remains the computational burden, which does not scale well to the massive corpora that are nowadays available. For this reason, the first contribution of this dissertation is the definition of a neural architecture based on a tree representation of the output vocabulary, namely Structured OUtput Layer (SOUL), which makes them well suited for large scale frameworks. The SOUL model combines the neural network approach with the class-based approach. It achieves significant improvements on both state-of-the-art large scale automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translations tasks. The second contribution is to provide several insightful analyses on their performances, their pros and cons, their induced word space representation. Finally, the third contribution is the successful adoption of the continuous space neural network into a machine translation framework. New translation models are proposed and reported to achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art baseline systems.

1 English abstract: Villa Müller versus Villa Tugendhat - A Comparison of Two Different Restoration Projects of Modernist Buildings. The work compares two successful restorations of interwar Czechoslovak avant-garde buildings realized between 1995 and 2012. At first, the respective histories of both buildings are compared since their creation through two totalitarian regimes up to their restoration. The fates of builders and architects of both villas are also described. From the point of view of historic preservation the work describes the state of both buildings before the commencement of restoration. The errors committed by the original designers are also described here. The methodology of restoration of both villas stemming from the professional points of view and relevant laws governing heritage protection is also treated in detail. The emphasis is given on preparation works preceding the design phase - the historic-structural survey, which, in both cases, was conceived as above-standard. Due to their span, these surveys have marked a key moment in relation to the modern cultural heritage within the Czech context. In the last part of the work links and comparisons are given to similar modern cultural heritage objects abroad. The work also documents the influence these two restorations have had on...

Les modèles de langage ont pour but de caractériser et d'évaluer la qualité des énoncés en langue naturelle. Leur rôle est fondamentale dans de nombreux cadres d'application comme la reconnaissance automatique de la parole, la traduction automatique, l'extraction et la recherche d'information. La modélisation actuellement état de l'art est la modélisation "historique" dite n-gramme associée à des techniques de lissage. Ce type de modèle prédit un mot uniquement en fonction des n-1 mots précédents. Pourtant, cette approche est loin d'être satisfaisante puisque chaque mot est traité comme un symbole discret qui n'a pas de relation avec les autres. Ainsi les spécificités du langage ne sont pas prises en compte explicitement et les propriétés morphologiques, sémantiques et syntaxiques des mots sont ignorées. De plus, à cause du caractère éparse des langues naturelles, l'ordre est limité à n=4 ou 5. Sa construction repose sur le dénombrement de successions de mots, effectué sur des données d'entrainement. Ce sont donc uniquement les textes d'apprentissage qui conditionnent la pertinence de la modélisation n-gramme, par leur quantité (plusieurs milliards de mots sont utilisés) et leur représentativité du contenu en terme de thématique, époque ou de genre. L'usage des modèles neuronaux ont récemment ouvert de nombreuses perspectives. Le principe de projection des mots dans un espace de représentation continu permet d'exploiter la notion de similarité entre les mots: les mots du contexte sont projetés dans un espace continu et l'estimation de la probabilité du mot suivant exploite alors la similarité entre ces vecteurs. Cette représentation continue confère aux modèles neuronaux une meilleure capacité de généralisation et leur utilisation a donné lieu à des améliorations significative en reconnaissance automatique de la parole et en traduction automatique. Pourtant, l'apprentissage et l'inférence des modèles de langue neuronaux à grand vocabulaire restent très couteux. Ainsi par le passé, les modèles neuronaux ont été utilisés soit pour des tâches avec peu de données d'apprentissage, soit avec un vocabulaire de mots à prédire limités en taille. La première contribution de cette thèse est donc de proposer une solution qui s’appuie sur la structuration de la couche de sortie sous forme d’un arbre de classification pour résoudre ce problème de complexité. Le modèle se nomme Structure OUtput Layer (SOUL) et allie une architecture neuronale avec les modèles de classes. Dans le cadre de la reconnaissance automatique de la parole et de la traduction automatique, ce nouveau type de modèle a permis d'obtenir des améliorations significatives des performances pour des systèmes à grande échelle et à état l'art. La deuxième contribution de cette thèse est d'analyser les représentations continues induites et de comparer ces modèles avec d'autres architectures comme les modèles récurrents. Enfin, la troisième contribution est d'explorer la capacité de la structure SOUL à modéliser le processus de traduction. Les résultats obtenus montrent que les modèles continus comme SOUL ouvrent des perspectives importantes de recherche en traduction automatique. / The purpose of language models is in general to capture and to model regularities of language, thereby capturing morphological, syntactical and distributional properties of word sequences in a given language. They play an important role in many successful applications of Natural Language Processing, such as Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine Translation and Information Extraction. The most successful approaches to date are based on n-gram assumption and the adjustment of statistics from the training data by applying smoothing and back-off techniques, notably Kneser-Ney technique, introduced twenty years ago. In this way, language models predict a word based on its n-1 previous words. In spite of their prevalence, conventional n-gram based language models still suffer from several limitations that could be intuitively overcome by consulting human expert knowledge. One critical limitation is that, ignoring all linguistic properties, they treat each word as one discrete symbol with no relation with the others. Another point is that, even with a huge amount of data, the data sparsity issue always has an important impact, so the optimal value of n in the n-gram assumption is often 4 or 5 which is insufficient in practice. This kind of model is constructed based on the count of n-grams in training data. Therefore, the pertinence of these models is conditioned only on the characteristics of the training text (its quantity, its representation of the content in terms of theme, date). Recently, one of the most successful attempts that tries to directly learn word similarities is to use distributed word representations in language modeling, where distributionally words, which have semantic and syntactic similarities, are expected to be represented as neighbors in a continuous space. These representations and the associated objective function (the likelihood of the training data) are jointly learned using a multi-layer neural network architecture. In this way, word similarities are learned automatically. This approach has shown significant and consistent improvements when applied to automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translation tasks. A major difficulty with the continuous space neural network based approach remains the computational burden, which does not scale well to the massive corpora that are nowadays available. For this reason, the first contribution of this dissertation is the definition of a neural architecture based on a tree representation of the output vocabulary, namely Structured OUtput Layer (SOUL), which makes them well suited for large scale frameworks. The SOUL model combines the neural network approach with the class-based approach. It achieves significant improvements on both state-of-the-art large scale automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translations tasks. The second contribution is to provide several insightful analyses on their performances, their pros and cons, their induced word space representation. Finally, the third contribution is the successful adoption of the continuous space neural network into a machine translation framework. New translation models are proposed and reported to achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art baseline systems.

Durant ces dernières années, les architectures de réseaux de neurones (RN) ont été appliquées avec succès à de nombreuses applications en Traitement Automatique de Langues (TAL), comme par exemple en Reconnaissance Automatique de la Parole (RAP) ainsi qu'en Traduction Automatique (TA).Pour la tâche de modélisation statique de la langue, ces modèles considèrent les unités linguistiques (c'est-à-dire des mots et des segments) à travers leurs projections dans un espace continu (multi-dimensionnel), et la distribution de probabilité à estimer est une fonction de ces projections.Ainsi connus sous le nom de "modèles continus" (MC), la particularité de ces derniers se trouve dans l'exploitation de la représentation continue qui peut être considérée comme une solution au problème de données creuses rencontré lors de l'utilisation des modèles discrets conventionnels.Dans le cadre de la TA, ces techniques ont été appliquées dans les modèles de langue neuronaux (MLN) utilisés dans les systèmes de TA, et dans les modèles continus de traduction (MCT).L'utilisation de ces modèles se sont traduit par d'importantes et significatives améliorations des performances des systèmes de TA. Ils sont néanmoins très coûteux lors des phrases d'apprentissage et d'inférence, notamment pour les systèmes ayant un grand vocabulaire.Afin de surmonter ce problème, l'architecture SOUL (pour "Structured Output Layer" en anglais) et l'algorithme NCE (pour "Noise Contrastive Estimation", ou l'estimation contrastive bruitée) ont été proposés: le premier modifie la structure standard de la couche de sortie, alors que le second cherche à approximer l'estimation du maximum de vraisemblance (MV) par une méthode d’échantillonnage.Toutes ces approches partagent le même critère d'estimation qui est la log-vraisemblance; pourtant son utilisation mène à une incohérence entre la fonction objectif définie pour l'estimation des modèles, et la manière dont ces modèles seront utilisés dans les systèmes de TA.Cette dissertation vise à concevoir de nouvelles procédures d'entraînement des MC, afin de surmonter ces problèmes.Les contributions principales se trouvent dans l'investigation et l'évaluation des méthodes d'entraînement efficaces pour MC qui visent à: (i) réduire le temps total de l'entraînement, et (ii) améliorer l'efficacité de ces modèles lors de leur utilisation dans les systèmes de TA.D'un côté, le coût d'entraînement et d'inférence peut être réduit (en utilisant l'architecture SOUL ou l'algorithme NCE), ou la convergence peut être accélérée.La dissertation présente une analyse empirique de ces approches pour des tâches de traduction automatique à grande échelle.D'un autre côté, nous proposons un cadre d'apprentissage discriminant qui optimise la performance du système entier ayant incorporé un modèle continu.Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que ce cadre d'entraînement est efficace pour l'apprentissage ainsi que pour l'adaptation des MC au sein des systèmes de TA, ce qui ouvre de nouvelles perspectives prometteuses. / Over the past few years, neural network (NN) architectures have been successfully applied to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Statistical Machine Translation (SMT).For the language modeling task, these models consider linguistic units (i.e words and phrases) through their projections into a continuous (multi-dimensional) space, and the estimated distribution is a function of these projections. Also qualified continuous-space models (CSMs), their peculiarity hence lies in this exploitation of a continuous representation that can be seen as an attempt to address the sparsity issue of the conventional discrete models. In the context of SMT, these echniques have been applied on neural network-based language models (NNLMs) included in SMT systems, and oncontinuous-space translation models (CSTMs). These models have led to significant and consistent gains in the SMT performance, but are also considered as very expensive in training and inference, especially for systems involving large vocabularies. To overcome this issue, Structured Output Layer (SOUL) and Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) have been proposed; the former modifies the standard structure on vocabulary words, while the latter approximates the maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) by a sampling method. All these approaches share the same estimation criterion which is the MLE ; however using this procedure results in an inconsistency between theobjective function defined for parameter stimation and the way models are used in the SMT application. The work presented in this dissertation aims to design new performance-oriented and global training procedures for CSMs to overcome these issues. The main contributions lie in the investigation and evaluation of efficient training methods for (large-vocabulary) CSMs which aim~:(a) to reduce the total training cost, and (b) to improve the efficiency of these models when used within the SMT application. On the one hand, the training and inference cost can be reduced (using the SOUL structure or the NCE algorithm), or by reducing the number of iterations via a faster convergence. This thesis provides an empirical analysis of these solutions on different large-scale SMT tasks. On the other hand, we propose a discriminative training framework which optimizes the performance of the whole system containing the CSM as a component model. The experimental results show that this framework is efficient to both train and adapt CSM within SMT systems, opening promising research perspectives.