Abstract
This paper proposes a low power ring oscillator by combining current starving technique with negative skewed delay approach. This design has shown an improvement of more than 50% in the power delay product compared to the state of the art techniques. Circuit simulations are carried out in standard 65 nm technology. The proposed circuit has shown a robust performance against temperature and voltage variation within 10%. Therefore this circuit can find potential applications in IoT devices and RFID tags operating from 10 MHz to 1 GHz.

Abstract
In recent years, power systems have been watching important advancements related with Plug-in-Electrical Vehicles (PEVs), Demand Side Management (DSM), Distributed Generation (DG), Microgrid and Smart Grid installations that directly affect distribution networks while impacting indirectly on Transmission studies. These changes will lead to an extra flexibility on the transmission-distribution boundary and to a significant modification of the load patterns, that are an essential input to planning studies. In this scope, this paper describes a multiyear Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) solved by Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization (EPSO) and incorporating the impact of solar DG penetration. The primary substation load profiles and the solar generation profiles are taken into account on the planning problem. The numerical simulations were conducted using the IEEE 24 bus reliability test system in which the planning horizon is 3 years and the load growth is 2.5 % per year. If demand and solar DG peaks are coincident, then the liquid demand seen by the transmission network gets reduced enabling a reduction of investment costs. In the tested cases, these peaks were not coincident so that the optimal expansion plan remains unchanged even though the injected power from DG is large. This stresses the fact that solar DG may not on an isolated way contribute to alleviate the demand seen by transmission networks but should be associated with storage devices or demand side management programs.

Abstract
The IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee set of standards is one of the most used wireless sensor network technologies. This set of standards supports cluster-tree networks, which are suitable topologies for wide-scale deployments. The design of wide-scale wireless sensor networks is a challenging task because it is difficult to test, analyse and validate new designs in real scenarios. Thus, simulation becomes a convenient and feasible method for its assessment before deployment. Within this context, we provide a set of simulation models for IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee-based networks, which are able to deal with wide-scale cluster-tree wireless sensor networks and to address their major challenges. The provided simulation models implement important mechanisms for the assessment of wide-scale cluster-tree networks and associated data communication mechanisms, enabling an easier design and test of wide-scale wireless sensor network implementations.

Abstract
We consider the problem of elimination in communication complexity, that was first raised by Ambainis et al. [1] and later studied by Beimel et al. [4] for its connection to the famous direct sum question. In this problem, let f: {0, 1}2n ? {0,1} be any boolean function. Alice and Bob get k inputs x1,?, xk and y1,?, yk respectively, with xi, yi ? {0, 1}n. They want to output a k-bit vector v, such that there exists one index i for which vi = f(xi,yi). We prove a general result lower bounding the randomized communication complexity of the elimination problem for f using its discrepancy. Consequently, we obtain strong lower bounds for the functions Inner-Product and Greater-Than, that work for exponentially larger values of k than the best previous bounds. To prove our result, we use a pseudo-random notion called regularity that was first used by Raz and Wigderson [19]. We show that functions with small discrepancy are regular. We also observe that a weaker notion, that we call weak-regularity, already implies hardness of elimination. Finally, we give a different proof, borrowing ideas from Viola [23], to show that Greater-Than is weakly regular. © Arkadev Chattopadhyay, Pavel Dvorák, Michal Koucký, Bruno Loff, and Sagnik Mukhopadhyay.

Abstract
Through the years, several CAD systems have been developed to help radiologists in the hard task of detecting signs of cancer in mammograms. In these CAD systems, mass segmentation plays a central role in the decision process. In the literature, mass segmentation has been typically evaluated in a intra-sensor scenario, where the methodology is designed and evaluated in similar data. However, in practice, acquisition systems and PACS from multiple vendors abound and current works fails to take into account the differences in mammogram data in the performance evaluation. In this work it is argued that a comprehensive assessment of the mass segmentation methods requires the design and evaluation in datasets with different properties. To provide a more realistic evaluation, this work proposes: a) improvements to a state of the art method based on tailored features and a graph model; b) a head-to-head comparison of the improved model with recently proposed methodologies based in deep learning and structured prediction on four reference databases, performing a cross-sensor evaluation. The results obtained support the assertion that the evaluation methods from the literature are optimistically biased when evaluated on data gathered from exactly the same sensor and/or acquisition protocol.

Abstract
To realize human-robot collaboration in manufacturing, industrial robots need to share an environment with humans and to work hand in hand. This introduces safety concerns but also provides the opportunity to take advantage of human-robot interactions to control the robot. The main objective of this work is to provide HRI without compromising safety issues in a realistic industrial context. In the paper, a region-based filtering and reasoning method for safety has been developed and integrated into a human-robot collaboration system. The proposed method has been successfully demonstrated keeping safety during the showcase evaluation of the European robotics challenges with a real mobile manipulator. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018.