Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam

Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, Thomas Dandres et al.

In this work, three of many ICT-specific challenges of LCA are discussed. First, the inconsistency versus uncertainty is reviewed with regard to the meta-technological nature of ICT. As an example, the semiconductor technologies are used to highlight the complexities especially with respect to energy and water consumption. The need for specific representations and metric to separately assess products and technologies is discussed. It is highlighted that applying product-oriented approaches would result in abandoning or disfavoring of new technologies that could otherwise help toward a better world. Second, several believed-untouchable hot spots are highlighted to emphasize on their importance and footprint. The list includes, but not limited to, i) User Computer-Interfaces (UCIs), especially screens and displays, ii) Network-Computer Interlaces (NCIs), such as electronic and optical ports, and iii) electricity power interfaces. In addition, considering cross-regional social and economic impacts, and also taking into account the marketing nature of the need for many ICT's product and services in both forms of hardware and software, the complexity of End of Life (EoL) stage of ICT products, technologies, and services is explored. Finally, the impact of smart management and intelligence, and in general software, in ICT solutions and products is highlighted. In particular, it is observed that, even using the same technology, the significance of software could be highly variable depending on the level of intelligence and awareness deployed. With examples from an interconnected network of data centers managed using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technology and smart cooling systems, it is shown that the unadjusted assessments could be highly uncertain, and even inconsistent, in calculating the management component's significance on the ICT impacts.

Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, Mohamed Cheriet

In recent years, a large number of binarization methods have been developed, with varying performance generalization and strength against different benchmarks. In this work, to leverage on these methods, an ensemble of experts (EoE) framework is introduced, to efficiently combine the outputs of various methods. The proposed framework offers a new selection process of the binarization methods, which are actually the experts in the ensemble, by introducing three concepts: confidentness, endorsement and schools of experts. The framework, which is highly objective, is built based on two general principles: (i) consolidation of saturated opinions and (ii) identification of schools of experts. After building the endorsement graph of the ensemble for an input document image based on the confidentness of the experts, the saturated opinions are consolidated, and then the schools of experts are identified by thresholding the consolidated endorsement graph. A variation of the framework, in which no selection is made, is also introduced that combines the outputs of all experts using endorsement-dependent weights. The EoE framework is evaluated on the set of participating methods in the H-DIBCO'12 contest and also on an ensemble generated from various instances of grid-based Sauvola method with promising performance.

Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Mohamed Cheriet

Designing a fast and efficient optimization method with local optima avoidance capability on a variety of optimization problems is still an open problem for many researchers. In this work, the concept of a new global optimization method with an open implementation area is introduced as a Curved Space Optimization (CSO) method, which is a simple probabilistic optimization method enhanced by concepts of general relativity theory. To address global optimization challenges such as performance and convergence, this new method is designed based on transformation of a random search space into a new search space based on concepts of space-time curvature in general relativity theory. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed method, an implementation of CSO is deployed and its results are compared on benchmark functions with state-of-the art optimization methods. The results show that the performance of CSO is promising on unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions with different search space dimension sizes.