We present a comprehensive methodology for the simulation of astronomical images from optical survey telescopes. We use a photon Monte Carlo approach to construct images by sampling photons from models of astronomical source populations, and then simulating those photon...

EFOSC2 (the European Southern Observatory Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera v2) is one of the workhorse instruments on ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT), and is one of the most popular instruments at La Silla observatory. It is mounted at a Nasmyth focus, and ther...

The Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) is one of three science instruments on the Spitzer Space Telescope. The IRS comprises four separate spectrograph modules covering the wavelength range from 5.3 to 38micron with spectral resolutions, R \~90 and 600, and it was optimized to...

Numerous resource-limited smart objects (SOs) such as sensors and actuators have been widely deployed in smart environments, opening new attack surfaces to intruders. The severe security flaw discourages the adoption of the Internet of things in smart living. In this pa...

High energy efficiency is critical for enabling massive machine-type communications (MTC) over cellular networks. This work is devoted to energy consumption modeling, battery lifetime analysis, lifetime-aware scheduling and transmit power control for massive MTC over ce...

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is a powerful technique to predict soil properties. It can be used in situ to provide data inexpensively and rapidly compared to the standard laboratory measurements. Because most spectral data bases contain air-dried samples scanned in ...

Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a time-consuming and difficult developm...