The important role of fire in regulating vegetation community composition and contributions to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols make it a critical component of dynamic global vegetation models and Earth system models. Over 2 decades of development, a wide variety of model structures and mechanisms have been designed and incorporated into global fire models, which have been linked to different vegetation models. However, there has not yet been a systematic examination of how these different strategies contribute to model performance. Here we describe the structure of the first phase of the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), which for the first time seeks to systematically compare a number of models. By combining a standardized set of input data and model experiments with a rigorous comparison of model outputs to each other and to observations, we will improve the understanding of what drives vegetation fire, how it can best be simulated, and what new or improved observational data could allow better constraints on model behavior. In this paper, we introduce the fire models used in the first phase of FireMIP, the simulation protocols applied, and the benchmarking system used to evaluate the models. We have also created supplementary tables that describe, in thorough mathematical detail, the structure of each model

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In part due to the proliferation of GPS-equipped mobile devices, massive volumes of geo-tagged streaming text messages are becoming available on social media. It is of great interest to discover most frequent nearby terms from such tremendous stream data. In this paper, we present novel indexing, updating, and query processing techniques that are capable of discovering top-k locally popular nearby terms over a sliding window. Specifically, given a query location and a set of geo-tagged messages within a sliding window, we study the problem of searching for the top-k terms by considering both the term frequency and the proximities between the messages containing the term and the query location. We develop a novel and efficient mechanism to solve the problem, including a quad-tree based indexing structure, indexing update technique, and a best-first based searching algorithm. An empirical study is conducted to show that our proposed techniques are efficient and fit for users' requirements through varying a number of parameters.

We consider requirements for cyber-physical systems represented in constrained natural language. We present novel automated techniques for aiding in the development of these requirements so that they are consistent and can withstand perceived failures. We show how cyber-physical systems' requirements can be modeled using the event calculus (EC), a formalism used in AI for representing actions and change. We also show how answer set programming (ASP) and its query-driven implementation s(CASP) can be used to directly realize the event calculus model of the requirements. This event calculus model can be used to automatically validate the requirements. Since ASP is an expressive knowledge representation language, it can also be used to represent contextual knowledge about cyber-physical systems, which, in turn, can be used to find gaps in their requirements specifications. We illustrate our approach through an altitude alerting system from the avionics domain.