In response to the urgent need for climate action and the transition to cleaner energy, organizations and businesses are setting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to achieve carbon neutrality. Achieving these targets requires informed investment decisions in a complex mix of interconnected infrastructures and resources related to energy service modalities. This paper introduces GADGET, a Green Assessment and Decision Guidance Tool. GADGET assists stakeholders in optimizing investment choices in various energy service modalities. It takes into account interconnected infrastructures, greenhouse gas emission reduction, total cost of ownership, and can be extended to cover additional performance metrics. GADGET’s uniqueness lies in its ability to generate machine-generated mathematical programming (MP) models through a library of power-centric analytical models. Additionally, it is equipped with a pre-processor engine that generates representative operational demand windows, such as daily patterns. This feature reduces the number of decision variables while accounting for operational interactions. Empirical studies confirm GADGET’s applicability to large-scale investment challenges, ensuring effective and efficient decision-making in energy systems.

We present a novel AAC application, HoloAAC, based on mixed reality that helps people with expressive language difficulties communicate in grocery shopping scenarios via a mixed reality device. A user, who has difficulty in speaking, can easily convey their intention by pressing a few buttons. Our application uses computer vision techniques to automatically detect grocery items, helping the user quickly locate the items of interest. In addition, our application uses natural language processing techniques to categorize the sentences to help the user quickly find the desired sentence. We conducted case studies to evaluate our mixed reality-based application with 7 participants with expressive language difficulties to validate the usability and feasibility. To the best of our knowledge, HoloAAC is the very first application that explores context-aware AAC based on mixed reality. We will open-source our holistic implementation.

A patch editor is a software tool which assists in the programming of electronic music synthesizers. Synthesizers have a long history remote programmability via a communication protocol called MIDI, but there are many complexities involved in building a general-purpose patch editor tool for a large number of machines from a wide variety of manufacturers. This document introduces the reader to how synthesizers are remotely programmed, provides a tutorial with three example synthesizers, and discusses a variety of issues and challenges involved in building patch editors.