Proactive privacy for a driverless age

Autonomous vehicles are on the cusp of disrupting the entire transportation industry and current privacy legislation is not yet equipped to deal with the changes being spurred by this innovation. This paper enumerates and elucidates on the various privacy concerns that are specific autonomous vehicles. It also proposes the principles of “Privacy-by-Design”, an industry trend pertaining to other arenas of privacy, be adapted and used for regulating privacy around autonomous vehicles. It calls for the NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration), with guidance from the FCC, and the FTC, to use their expertise in creating administrative rules that will protect the privacy of the public. Having learned valuable lessons from recent privacy concerns in the mobile device industry, the Privacy-by-Design approach would help ease the transition into this useful, but potentially intrusive technology. Currently, privacy is receiving significant attention in publications, but with autonomous vehicles being a nascent industry, there is very little being said about the privacy concerns specifically pertaining to these technology autonomous vehicles. Recent strides in the technology and the legislative acceptance of these vehicles have made them a widely discussed topic, and thus makes a thorough discussion of privacy related specifically to this technology both timely and relevant. This paper provides an early assessment of an area of concern that is growing as rapidly as are autonomous vehicles. The technology is being proven effective and safe, so the real focus will shift to use concerns, like privacy. The autonomous vehicle industry is still early in its development, and there is imminent opportunity to anchor privacy into the fundamentals of autonomous vehicles, preempting numerous potential infringements.     

A two‐step control approach for docking of autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper presents a novel integrated guidance and control strategy for docking of autonomous underwater vehicles. The approach to the base, and hence the control design, is divided in two steps: (i) in the first, at higher speed, the vehicle dynamics is assumed to be underactuated, and an appropriate control law is derived to steer the vehicle towards the final docking path, achieving convergence to zero of the appropriate error variables for almost all initial conditions; (ii) in the second stage, at low speed, the vehicle is assumed to be fully actuated, and a robust control law is designed that achieves convergence to zero of the appropriate error variables for all initial conditions, in the presence of parametric model uncertainty. Simulations are presented illustrating the performance of the proposed controllers, including model uncertainty and sensor noise. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evolutionary variational inequality with long-term memory and applications to economic networks

The aim of this paper is to present the relation between an evolutionary variational inequality with long-term memory and Lagrange multipliers. More precisely, we study the oligopolistic market equilibrium problem in which the profit function depends also on previous events of the market by means of a long-term memory which takes into account the previous states of the equilibrium. Moreover, thanks to the variational formulation, we are able to show existence and regularity results for equilibrium solutions. Then, we apply the infinite dimensional duality theory through which we obtain the existence of Lagrange multipliers which are great utility in order to understand the behaviour of the market. Finally, an example is provided, which allows to analyse the influence of the long-term memory on the equilibrium solution.     

Game‐Based Valley‐Fill Charging Coordination for Large‐Population Plug‐in Electric Vehicles

Charging coordination of large‐population autonomous plug‐in electric vehicles (PEVs) in the power grid can be formulated as a class of constrained optimization problems. To overcome the computational complexity, a game‐based method is proposed for the charging problems of the PEV population, which is composed of homogeneous subpopulations, such that individuals update their best charging strategies simultaneously with respect to a common electricity price determined by the total demand. To mitigate the oscillation behavior caused by the greedy behavior for the cheap electricity by individuals, a deviation cost is introduced to penalize against the deviation of the individual strategy from the average value of the homogeneous subpopulation. By adopting a proper deviation cost and following a best strategy update mechanism, the game systems may converge to the socially optimal valley‐fill Nash equilibrium. Simulation examples are studied to illustrate the results.     

Sampling average approximation method for a class of stochastic Nash equilibrium problems

We consider a class of stochastic Nash equilibrium problems (SNEP). Under some mild conditions, we reformulate the SNEP as a stochastic mixed complementarity problem (SMCP). We apply the well-known sample average approximation (SAA) method to solve the SMCP. We further introduce a semismooth Newton method to solve the SAA problems. The comprehensive convergence analysis is given as well. In addition, we demonstrate the proposed approach on a stochastic Nash equilibrium model in the wholesale gas–oil markets.     

Twenty years of artificial life art

This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: ‘Propagaciones’ by Leo Nuñez; ‘Sniff’ by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; ‘Universal Whistling Machine’ by Marc Boehlen; and ‘Performative Ecologies’ by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.1 A more extensive study of the theoretical history of Artificial Life can be found in my paper ‘Artificial Life Art—A Primer’, in the Proceedings of DAC09 and also at http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny. Excerpts from that essay are included here.      

单向耦合Lorenz-R(o)ssler系统的多参数分岔

深入研究了单向耦合Lorenz-R(o)ssler系统的动力学行为,首先定性地分析了该系统,找出了该系统所有平衡点及平衡点存在和稳定的条件.再对该系统的分岔行为做了理论分析,得到该系统发生fold和Hopf 分岔的条件.最后利用分岔软件对前面的理论进行验证,而且针对三个单向耦合参数的不同取值情况,从数值的角度研究了该系统的多参数分岔,结果表明不同的耦合强度对于系统的动力学行为有较大的影响.     

Walrasian Equilibrium: Hardness,Approximations and Tractable Instances

We study the complexity issues for Walrasian equilibrium in a special case of combinatorial auction, called single-minded auction, in which every participant is interested in only one subset of commodities. Chen et al. (J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 69(4): 675–687, 2004) showed that it is NP-hard to decide the existence of a Walrasian equilibrium for a single-minded auction and proposed a notion of approximate Walrasian equilibrium called relaxed Walrasian equilibrium. We show that every single-minded auction has a relaxed Walrasian equilibrium that satisfies at least two-thirds of the participants, proving a conjecture posed in Chen et al. (J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 69(4): 675–687, 2004). Motivated by practical considerations, we introduce another concept of approximate Walrasian equilibrium called weak Walrasian equilibrium. We show NP-completeness and hardness of approximation results for weak Walrasian equilibria. In search of positive results, we restrict our attention to the tollbooth problem (Guruswami et al. in Proceedings of the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), pp. 1164–1173, 2005), where every participant is interested in a single path in some underlying graph. We give a polynomial time algorithm to determine the existence of a Walrasian equilibrium and compute one (if it exists), when the graph is a tree. However, the problem is still NP-hard for general graphs.     

WSN中层次性簇聚路由选择算法中的一种优化策略

对层次性簇聚路由算法,提出了一种优化策略。具体实施是在已选出的多个簇首中,以能量均衡损耗和节能为依据,设计一个优化路由机制．选出一个二级簇首,由该二级簇首与汇点通信。通过分析,该策略能够有效的降低网络的能量损耗,大大延长网络的生命周期。     

一种基于高频强调滤波和直方图均衡化的图像增强方法

直方图均衡化能够调节图像的动态灰度范围,是一种经典有效的图像增强方法,但它建立在合并相似像素灰度的基础之上,模糊了图像的细节。高频强调滤波将变换后的低频和高频分量都得到了增强,但是低频分量的增强要弱一些,这样会使得图像边缘更加清晰。实验表明,经该方法增强后的图像,其主观视觉效果明显改善。