Mediating Power: Distance Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze

Distance learning's interfaces—from corresponding through the postal service to the televised talking head—have traditionally been designed from the top down, supporting banking models of learning or, in writing instruction, current-traditional rhetoric pedagogies. Due to temporal and spatial constraints, these interface designs often support (or encourage) one-way communication from the instructor to the student. Students mostly interact with the instructor by asking questions or submitting work, and they tend to have little correspondence with other peers. These methods clearly privilege the instructor's knowledge and evaluation. Furthermore, these interface designs empower the instructor to gaze upon the students and assess them—often not as a corporeal body but as a corpus of texts. Thus, each interface adopted for distance learning sets up a power dynamic in which the capability to share the roles of creating knowledge is juxtaposed with the instructor's capability to normalize the students and reify their own authority through their gaze. In this article we examine the traditional classroom interface through the correspondence course interface, the simulated classroom interface, and the synchronous video interface to raise questions about the infrastructures of distance learning and their implications for student learning.     

Optimal experimental design and some related control problems

This paper traces the strong relations between experimental design and control, such as the use of optimal inputs to obtain precise parameter estimation in dynamical systems and the introduction of suitably designed perturbations in adaptive control. The mathematical background of optimal experimental design is briefly presented, and the role of experimental design in the asymptotic properties of estimators is emphasized. Although most of the paper concerns parametric models, some results are also presented for statistical learning and prediction with nonparametric models.     

Valence band density of states of small cobalt particles on Si(111) substrate

Small Co particles were prepared by sputter etching of a 4–5 nm thick island-like Co film deposited on Si(111) substrate. The density of states (DOS) of the valence band was measured by means of ultraviolet photoemission (UPS) during the sputter etching to monitor the formation of small Co particles. It was found that at a given thickness of the Co island the Fermi level was shifted by 1.8-1.9 eV toward higher binding energy and theDOS decreased or no states were detectable at the Fermi level. This effect was explained by the formation of small Co particles with electronic structure which is significantly different from that of the bulk Co.     

Finite-time optimal tracking control for a class of nonlinear systems with prescribed performance

In this paper, a finite-time optimal tracking control scheme based on integral reinforcement learning is developed for partially unknown nonlinear systems. In order to realize the prescribed performance, the original system is transformed into an equivalent unconstrained system so as to a composite system is constructed. Subsequently, a modified nonlinear quadratic performance function containing the auxiliary tracking error is designed. Furthermore, the technique of experience replay is used to update the critic neural network, which eliminates the persistent of excitation condition in traditional optimal methods. By combining the prescribed performance control with the finite-time optimization control technique, the tracking error is driven to a desired performance in finite time. Consequently, it has been shown that all signals in the partially unknown nonlinear system are semiglobally practical finite-time stable by stability analysis. Finally, the provided comparative simulation results verify the effectiveness of the developed control scheme.     

F-BIDS: Federated-Blending based Intrusion Detection System

The rapid development of network communication along with the drastic increase in the number of smart devices has triggered a surge in network traffic, which can contain private data and in turn affect user privacy. Recently, Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) to ensure attack detection, privacy preservation, and cost reduction, which are crucial issues in traditional centralized machine-learning-based IDS. However, FL-based approaches still exhibit vulnerabilities that can be exploited by adversaries to compromise user data. At the same time, meta-models (including the blending models) have been recognized as one of the solutions to improve generalization for attack detection and classification since they enhance generalization and predictive performances by combining multiple base models. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Federated Blending model-driven IDS framework for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT), called F-BIDS, in order to further protect the privacy of existing ML-based IDS. The proposition consists of a Decision Tree (DT) and Random Forest (RF) as base classifiers to first produce the meta-data. Then, the meta-classifier, which is a Neural Networks (NN) model, uses the meta-data during the federated training step, and finally, it makes the final classification on the test set. Specifically, in contrast to the classical FL approaches, the federated meta-classifier is trained on the meta-data (composite data) instead of user-sensitive data to further enhance privacy. To evaluate the performance of F-BIDS, we used the most recent and open cyber-security datasets, called Edge-IIoTset (published in 2022) and InSDN (in 2020). We chose these datasets because they are recent datasets and contain a large amount of network traffic including both malicious and benign traffic.     

Volt-VAR control for distribution networks with high penetration of DGs: An overview

Continuously improving the ability to accept distributed renewable energies is the trend of future grid development, and a large number of papers have been published in recent years to study the problem of Volt-VAR control (VVC) for distribution networks with high penetration of distributed generations. This paper summarizes the relevant modeling and solution methods for VVC problems, mainly including VVC based on multiple time scales, hierarchical partitioning, multi-stage and network reconstruction, in conjunction with the operational characteristics of distribution networks containing distributed renewable energies; meanwhile, it analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of traditional optimization methods, heuristic intelligent algorithms and random variable processing methods used to solve VVC problems, and then introduces the application of model-free deep reinforcement learning as a latest decision method in VVC of distribution networks. Most of the models and methods compiled in this article are from the research results of the last three years and have some reference value.     

Confidence regions of two-stage stochastic linear complementarity problems

Two-stage stochastic linear complementarity problems (TSLCP) model a large class of equilibrium problems subject to data uncertainty, and are closely related to two-stage stochastic optimization problems. The sample average approximation (SAA) method is one of the basic approaches for solving TSLCP and the consistency of the SAA solutions has been well studied. This paper focuses on building confidence regions of the solution to TSLCP when SAA is implemented. We first establish the error-bound condition of TSLCP and then build the asymptotic and nonasymptotic confidence regions of the solutions to TSLCP by error-bound approach, which is to combine the error-bound condition with central limit theory, empirical likelihood theory, and large deviation theory.     

Physics-Informed Multistage Machine Learning Strategy for the Nanomachining-Induced Plastic Deformation Behavior

The evolution of the dislocation density induced by the nanomachining process dominates the plastic deformation behaviors of materials, thus affecting the mechanical properties significantly. However, a challenging topic related to how to establish an accurate model for predicting the dislocation density based on the limited simulations and experiments arises due to the complicated thermal–mechanical coupling mechanism during the machining process. Herein, a multistage method integrating machine learning, physics, and high-throughput atomic simulation is proposed to investigate the effect of cutting speed on the dislocation behavior in polycrystal copper. Compared with the traditional one-step machine learning method, the constraint of physical features effectively improves the accuracy and generalization ability of the model. The results indicate that the dislocation behaviors depend on the competition between the cutting force and temperature. In the low-cutting speed, the predominated role of the cutting temperature leads to a rapid decline of the dislocation density. In contrast, the dislocation density tends to be stable under a high-speed cutting process due to the dynamic balance between the effects of the cutting force and temperature. Notably, the proposed strategy provides a new and universal framework to design the machining parameters to obtain high-quality products.     

Learning parities in the mistake-bound model

We study the problem of learning parity functions that depend on at most k variables (k-parities) attribute-efficiently in the mistake-bound model. We design a simple, deterministic, polynomial-time algorithm for learning k-parities with mistake bound . This is the first polynomial-time algorithm to learn ω(1)-parities in the mistake-bound model with mistake bound o(n).Using the standard conversion techniques from the mistake-bound model to the PAC model, our algorithm can also be used for learning k-parities in the PAC model. In particular, this implies a slight improvement over the results of Klivans and Servedio (2004) [1] for learning k-parities in the PAC model.We also show that the time algorithm from Klivans and Servedio (2004) [1] that PAC-learns k-parities with sample complexity can be extended to the mistake-bound model.     

Action categorization with modified hidden conditional random field

In this paper, we present a method for action categorization with a modified hidden conditional random field (HCRF). Specifically, effective silhouette-based action features are extracted using motion moments and spectrum of chain code. We formulate a modified HCRF (mHCRF) to have a guaranteed global optimum in the modelling of the temporal action dependencies after the HMM pathing stage. Experimental results on action categorization using this model are compared favorably against several existing model-based methods including GMM, SVM, Logistic Regression, HMM, CRF and HCRF.