Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out

Autonomous On-Line Learning of Assistant Selection Policies For Fault Recovery

As robotic space exploration has expanded, increasing the autonomy of planetary exploration is necessary to overcome limitations of human-centric robotic operations. Although autonomous systems are designed to be robust, an exploration environment offers unknowns by its very definition; planning for failure handling must be an important part of mission design. This work considers the problem of how robots in space operations can learn to choose appropriate sources of assistance to recover from failures. Current assistant selection methods for failure handling are based on manually specified fixed rules, which are not responsive to dynamic environments or uncertainty in human performance. First, a novel and highly flexible reinforcement-learning based assistant selection framework is described that uses contextual multi-arm bandit algorithms. The contextual bandits exploit information from observations about their environment and potential assistants to efficiently learn selection rules, called policies, under a wide set of uncertain operating conditions and unknown/dynamically constrained assistant capabilities. The framework is first assessed for usefulness within simulation by comparing with other state of the art assistant selection approaches. Having discovered that the contextual bandit approach outperforms conventional static policies and non-contextual learning approaches with favorable robustness and scaling properties, a human factors study is designed and executed to gather real-world human performance data. On real humans, contextual bandit achieves better performance compared to baseline approaches.While useful, the dataset was not designed to capture effects of long-term learning in humans. In simulation, dynamics associated with human learning are used to assess the robustness of several contextual multi-arm bandit algorithms to situations occuring with real humans.Finally, two follow on experiments are described to bring adaptive assistant selection closer to a real-life mission deployment. As a result of this work, autonomous systems can learn to request the best assistance available.</p

Online Deliberation and Personal Identity

Both offline and online deliberation require certain structural features and dispositions from all participants involved in order to qualify as a rational discourse of importance—in regard to the legitimacy of the political decision-making process. Some of them are: 1) inclusiveness—all those affected both directly or indirectly ought to be included in deliberation; 2) reflexivity—participants must be willing to change their opinion after encountering a better argument; 3) ideal role taking—participants must be able to understand the perspective of others; 4) sincerity—there ought to be an awareness regarding the dangers of self-deception or manipulation. Unlike a typical offline setting, an online setting for deliberation is able to offer anonymity to participants, which is reflecting interestingly on the aforementioned features of deliberation. An opportunity to stay anonymous is both praised and criticized due to its ambivalent influence on people’s behavior—making them simultaneously more and less attuned to the ideal of deliberation. For example, anonymity makes people more willing to participate, but reportedly lowers the quality of deliberation itself by reducing the respectfulness of participants. It seems that the decision about disclosure of one’s personal identity has consequences, such as favoring some features of deliberation at the expense of others. I will assess the potential of digital anonymity as a tool for neutralizing power dynamics that are incompatible with rational discourse

Incentive-driven QoS in peer-to-peer overlays

A well known problem in peer-to-peer overlays is that no single entity has control over the software, hardware and configuration of peers. Thus, each peer can selfishly adapt its behaviour to maximise its benefit from the overlay. This thesis is concerned with the modelling and design of incentive mechanisms for QoS-overlays: resource allocation protocols that provide strategic peers with participation incentives, while at the same time optimising the performance of the peer-to-peer distribution overlay. The contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, we present PledgeRoute, a novel contribution accounting system that can be used, along with a set of reciprocity policies, as an incentive mechanism to encourage peers to contribute resources even when users are not actively consuming overlay services. This mechanism uses a decentralised credit network, is resilient to sybil attacks, and allows peers to achieve time and space deferred contribution reciprocity. Then, we present a novel, QoS-aware resource allocation model based on Vickrey auctions that uses PledgeRoute as a substrate. It acts as an incentive mechanism by providing efficient overlay construction, while at the same time allocating increasing service quality to those peers that contribute more to the network. The model is then applied to lagsensitive chunk swarming, and some of its properties are explored for different peer delay distributions. When considering QoS overlays deployed over the best-effort Internet, the quality received by a client cannot be adjudicated completely to either its serving peer or the intervening network between them. By drawing parallels between this situation and well-known hidden action situations in microeconomics, we propose a novel scheme to ensure adherence to advertised QoS levels. We then apply it to delay-sensitive chunk distribution overlays and present the optimal contract payments required, along with a method for QoS contract enforcement through reciprocative strategies. We also present a probabilistic model for application-layer delay as a function of the prevailing network conditions. Finally, we address the incentives of managed overlays, and the prediction of their behaviour. We propose two novel models of multihoming managed overlay incentives in which overlays can freely allocate their traffic flows between different ISPs. One is obtained by optimising an overlay utility function with desired properties, while the other is designed for data-driven least-squares fitting of the cross elasticity of demand. This last model is then used to solve for ISP profit maximisation

Whiteface

This study originates in the observation that improv comedy or improvised theater has such a vast majority of white people practicing it, while other improvisational or comedic art forms (jazz, freestyle rap, stand up) are historically grounded in and marked as Black cultural production. What it is about improv that makes it such a white space? Can an absence be an object of study? If so, what is there to study? Where should one look

Whiteface

This study originates in the observation that improv comedy or improvised theater has such a vast majority of white people practicing it, while other improvisational or comedic art forms (jazz, freestyle rap, stand up) are historically grounded in and marked as Black cultural production. What it is about improv that makes it such a white space? Can an absence be an object of study? If so, what is there to study? Where should one look

Effect of Resource Curse on Child Well-being in Resource-rich States, Specifically in Post-Soviet States

It was November of 2019, and I had just landed in my next country, the second resource-rich country I was visiting to collect data for my dissertation. I took a taxi from the airport to go to my hotel. The radio was playing Russian pop music. As we started to drive, I was shocked to see gleaming buildings, wide roads, lights, and mega-sized construction projects, all radiating out from the airport. I knew this particular country was rich, but I did not expect this much wealth. Everything was telling me that I was in a country with immense wealth; signs of it were everywhere. While looking around I could not hide my surprise and excitement. Noticing my reaction, the taxi driver responded, “Yes, we are a very rich country, we have all the minerals and expensive natural elements from Mendeleyev’s [periodic] table.” As we were driving, the news, in Russian, which I understood, came on the radio. The news anchor announced, “We continue reporting on the news that we woke up to yesterday, which shocked the whole nation. The mother of the five girls who burned to death behind locked doors is still in the hospital and in shock. She is still not fully conscious or able to talk about details.” As I heard this, I asked the driver what happened. Apparently, two able-bodied parents had come to the capital from one of the provinces of the country to seek work to support their five children. They found a place to live, but while out earning money—most probably through informal labor—they had to leave their children without supervision behind a locked door at home. The eldest of five children, all girls, was seven years old. The family did not know anyone who could be with their daughters, nor could they afford to send them to childcare or school. A fire started at the home, and the girls could not escape, so they burned to death. As I heard this story, we continued passing by an increasing number of mega-constructions, fancy buildings, and new bridges on the way to the hotel. I remembered an old saying we had in Azerbaijan, “the beggar sons of millionaires,” which referred to the millions of poor people during the first oil boom in Azerbaijan back in the early 1900s. Azerbaijan and this country I visited had similar histories, with similar outcomes. Oil wealth does not necessarily lead to shared prosperity and development. Moreover, as I was writing this introduction in 2022, the people of this country were mourning another tragedy—the arrests of 5,000 people and the deaths of 165 civilian protesters, who were killed on January 6, 2022, by their government, while protesting harsh living conditions and recent increases in fuel and food prices. In addition to inequality, oil- and gas-rich developing nations also tend to have less democracy and more government oppression. Why are so many people struggling and helpless in countries with oil and gas resources? As countries become richer, citizens should gain in social and economic well-being. Theoretically, countries with new wealth can create opportunities for vulnerable populations, especially for children. But that has not been the case for low-to-middle income (LMI) countries that are rich in natural resources such as oil and gas. These countries are victims of the resource curse, which is regressive development that occurs despite wealth coming from the exploitation of natural resources, especially oil and gas. These countries tend to have unequal economic development, strong autocratic regimes, and severe human rights violations. Social well-being is also affected negatively by the resource curse. The purpose of this dissertation research has been to extend resource curse theory to the study of child well-being in LMI resource-rich countries and to suggest a policy-level intervention to improve children’s well-being. Although the effect of the resource curse on the development of countries has been studied since the late 1980s, little attention has been paid to the situation of children from the perspective of the resource curse. But with resource-rich LMI numbering as many as 72—about one-quarter of all the nations on the planet—the question of truncated or diminished well-being of children in these countries is important to address. And it is also important to plan, design, test, and implement tailored interventions that can contribute to the improvement of the well-being of millions of children. Given this agenda, the following three papers have the purpose of (1) studying the situation of the well-being of children in resource-rich LMI countries worldwide, (2) focusing specifically on six post-Soviet countries, and (3) developing a policy or policies to break the resource curse, in this case focusing on one resource-rich LMI country. The first paper presents a new conceptual model to test the link between the resource curse and child well-being, using mixed-effects linear regression and then tests the mediation effect of social protection policies by using structural equation modeling analyses. Panel data for 18 years were entered into the models and analyzed in STATA 17 and SPSS 21. The sample size for the first paper was 137 countries, nearly all the LMI countries in the world. The results showed that dimensions of the resource curse such as oil, poverty of people, and democracy had a statistically significant relationship with child well-being. As oil rents (or net revenues) per capita increased, child well-being declined; and as income per capita and democracy increased, child well-being improved. The second paper compares three resource-poor post-Soviet countries—Georgia, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan—to three resource-rich post-Soviet countries—Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan—to test the relationship between the resource curse and child well-being. Using a mixed-methods research design, the paper examines the link between the two concepts, asking how and why the resource curse is associated with child well-being. For the quantitative part of the study, an analytical model like the first paper was employed to test the relationship in the six countries between the resource curse and child well-being. In the qualitative research, 65 interviews were conducted with key informants. Thematic and content analysis methods were used to analyze data in NVivo 21, and structural, descriptive, process, motif, emotion, evaluation, hypothesis, values, holistic, and provisional types of coding methods were used. The quantitative analyses found that oil and poverty affected child well-being in resource-rich post-Soviet countries, in line with the findings of the first paper. Strong civil society and political activism of citizens were contributing factors to the successful child well-being reforms in resource-poor countries. But measures of democracy and effective governance had the opposite impacts. Based on qualitative insights, the standard quantitative measures of democracy and effective governance may be overridden by the instability of government leaders and administrators. In short, shifting political regimes do not necessarily create institutional stability. This may be a contribution of the research, and a useful specification of resource curse theory. The qualitative results overall were more consistent with the results in the first paper. Overall, as expected, child well-being was not a priority for policymakers in resource-rich post-Soviet countries, compared to resource-poor post-Soviet countries. The findings of the second paper suggest that child well-being reforms may be more successful in resource-rich LMI countries when decision-makers pay attention to and invest in civil society and the political activism of citizens. The third paper proposes an intervention to improve the well-being of children in LMI countries with oil and gas resources, using Azerbaijan as a case study. The recommendations are based on the findings of additional qualitative studies conducted in Azerbaijan from 2017 to 2020. The sample for the studies was 39 key informants, such as ministers, deputy ministers, heads, and deputy heads of the national oil foundation, academics, and civil society representatives. The paper recommends diverting a portion of wealth coming from oil and gas revenues into individual child development accounts (CDAs), which are evidence-based asset-building accounts, which can be used for purposes such as postsecondary education or starting a business. Compared to the national oil reserve fund model, CDAs have a direct impact in building assets for children and households in resource-rich LMI countries, which can in turn lead to social and economic development. The national oil reserve fund model was developed in the 1970s to enable countries with oil and gas resources to save some or all that wealth for the future, but in reality, half of the resource-rich countries using this model failed to save oil and gas wealth, due to mismanagement of the funds and endemic corruption. Saving accounts at the individual and household level, in contrast, avoid government mismanagement of funds and corruption, and CDAs are a proven policy intervention to improve child well-being. Thus, diverting oil and gas revenues into CDAs may be a promising strategy for resource-rich LMI countries. The CDA design work for Azerbaijan could also potentially serve as a model for other resource-rich LMI countries that may choose to develop similar policies

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices