2,194 research outputs found
HyperSNN: A new efficient and robust deep learning model for resource constrained control applications
In light of the increasing adoption of edge computing in areas such as
intelligent furniture, robotics, and smart homes, this paper introduces
HyperSNN, an innovative method for control tasks that uses spiking neural
networks (SNNs) in combination with hyperdimensional computing. HyperSNN
substitutes expensive 32-bit floating point multiplications with 8-bit integer
additions, resulting in reduced energy consumption while enhancing robustness
and potentially improving accuracy. Our model was tested on AI Gym benchmarks,
including Cartpole, Acrobot, MountainCar, and Lunar Lander. HyperSNN achieves
control accuracies that are on par with conventional machine learning methods
but with only 1.36% to 9.96% of the energy expenditure. Furthermore, our
experiments showed increased robustness when using HyperSNN. We believe that
HyperSNN is especially suitable for interactive, mobile, and wearable devices,
promoting energy-efficient and robust system design. Furthermore, it paves the
way for the practical implementation of complex algorithms like model
predictive control (MPC) in real-world industrial scenarios
Design and Real-World Evaluation of Dependable Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems
The ongoing effort for an efficient, sustainable, and automated interaction between humans, machines, and our environment will make cyber-physical systems (CPS) an integral part of the industry and our daily lives. At their core, CPS integrate computing elements, communication networks, and physical processes that are monitored and controlled through sensors and actuators. New and innovative applications become possible by extending or replacing static and expensive cable-based communication infrastructures with wireless technology. The flexibility of wireless CPS is a key enabler for many envisioned scenarios, such as intelligent factories, smart farming, personalized healthcare systems, autonomous search and rescue, and smart cities.
High dependability, efficiency, and adaptivity requirements complement the demand for wireless and low-cost solutions in such applications. For instance, industrial and medical systems should work reliably and predictably with performance guarantees, even if parts of the system fail. Because emerging CPS will feature mobile and battery-driven devices that can execute various tasks, the systems must also quickly adapt to frequently changing conditions. Moreover, as applications become ever more sophisticated, featuring compact embedded devices that are deployed densely and at scale, efficient designs are indispensable to achieve desired operational lifetimes and satisfy high bandwidth demands.
Meeting these partly conflicting requirements, however, is challenging due to imperfections of wireless communication and resource constraints along several dimensions, for example, computing, memory, and power constraints of the devices. More precisely, frequent and correlated message losses paired with very limited bandwidth and varying delays for the message exchange significantly complicate the control design. In addition, since communication ranges are limited, messages must be relayed over multiple hops to cover larger distances, such as an entire factory. Although the resulting mesh networks are more robust against interference, efficient communication is a major challenge as wireless imperfections get amplified, and significant coordination effort is needed, especially if the networks are dynamic.
CPS combine various research disciplines, which are often investigated in isolation, ignoring their complex interaction. However, to address this interaction and build trust in the proposed solutions, evaluating CPS using real physical systems and wireless networks paired with formal guarantees of a system’s end-to-end behavior is necessary. Existing works that take this step can only satisfy a few of the abovementioned requirements. Most notably, multi-hop communication has only been used to control slow physical processes while providing no guarantees. One of the reasons is that the current communication protocols are not suited for dynamic multi-hop networks.
This thesis closes the gap between existing works and the diverse needs of emerging wireless CPS. The contributions address different research directions and are split into two parts. In the first part, we specifically address the shortcomings of existing communication protocols and make the following contributions to provide a solid networking foundation:
• We present Mixer, a communication primitive for the reliable many-to-all message exchange in dynamic wireless multi-hop networks. Mixer runs on resource-constrained low-power embedded devices and combines synchronous transmissions and network coding for a highly scalable and topology-agnostic message exchange. As a result, it supports mobile nodes and can serve any possible traffic patterns, for example, to efficiently realize distributed control, as required by emerging CPS applications.
• We present Butler, a lightweight and distributed synchronization mechanism with formally guaranteed correctness properties to improve the dependability of synchronous transmissions-based protocols. These protocols require precise time synchronization provided by a specific node. Upon failure of this node, the entire network cannot communicate. Butler removes this single point of failure by quickly synchronizing all nodes in the network without affecting the protocols’ performance.
In the second part, we focus on the challenges of integrating communication and various control concepts using classical time-triggered and modern event-based approaches. Based on the design, implementation, and evaluation of the proposed solutions using real systems and networks, we make the following contributions, which in many ways push the boundaries of previous approaches:
• We are the first to demonstrate and evaluate fast feedback control over low-power wireless multi-hop networks. Essential for this achievement is a novel co-design and integration of communication and control. Our wireless embedded platform tames the imperfections impairing control, for example, message loss and varying delays, and considers the resulting key properties in the control design. Furthermore, the careful orchestration of control and communication tasks enables real-time operation and makes our system amenable to an end-to-end analysis. Due to this, we can provably guarantee closed-loop stability for physical processes with linear time-invariant dynamics.
• We propose control-guided communication, a novel co-design for distributed self-triggered control over wireless multi-hop networks. Self-triggered control can save energy by transmitting data only when needed. However, there are no solutions that bring those savings to multi-hop networks and that can reallocate freed-up resources, for example, to other agents. Our control system informs the communication system of its transmission demands ahead of time so that communication resources can be allocated accordingly. Thus, we can transfer the energy savings from the control to the communication side and achieve an end-to-end benefit.
• We present a novel co-design of distributed control and wireless communication that resolves overload situations in which the communication demand exceeds the available bandwidth. As systems scale up, featuring more agents and higher bandwidth demands, the available bandwidth will be quickly exceeded, resulting in overload. While event-triggered control and self-triggered control approaches reduce the communication demand on average, they cannot prevent that potentially all agents want to communicate simultaneously. We address this limitation by dynamically allocating the available bandwidth to the agents with the highest need. Thus, we can formally prove that our co-design guarantees closed-loop stability for physical systems with stochastic linear time-invariant dynamics.:Abstract
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction
1.1 Motivation
1.2 Application Requirements
1.3 Challenges
1.4 State of the Art
1.5 Contributions and Road Map
2 Mixer: Efficient Many-to-All Broadcast in Dynamic Wireless Mesh Networks
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Overview
2.3 Design
2.4 Implementation
2.5 Evaluation
2.6 Discussion
2.7 Related Work
3 Butler: Increasing the Availability of Low-Power Wireless Communication Protocols
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Motivation and Background
3.3 Design
3.4 Analysis
3.5 Implementation
3.6 Evaluation
3.7 Related Work
4 Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-Power Multi-Hop Networks
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Related Work
4.3 Problem Setting and Approach
4.4 Wireless Embedded System Design
4.5 Control Design and Analysis
4.6 Experimental Evaluation
4.A Control Details
5 Control-Guided Communication: Efficient Resource Arbitration and Allocation in Multi-Hop Wireless Control Systems
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Problem Setting
5.3 Co-Design Approach
5.4 Wireless Communication System Design
5.5 Self-Triggered Control Design
5.6 Experimental Evaluation
6 Scaling Beyond Bandwidth Limitations: Wireless Control With Stability Guarantees Under Overload
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Problem and Related Work
6.3 Overview of Co-Design Approach
6.4 Predictive Triggering and Control System
6.5 Adaptive Communication System
6.6 Integration and Stability Analysis
6.7 Testbed Experiments
6.A Proof of Theorem 4
6.B Usage of the Network Bandwidth for Control
7 Conclusion and Outlook
7.1 Contributions
7.2 Future Directions
Bibliography
List of Publication
SPATIAL ANALYSES AND REMOTE SENSING FOR LAND COVER CHANGE DYNAMICS: ASSESSING IN A SPATIAL PLANNING
ABSTRACT (EN)
Spatial planning is a crucial discipline for the identification and implementation of sustainable development strategies that take into account the environmental impacts on the soil. In recent years, the significant development of technology, like remote sensing and GIS software, has significantly increased the understanding of environmental components, highlighting their peculiarities and criticalities. Geographically referenced information on environmental and socio-economic components represents a fundamental database for identifying and monitoring vulnerable areas, also distinguishing different levels of vulnerability.
This is even more relevant considering the increasingly significant impact of land transformation processes, consisting of rapid and frequent changes in land use patterns. In order to achieve some of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda, the role of environmental planning is crucial in addressing spatial problems, such as agricultural land abandonment and land take, which cause negative impacts on
ecosystems. Remote sensing, and in general all Earth Observation techniques, play a key role in achieving SDG 11.3 and 15.3 of Agenda 2030. Through a series of applications and investigations in different areas of Basilicata, it has been demonstrated how the extensive use of remote sensing and spatial analysis in a GIS environment provide a substantial contribution to the results of the SDGs, enabling an informed decisionmaking process and enabling monitoring of the results expected, ensuring data reliability and directly contributing to the calculation of SDG objectives and indicators by facilitating local administrations approaches to work in different development and sustainability sectors. In this thesis have been analyse the dynamics of land transformation in terms of land take and soil erosion in sample areas of the Basilicata Region, which represents an interesting case example for the study of land use land cover change (LULCC).
The socio-demographic evolutionary trends and the study of marginality and territorial fragility are fundamental aspects in the context of territorial planning, since they are important drivers of the LULCC and territorial transformation processes. In fact, in Basilicata, settlement dynamics over the years have occurred in an uncontrolled and unregulated manner, leading to a constant consumption of land not accompanied by
adequate demographic and economic growth. To better understand the evolution and dynamics of the LULCCs and provide useful tools for formulating territorial planning policies and strategies aimed at a sustainable use of the territory, the socio-economic aspects of the Region were investigated. A first phase involved the creation of a database and the study and identification of essential services in the area as a
fundamental parameter against which to evaluate the quality of life in a specific area. The supply of essential services can be understood as an assessment of the lack of minimum requirements with reference to the urban functions exercised by each territorial unit. From a territorial point of view, the level of peripherality of the territories with respect to the network of urban centres profoundly influences the quality of life of
citizens and the level of social inclusion. In these, the presence of essential services can act as an attractor capable of generating discrete catchment areas. The purpose of this first part of the work was above all to create a dataset of data useful for the calculation of various socio-economic indicators, in order to frame the demographic evolution and the evolution of the stock of public and private services. The first methodological
approach was to reconstruct the offer of essential services through the use of open data in a GIS environment and subsequently estimate the peripherality of each municipality by estimating the accessibility to essential services. The study envisaged the use of territorial analysis techniques aimed at describing the distribution of essential services on the regional territory. It is essential to understand the role of demographic dynamics
as a driver of urban land use change such as, for example, the increase in demand for artificial surfaces that occurs locally. Social and economic analyses are important in the spatial planning process. Comparison of socio-economic analyses with land use and land cover change can highlight the need to modify existing policies or implement new ones. A particular land use can degrade and thereby destroy other land resources.
If the economic analysis shows that the use is beneficial from the point of view of the land user, it is likely to continue, regardless of whether the process is environmentally friendly. It is important to understand and investigate which drivers have been and will be in the future the most decisive in these dynamics that intrinsically contribute to land take, agricultural abandonment and the consequent processes of land degradation and to define policies or thresholds to mitigate and monitor the effects of these processes.
Subsequently, the issues of land take and abandonment of agricultural land were analysed by applying models and techniques of remote sensing, GIS and territorial analysis for the identification and monitoring of abandoned agricultural areas and sealed areas. The classic remote sensing methods have also been integrated by some geostatistical analyses which have provided more information on the investigated phenomenon. The aim was the creation of a quick methodology that would allow to describe the monitoring and analysis activities of the development trends of soil consumption and the monitoring and identification of degraded areas. The first methodology proposed allowed the automatic and rapid detection of detailed
LULCC and Land Take maps with an overall accuracy of more than 90%, reducing costs and processing times.
The identification of abandoned agricultural areas in degradation is among the most complicated LULCC and Land Degradation processes to identify and monitor as it is driven by a multiplicity of anthropic and natural factors. The model used to estimate soil erosion as a degradation phenomenon is the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE). To identify potentially degraded areas, two factors of the RUSLE have been correlated: Factor C which describes the vegetation cover of the soil and Factor A which represents the amount of potential soil erosion. Through statistical correlation analysis with the RUSLE factors, on the basis of the deviations from the average RUSLE values and mapping of the areas of vegetation degradation, relating to arable land, through statistical correlation with the vegetation factor C, the areas were identified and mapped
that are susceptible to soil degradation. The results obtained allowed the creation of a database and a map of the degraded areas to be paid attention to
The Politics of Platformization: Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory
What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries
Current issues of the management of socio-economic systems in terms of globalization challenges
The authors of the scientific monograph have come to the conclusion that the management of socio-economic systems in the terms of global challenges requires the use of mechanisms to ensure security, optimise the use of resource potential, increase competitiveness, and provide state support to economic entities. Basic research focuses on assessment of economic entities in the terms of global challenges, analysis of the financial system, migration flows, logistics and product exports, territorial development. The research results have been implemented in the different decision-making models in the context of global challenges, strategic planning, financial and food security, education management, information technology and innovation. The results of the study can be used in the developing of directions, programmes and strategies for sustainable development of economic entities and regions, increasing the competitiveness of products and services, decision-making at the level of ministries and agencies that regulate the processes of managing socio-economic systems. The results can also be used by students and young scientists in the educational process and conducting scientific research on the management of socio-economic systems in the terms of global challenges
Sparse Feedback Controller: From Open-loop Solution to Closed-loop Realization
In this paper, we explore the discrete time sparse feedback control for a
linear invariant system, where the proposed optimal feedback controller enjoys
input sparsity by using a dynamic linear compensator, i.e., the components of
feedback control signal having the smallest possible nonzero values. The
resulting augmented dynamics ensures closed-loop stability, which infers sparse
feedback controller from open-loop solution to closed-loop realization. In
particular, we show that the implemented sparse feedback (closed-loop) control
solution is equivalent to the original sparse (open-loop) control solution
under a specified basis. We then extend the dynamic compensator to a
feedforward tracking control problem. Finally, numerical examples demonstrate
the effectiveness of proposed control approach.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure
2022 comprehensive permanent improvement plan for the plan years 2023-2027 statewide
This planning document tells the costs and funding sources for capital improvements of state agencies for the plan years 2023-2027. Each agency has a summary of proposed permanent improvement projects including funding source, functional group and business area
Nothing To See Hear
Nothing to See/Hear is a research experiment into minimalist visual narrative via the short film Not the Boss of Me, in which the criteria for production mandated only the bare essential elements required to construct and convey a plot and its characters be used while filming within a nondescript space - in this case, a mostly empty soundstage. How does one tell a story and define its characters without direct expository dialogue? What is needed to establish and define locations and/or environments when limited to only one or two items? Can an audience engage their imagination to fill in the absences of content and come away feeling as though they have experienced a fully realized cinematic event? And will they?
The screenplay - not written to be minimalistic by nature, but rather produced through minimalistic techniques - went through a process of rigorous drafts, actor table readings, feedback sessions and further revisions. Said process resulted in a script which streamlined plot points, eliminated extraneous dialogue and converted exposition into actions. By analyzing environments via a process of sensory elimination, a method of reconstructing spaces one sense element at a time, a basis was established for designing a floor plan for any location needed. If you can’t see a location, how do you hear it? Through audio field recordings mixed with soundstage captures, the atmosphere and scope of environments would be established. If you can only see one thing, what will provide context to define everything unseen surrounding it? Light and shadow, along with strategically placed set items, would create a sense of time, location and tone.
Examples: The sound of a lawn mower might elicit a mental picture of a house and neighborhood. Someone wearing a hardhat could conjure the scene of a construction site. Warm yellow side light creates a sense of morning. A cold wash of blue overhead light evokes an isolating night.
It was determined that doors embody the character of the buildings they inhabit and serve as the single best representation of any location structure. The remaining majority of the world-building, not practically visible or aided by sound, would rely on the actor’s physical engagement - seeing how they put the space into their bodies through behavior - and the audience’s natural tendency to solve the missing visual puzzle.
The finished film, equipped with the bare minimum of visual and narrative elements, presented a layered and detailed character-driven storyline which hinted at a much larger world beyond what was actively seen and heard. This resulted in a cinematic experience that functioned in the audience’s peripheral vision, engaging their minds\u27 eyes to fill in the voids, operating off fragments of sight, sound, gestures and inflection. Based on audience reactions, the project was a resounding success, with feedback affirming that despite the minimalistic approach to the work nothing felt missing, solidifying their investment in the work and leaving them with a desire to see and hear more. In conclusion, less is more
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