Reference Governors: From Theory to Practice

Control systems that are subject to constraints due to physical limitations, hardware protection, or safety considerations have led to challenging control problems that have piqued the interest of control practitioners and theoreticians for many decades. In general, the design of constraint management schemes must meet several stringent requirements, for example: low computational burden, performance, recovery mechanisms from infeasibility conditions, robustness, and formulation simplicity. These requirements have been particularly difficult to meet for the following three classes of systems: stochastic systems, linear systems driven by unmodeled disturbances, and nonlinear systems. Hence, in this work, we develop three constraint management schemes, based on Reference Governor (RG), for these classes of systems. The first scheme, which is referred to as Stochastic RG, leverages the ideas of chance constraints to construct a Stochastic Robustly Invariant Maximal Output Admissible set (SR-MAS) in order to enforce constraints on stochastic systems. The second scheme, which is called Recovery RG (RRG), addresses the problem of recovery from infeasibility conditions by implementing a disturbance observer to update the MAS, and hence recover from constraint violations due to unmodeled disturbances. The third method addresses the problem of constraint satisfaction on nonlinear systems by decomposing the design of the constraint management strategy into two parts: enforcement at steady-state, and during transient. The former is achieved by using the forward and inverse steady-state characterization of the nonlinear system. The latter is achieved by implementing an RG-based approach, which employs a novel Robust Output Admissible Set (ROAS) that is computed using data obtained from the nonlinear system. Added to this, this dissertation includes a detailed literature review of existing constraint management schemes to compare and highlight advantages and disadvantages between them. Finally, all this study is supported by a systematic analysis, as well as numerical and experimental validation of the closed-loop systems performance on vehicle roll-over avoidance, turbocharged engine control, and inverted pendulum control problems

Financial Sector Reforms in Vietnam: Selected Issues and Problems

The purpose of this report is to concentrate on performing in-depth analyses of selected issues of prominence and importance for the future success of the reform process rather than describing the current day-to-day operations and procedures in the financial sector. This eclectic approach implies that other important issues such as the development of a payment system, the state and prospects for the inter-bank markets, and the human capital and organisational issues in the state-owned banks are neglected and/or not analysed in depth. They are, however, omissions due to constraints imposed by funds and time available rather than a failure to comprehend their importance. In this context, the present report should thus be viewed as a first step towards establishing an open dialogue about the nature and speed of the financial sector reforms in Vietnam based on recurrent independent assessments of financial sector issues and problems.Financial Sector Reforms, Vietnam

Federalism at the \u27Cathedral\u27: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability Rules in Tenth Amendment Infrastructure

As the climate crisis, war in the Middle East, and the price of oil focus American determination to move beyond fossil fuels, nuclear power has resurfaced as a possible alternative. But heady plans for energy reform may be stalled by an unlikely policy deadlock stemming from a structural technicality in an aging Supreme Court decision: New York v. United States, which set forth the Tenth Amendment anti-commandeering rule in 1992. The same dry technicality has also threatened the effective management of storm water pollution, contributed to the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, and poses ongoing regulatory obstacles in such critical interjurisdictional contexts as national security and counter-terrorism efforts. Such is the enormous power hidden in the infrastructure of legal rules, parts of which we know better as property, liability, and inalienability remedy rules. Federalism at the Cathedral explores the consequences for good governance of poorly constructed legal infrastructure in the Tenth Amendment context, and recommends a simple jurisprudential fix: exchanging a property rule for the inalienability remedy rule that the Court used to protect the anti-commandeering entitlement. Grounded in a values-based theory of American federalism, it shows how the New York inalienability rule unnecessarily removes tools for resolving interjurisdictional quagmires - exemplified by the radioactive waste capacity problem at the heart of the New York litigation - by prohibiting novel forms of state-federal bargaining. In New York, the Court held that Congress lacked the authority to bind a state\u27s participation in a regulatory scheme even if state officials had effectively waived Tenth Amendment-based objections during consensual negotiations with the federal government. In so doing, the Court articulated a reasonable entitlement to federal noninterference protected by an unreasonable inalienability rule. It is an inalienability rule, because any number of collective action problems would prevent the negotiated transfer of the entitlement except through elected representation. It is unreasonable, because the intergovernmental partnerships thus thwarted would help resolve pressing interjurisdictional problems without offending the constitution. Indeed, underlying values of federalism that give meaning to the Tenth Amendment would be better served by allowing a state to decide for itself whether to hold or trade its entitlement. Focusing on the facts and legacy of the New York decision, the Article concludes that although its inalienability rule is defensible in exclusively state or federal jurisdictional contexts, it is dubious in contexts that require regulatory attention at both the local and national level. A property rule that would enable states to bargain with their anti-commandeering entitlement would not offend the touchstone of Tenth Amendment jurisprudence, which has always been the prevention of federal coercion of the states. A pro-bargaining property rule would be more consistent with the rest of the Court\u27s federalism jurisprudence, more faithful to the full panoply of values that under gird American federalism, and better for state and federal governance in difficult interjurisdictional contexts

Using Text Mining to Identify Crime Patterns from Arabic Crime News Report Corpus

Most text mining techniques have been proposed only for English text, and even here, most research has been conducted on specific texts related to special contexts within the English language, such as politics, medicine and crime. In contrast, although Arabic is a widely spoken language, few mining tools have been developed to process Arabic text, and some Arabic domains have not been studied at all. In fact, Arabic is a language with a very complex morphology because it is highly inflectional l, and therefore, dealing with texts written in Arabic is highly complicated. This research studies the crime domain in the Arabic language, exploiting unstructured text using text mining techniques. Developing a system for extracting important information from crime reports would be useful for police investigators, for accelerating the investigative process (instead of reading entire reports) as well as for conducting further or wider analyses. We propose the Crime Profiling System (CPS) to extract crime-related information (crime type, crime location and nationality of persons involved in the event), automatically construct dictionaries for the existing information, cluster crime documents based on certain attributes and utilize visualisation techniques to assist in crime data analysis. The proposed information extraction approach is novel, and it relies on computational linguistic techniques to identify the abovementioned information, i.e. without using predefined dictionaries (e.g. lists of location names) and annotated corpus. The language used in crime reporting is studied to identify patterns of interest using a corpus-based approach. Frequency analysis, collocation analysis and concordance analysis are used to perform the syntactic analysis in order to discover the local grammar. Moreover, the Self Organising Map (SOM) approach is adopted in order to perform the clustering and visualisation tasks for crime documents based on crime type, location or nationality. This clustering technique is improved because only refined data containing meaningful keywords extracted through the information extraction process are inputted into it, i.e. the data is cleaned by removing noise. As a result, a huge reduction in the quantity of data fed into the SOM is obtained, consequently, saving memory, data loading time and the execution time needed to perform the clustering. Therefore, the computation of the SOM is accelerated. Finally, the quantization error is reduced, which leads to high quality clustering. The outcome of the clustering stage is also visualised and the system is able to provide statistical information in the form of graphs and tables about crimes committed within certain periods of time and within a particular area.Saudi Cultural Burea

Rural biomass energy 2020: People's Republic of China

The developing world is looking for effective, creative ideas for upscaling clean, renewable energy. No place will gain more socially, economically, and environmentally from increased access to clean, reliable energy than poor, rural areas. Biomass energy, produced from animal and crop wastes, is a sensible renewable energy option for rural areas and it can be cost-effective at community and industry scales if guided effectively by governments. This publication explores the potential of biomass energy to close the urban–rural energy gap, raise farmer incomes, and mend the environment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its findings are instructive for other developing and medium-income countries exploring energy-for-all strategies. The report examines the promises and limitations of leading biomass energy technologies and resources for various distribution scales, including but not limited to household biogas digesters. The information is based on lessons learned and experiences from the Asian Development Bank–financed Efficient Utilization of Agricultural Wastes Project in the PRC, as well as findings and conclusions from a technical assistance grant to assist the government draft a national strategy for developing rural biomass energy.rural biomass energy; rural development; biomass resources; biomass technologies; China

The political economy of technology transfer: a case study of Guangdong.

by Choy Chi Keung.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991.Includes bibliographical references.ABSTRACTChapter CHAPTER ONE --- INTRODUCTIONChapter 1.1 --- Historical Background --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- The Taking Shape Of The Basic Policy In The Reform Era --- p.4Chapter 1.3 --- Accomplishments From The Technology Transfer --- p.8Chapter 1.4 --- Critical Problems --- p.8Chapter 1.5 --- Problem One: Excessive Duplication Of Technological Imports --- p.9Chapter 1.6 --- Problem Two: Assimilation --- p.11Notes --- p.14Chapter CHAPTER TWO --- RESEARCH DESIGNChapter 2.1 --- Research Problems --- p.16Chapter 2.2 --- Units Of Analysis --- p.17Chapter 2.3 --- Conceptualization --- p.19Chapter 2.4 --- Research Sample --- p.24Chapter 2.5 --- Research Method --- p.26Chapter 2.6 --- Interpretation Of The Research Result --- p.27Chapter 2.7 --- A Final Remark --- p.27Notes --- p.29Chapter CHAPTER THREE --- THE ENTERPRISE LEVELChapter 3.1 --- The Ideal Operation --- p.30Chapter 3.2 --- The Traditional Operation Environment Of A Soviet State Enterprise --- p.32Chapter 3.3 --- The Operation Environment Of A Chinese Public-Owned Enterprise In The Reform Era --- p.33Chapter 3.4 --- Two Important Behaviour Orientations --- p.39Chapter 3.5 --- The Business Environment --- p.40Chapter 3.6 --- The Hunger Of Foreign Technology Acquisition --- p.43Chapter 3.7 --- The Apathy Towards The Assimilation Of The Imported Technology --- p.45Chapter 3.8 --- A Summary --- p.46Notes --- p.48Chapter CHAPTER FOUR --- THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT LEVELChapter 4.1 --- The Ideal Operation --- p.50Chapter 4.2 --- The Incentive Structure --- p.51Chapter 4. 3 --- Some Implied Behaviour Orientations --- p.53Chapter 4.4 --- A Web Of Interests --- p.60Chapter 4.5 --- Issues Of Excessive Duplication Of Technology Imports And Poor Assimilation --- p.62Chapter 4.6 --- A Summary --- p.65Notes --- p.68Chapter CHAPTER FIVE --- THE SUPERVISION MECHANISM LEVELChapter 5.1 --- The Ideal Operation --- p.71Chapter 5.2 --- Dual Ruling As The Basic Principle Of Admin i st rat ion --- p.75Chapter 5.3 --- The First Type Of Dependence On Local Government: Nomenklatura --- p.77Chapter 5.4 --- The Second Type Of Dependence On Local Government: Material Allocation --- p.78Chapter 5.5 --- Erosion Of Vertical Ruling By Horizontal Ruling --- p.80Chapter 5. 6 --- Erosion Of Supervision Mechanisms --- p.80Chapter 5.7 --- Cheating Of The Enterprises --- p.84Chapter 5.8 --- A Summary --- p.85Notes --- p.87Chapter CHAPTER SIX --- CONCLUSION AND THEORETICAL REFLECTIONChapter 6.1 --- Limitations --- p.90Chapter 6.2 --- Theoretical Reflection --- p.95Notes --- p.99MAJOR BILBIOGRAPH

Capital, State, Empire

The United States presents the greatest source of global geo-political violence and instability. Guided by the radical political economy tradition, this book offers an analysis of the USA’s historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies. Scott Timcke explores the foundations of this impulse, then demonstrates how the militarization of digital society creates structural injustices and social inequalities. He analyses how new digital communication technologies support and fund indirect and informal means that ensures American paramountcy, in turn sustaining enduring conditions for worldwide capital accumulation. Identifying selected features of contemporary American society, Capital, State, Empire undertakes a materialist critique of this digital society and assesses the impact of The New American Way of War, understood here as an outcome of a capitalist state’s military budgets priorities under imperial strategy

Energy Efficient Servers

Computer scienc

Military Retirees in Politics: A Study on the Rise of Purnawirawan in Indonesian Political Parties 1998-2014

Studies of civil-military relations and political parties in democratic Indonesia which gives deeper attention to the role of the military retirees (purnawirawan) in the democratization are still rare. The few studies that have been carried out only explore their role in the political contestation of presidential elections as key actors in supporting candidates and mobilizing votes. This study explains the meaning of the rise of purnawirawan’s involvement, not only in the political contestation, but also the extent of their contribution to the development of political parties and their performance in legislative institutions and public offices in the government. Overall the study investigates the contribution of their roles in the early democratic transition and the consolidation period Three aspects were analyzed. The first aspect was political parties that had a large number of purnawirawan. From the dataset produced by this study, there were four political parties that became the units of analysis, namely PDI-P, Golkar, Democratic Party and Gerindra. The second aspect was the roles of purnawirawan from those four parties in the elections and legislative institutions. The third aspect was the roles of purnawirawan with the parties and non-parties background within the central and local governments. This study limits the research period from 1998 to 2014. In this period, there were five elections. The discussion begins with the period from 1998-2004 as the background of the emergence of purnawirawan in the direct elections and the presidential contest which began in 2004 where full-time participation in the political contestation took place massively. There are three hypotheses in this research. The first is that trends of purnawirawan’s participation in politics and political parties were the effects of structural changes resulting from the military reform and the multi-party systems. The second is that Purnawirawan contributed to the uniqueness of the development of party organizations that combined thin military values with a model of civilian organization. The third is that the role of purnawirawan in political parties and public offices was driven by the importance of continuing military doctrines to influence the state policy-making processes. This study is an intersection between the study of party organizations and the study of civil military relations in emerging democracy. The analytical framework developed combines the theories of the development of political parties and civilian control over the military to test the causal relationship between the involvement of purnawirawan in political parties, their performance in the parliament and the government, as well as their contribution to the democratization in Indonesia. There are three important findings of this study. The first finding is that in the multi-parties system, purnawirawan worked hard not only to gain positions in the parliament and the government, but also to build political parties as political vehicles. This confirms that they were important actors in the party development. The second finding is that some parties established by purnawirawan were able to survive in the elections and obtain parliamentary seats. The parties were managed with a democratic vision, but still colored by militaristic characters. The third finding is that purnawirawan’s political participation in the democracy of Indonesia was driven by their personal interests to be posted in public offices and their responsibility as state guardians in the form of civilian politicians

Fintech and the future of financial services: What are the research gaps?

New financial technologies (FinTech) have erupted around the world. Consequently, there has been a considerable increase in academic literature on FinTech over the last five years. Research tends to be scantily connected with no coherent research agenda. Signi - cant research gaps and important questions remain. There is much work to be done before this area becomes an established academic discipline. This paper offers coherent research themes formulated through focus group meetings with policymakers and academics, and also based on a critical assessment of the literature. We outline seven key research gaps with questions that could form the basis of academic study. If these are addressed it would help this area become an established academic discipline