Normative Multi-Agent Organizations: Modeling, Support and Control, Draft Version

http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2007/902/pdf/07122.BoissierOlivier.Paper.902.pdfInternational audienceIn the last years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in multi-agent systems' research. Recent applications of MAS enforce the need of using these aspects in order to ensure some social order within these systems. Tools to control and regulate the overall functioning of the system are needed in order to enforce global laws on the autonomous agents operating in it. This paper presents a normative organization system composed of a normative organization modeling language MOISEInst used to define the normative organization of a MAS, accompanied with SYNAI, a normative organization implementation architecture which is itself regulated with an explicit normative organization specification

MoiseInst: An Organizational Model for Specifying Rights and Duties of Autonomous Agents

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.108.3187&rep=rep1&type=pdfInternational audienc

SECURING FPGA SYSTEMS WITH MOVING TARGET DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) enter a rapid growth era due to their attractive flexibility and CMOS-compatible fabrication process. However, the increasing popularity and usage of FPGAs bring in some security concerns, such as intellectual property privacy, malicious stealthy design modification, and leak of confidential information. To address the security threats on FPGA systems, majority of existing efforts focus on counteracting the reverse engineering attacks on the downloaded FPGA configuration file or the retrieval of authentication code or crypto key stored on the FPGA memory. In this thesis, we extensively investigate new potential attacks originated from the untrusted computer-aided design (CAD) suite for FPGAs. We further propose a series of countermeasures to thwart those attacks. For the scenario of using FPGAs to replace obsolete aging components in legacy systems, we propose a Runtime Pin Grounding (RPG) scheme to ground the unused pins and check the pin status at every clock cycle, and exploit the principle of moving target defense (MTD) to develop a hardware MTD (HMTD) method against hardware Trojan attacks. Our method reduces the hardware Trojan bypass rate by up to 61% over existing solutions at the cost of 0.1% more FPGA utilization. For general FPGA applications, we extend HMTD to a FPGA-oriented MTD (FOMTD) method, which aims for thwarting FPGA tools induced design tampering. Our FOMTD is composed of three defense lines on user constraints file, random design replica selection, and runtime submodule assembling. Theoretical analyses and FPGA emulation results show that proposed FOMTD is capable to tackle three levels’ attacks from malicious FPGA design software suite

Scaling Up Network Analysis and Mining: Statistical Sampling, Estimation, and Pattern Discovery

Network analysis and graph mining play a prominent role in providing insights and studying phenomena across various domains, including social, behavioral, biological, transportation, communication, and financial domains. Across all these domains, networks arise as a natural and rich representation for data. Studying these real-world networks is crucial for solving numerous problems that lead to high-impact applications. For example, identifying the behavior and interests of users in online social networks (e.g., viral marketing), monitoring and detecting virus outbreaks in human contact networks, predicting protein functions in biological networks, and detecting anomalous behavior in computer networks. A key characteristic of these networks is that their complex structure is massive and continuously evolving over time, which makes it challenging and computationally intensive to analyze, query, and model these networks in their entirety. In this dissertation, we propose sampling as well as fast, efficient, and scalable methods for network analysis and mining in both static and streaming graphs

A 128K-bit CCD buffer memory system

A prototype system was implemented to demonstrate that CCD's can be applied advantageously to the problem of low power digital storage and particularly to the problem of interfacing widely varying data rates. 8K-bit CCD shift register memories were used to construct a feasibility model 128K-bit buffer memory system. Peak power dissipation during a data transfer is less than 7 W., while idle power is approximately 5.4 W. The system features automatic data input synchronization with the recirculating CCD memory block start address. Descriptions are provided of both the buffer memory system and a custom tester that was used to exercise the memory. The testing procedures and testing results are discussed. Suggestions are provided for further development with regards to the utilization of advanced versions of CCD memory devices to both simplified and expanded memory system applications

Biomaterials for bone regeneration

The purpose of this Ph.D. research is to investigate and improve two classes of hydroxyapatite (HA)-based biomaterials for bone repair: calcium phosphate microspheres and bioactive silicate glass scaffolds. These biomaterials were prepared with modified compositions and microstructures and then were evaluated for bone regeneration. The open HA microspheres with dense convex surfaces and rough and porous concave surfaces were obtained by sectioning closed hollow HA microspheres. Bone regeneration with the open HA microspheres was greater than with the closed HA microsphere at 12 weeks. Hollow biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) microspheres have been prepared with different fractions of HA and β-TCP (tricalcium phosphate) and their in vitro and in vivo reactivities determined. The BCP microspheres with higher ß-TCP/HA ratio (70/30) had faster degradation rates both in vitro and in vivo and a better capacity to regenerate bone. Moreover, the more reactive BCP microspheres were associated with significantly more blood vessel formation in the subcutaneous implants. 13-93 glass scaffolds with curved filaments stimulated a greater amount of new bone formation than straight filament scaffolds in rat calvarial defect at six weeks. Scaffolds with thin (6 ± 1 μm) HA-like surface layers were more effective at stimulating new bone formation, with the curved-filament structures again showing significant improvement in new bone growth compared to the surface-modified straight-filament structures --Abstract, page iv

Інформаційна технологія компонентно-базованого проектування сервіс-орієнтованої архітектури інформацйної системи

Магістерська дисертація містить результати розроблення інформаційної технології компонентно-базованого проектування сервіс-орієнтованої архітектури інформаційної системи підприємства. В роботі наведено модель інформаційної системи на базі розробленої архітектури та алгоритмів. Апробація на підприємстві дозволила перевірити практичну важливість отриманих результатів.The master's dissertation contains results of development of information technology of component-based design of service-oriented architecture of enterprise information system. The paper presents a model of the information system based on the developed architecture and algorithms. Approbation at the enterprise made it possible to check the practical importance of the results obtained.Магистерская диссертация содержит результаты разработки информационной технологии компонентно-базирующегося проектирования сервис-ориентированной архитектуры информационной системы предприятия. В работе приведена модель информационной системы на базе разработанной архитектуры и алгоритмов. Апробация на предприятии позволила проверить практическую важность полученных результатов

Integrated knowledge-based hierarchical modelling of manufacturing organizations

The objective of this thesis is to research into an integrated knowledge-based simulation method, which combines the capability of knowledge based simulation and a structured analysis method, for the design and analysis of complex and hierarchical manufacturing organizations. This means manufacturing organizations analysed according to this methodology can manage the tactical and operational planning as well as the direct operation of shop floor. [Continues.

Affinity-Based Reinforcement Learning : A New Paradigm for Agent Interpretability

The steady increase in complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is accompanied by a corresponding increase in opacity that obfuscates insights into their devised strategies. Methods in explainable artificial intelligence seek to mitigate this opacity by either creating transparent algorithms or extracting explanations post hoc. A third category exists that allows the developer to affect what agents learn: constrained RL has been used in safety-critical applications and prohibits agents from visiting certain states; preference-based RL agents have been used in robotics applications and learn state-action preferences instead of traditional reward functions. We propose a new affinity-based RL paradigm in which agents learn strategies that are partially decoupled from reward functions. Unlike entropy regularisation, we regularise the objective function with a distinct action distribution that represents a desired behaviour; we encourage the agent to act according to a prior while learning to maximise rewards. The result is an inherently interpretable agent that solves problems with an intrinsic affinity for certain actions. We demonstrate the utility of our method in a financial application: we learn continuous time-variant compositions of prototypical policies, each interpretable by its action affinities, that are globally interpretable according to customers’ financial personalities. Our method combines advantages from both constrained RL and preferencebased RL: it retains the reward function but generalises the policy to match a defined behaviour, thus avoiding problems such as reward shaping and hacking. Unlike Boolean task composition, our method is a fuzzy superposition of different prototypical strategies to arrive at a more complex, yet interpretable, strategy.publishedVersio