Learning and adaptation in physical agents

Learning and adaptation is fundamental for autonomous agents that operate in a physical world and not a computer network. The paper is providing a general framework of skills learning within behaviour logic framework of agents that communicate, sense and act in the physical world. It is advocated that playfulness can be important in learning and to improving skills of agents

Gain or Pain: Does Consumer Activity Reflect Utility Maximisation?

Competition Authorities are introducing new informational remedies to help consumers search and switch more actively. Using a specially commissioned data set, and unique direct estimates of the gains, search and switching time which consumers anticipate, we examine the determinants of consumer activity in eight markets. We find that expected costs (and to some extent gains) do influence consumers as a utility maximising model would predict; but that their role is small, and other factors, particularly experience of switching in other markets, are also influential. We conclude that consumers’ confidence in their own estimates is crucial in encouraging market activity

Observation of chaotic beats in a driven memristive Chua's circuit

In this paper, a time varying resistive circuit realising the action of an active three segment piecewise linear flux controlled memristor is proposed. Using this as the nonlinearity, a driven Chua's circuit is implemented. The phenomenon of chaotic beats in this circuit is observed for a suitable choice of parameters. The memristor acts as a chaotically time varying resistor (CTVR), switching between a less conductive OFF state and a more conductive ON state. This chaotic switching is governed by the dynamics of the driven Chua's circuit of which the memristor is an integral part. The occurrence of beats is essentially due to the interaction of the memristor aided self oscillations of the circuit and the external driving sinusoidal forcing. Upon slight tuning/detuning of the frequencies of the memristor switching and that of the external force, constructive and destructive interferences occur leading to revivals and collapses in amplitudes of the circuit variables, which we refer as chaotic beats. Numerical simulations and Multisim modelling as well as statistical analyses have been carried out to observe as well as to understand and verify the mechanism leading to chaotic beats.Comment: 30 pages, 16 figures; Submitted to IJB

Cognitive control in the generation of random sequences: a computational study of secondary task effects

Cognitive control processes, such as those involved in response inhibition or task switching, have been the focus of much recent research. Few studies, however, have considered how such processes work together in tasks that require multiple control processes. This paper reports a computational study of random sequence generation and the cognitive control processes involved therein. The task, which is argued to involve multiple control processes, produces several dependent measures. These measures are held to be differentially dependent on the differential efficacy of the various underlying control processes. Initial simulations demonstrate that the model is capable of reproducing subject performance on the basic task. Additional simulations explore differential interference effects of different secondary tasks (held to interfere with different control processes) on the different random generation dependent measures. The work illustrates how the putative control processes may interact in the production of successive responses during the random generation task

Development of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms for SF6 puffer circuit breakers from transient waveforms: a validation proposal

- This paper presents a validation proposal for development of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms for SF6 puffer circuit-breakers reproduced from actual site waveforms. The re-ignition/restriking rates are duplicated in given circuits and the cumulative energy dissipated in interrupters by the restriking currents. The targeted objective is to provide a simulated database for diagnosis of re-ignition/restrikes relating to the phase to earth voltage and the number of re-ignition/restrikes as well as estimating the remaining life of SF6 circuit-breakers. The model-based diagnosis of a tool will be useful in monitoring re-ignition/restrikes as well as predicting a nozzle’s lifetime. This will help ATP users with practical study cases and component data compilation for shunt reactor switching and capacitor switching. This method can be easily applied with different data for the different dielectric curves of circuit breakers and networks. This paper presents modelling details and some of the available cases, required project support, the validation proposal, the specific plan for implementation and the propsed main contributions