Evolving a rule system controller for automatic driving in a car racing competition

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. Perth, Australia, 15-18 December 2008.The techniques and the technologies supporting Automatic Vehicle Guidance are important issues. Automobile manufacturers view automatic driving as a very interesting product with motivating key features which allow improvement of the car safety, reduction in emission or fuel consumption or optimization of driver comfort during long journeys. Car racing is an active research field where new advances in aerodynamics, consumption and engine power are critical each season. Our proposal is to research how evolutionary computation techniques can help in this field. For this work we have designed an automatic controller that learns rules with a genetic algorithm. This paper is a report of the results obtained by this controller during the car racing competition held in Hong Kong during the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008).Publicad

Compliance and Imperfect Intertemporal Carbon Trading

This paper examines three compliance mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol: (i) the restoration rate, (ii) the commitment period reserve rule, and (iii) the suspension mechanism, all potentially constraining greenhouse gas emissions trading across time and space. The joint effect of these mechanisms on prices and costs is studied in a twoperiod model under various assumptions about the competitiveness of the permit market and US participation. The analytical results indicate that the restoration rate can make discounted permit prices decrease over time. With the commitment period reserve, marginal costs may not only be lower, but also higher than the permit prices. The suspension rule will under quite general circumstances not affect prices and costs; only shift non-compliance from future sellers to future buyers. The numerical results suggest that with imperfect permit markets and non-participation of the US in the Kyoto Protocol in 2010, none of the three rules becomes binding.compliance; market power; emissions trading; Kyoto Protocol

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 349)

This bibliography lists 149 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during April, 1991. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Criminal Justice Collapse: The Constitution After Hurricane Katrina

The New Orleans criminal justice system collapsed after Hurricane Katrina, resulting in a constitutional crisis. Eight thousand people, mostly indigent and charged with misdemeanors such as public drunkenness or failure to pay traffic tickets, languished indefinitely in state prisons. The court system shut its doors, the police department fell into disarray, few prosecutors remained, and a handful of public defenders could not meet with, much less represent, the thousands detained. This dire situation persisted for many months, long after the system should have been able to recover. We present a narrative of the collapse of the New Orleans area criminal system after Hurricane Katrina. Not only did this perfect storm illuminate how unprepared our local criminal systems may remain for a severe natural disaster or terrorist attack, but it raised unique and underexplored constitutional questions. We argue that constitutional criminal procedure failed to serve its protective role during this emergency, while deferential rules rooted in federalism had the unanticipated effect of hindering provision of critical federal emergency assistance, and perhaps most important, longstanding local neglect rendered the system vulnerable to collapse. We conclude by imagining systems designed to safeguard the provision of criminal justice during emergencies

The generation of oxygen radicals during host plant responses to infection

Recent evidence points to significant oxygen radical production by some plant tissues in response to pathogenic challenge. These findings have proved quite controversial, in part because of an inadequate appreciation of the behaviour of oxygen radicals in biological systems. This review critically discusses the evidence to date and outlines several potential roles for oxygen species in host-pathogen interactions. The production of oxygen radicals during plant defence responses is compared to the respiratory burst of mammalian phagocytic cells