Regional targeting of the Russian economic policy: an institution for spatial planning of territories

This article aims at assessing the state of Russian economy amid lower energy prices and the “exchange of sanctions” and identifying the priorities for Russian economic policy as a universal institution capable to support the stability and systemic character of development. It proposes to use the optimization of inter-budgetary relations in Municipality—Region—Federal Center system in order to initiate the process of spatial development of Russian territories by involving the regional and municipal capabilities in the development processes. All Russian citizens are recommended to adopt a more rigorous and responsible attitude towards the Constitution as the Basic Law, which received support from people and defines strategic priorities for the long-term development of Russia. The article provides a rationale for the methodology of optimizing the inter-budgetary relations between the Federation, its subjects and municipalities through a science-based division of powers and responsibilities for the socio-economic outcomes at each level. It proposes to involve the experts and the public in the development of a national plan for socio-economic and social development, the main priorities of which should be the improvement in the quality and effectiveness of public administration and spatial development of Russian territories. The author makes the case for the mechanisms and institutions that can connect the regions and territories to the implementation of such national plan. The conclusions and recommendations proposed in this article can be used by the federal authorities when drafting and adopting the laws and other regulatory acts on the distribution of powers and optimization of the budgetary process. They can also be used by regional and municipal authorities when planning and designing the spatial development of their territories.This article has been prepared with the financial support provided by the Grant from the Russian Science Foundation No. 14–18–00456 “Substantiating the geo-, eco-, socio-economic approach to the development of strategic natural and resource capacity of northern little-studied territories within The Arctic—Central Asia investment project.

Conceptual Systems Security Analysis Aerial Refueling Case Study

In today’s highly interconnected and technology reliant environment, systems security is rapidly growing in importance to complex systems such as automobiles, airplanes, and defense-oriented weapon systems. While systems security analysis approaches are critical to improving the security of these advanced cyber-physical systems-of-systems, such approaches are often poorly understood and applied in ad hoc fashion. To address these gaps, first a study of key architectural analysis concepts and definitions is provided with an assessment of their applicability towards complex cyber-physical systems. From this initial work, a definition of cybersecurity architectural analysis for cyber-physical systems is proposed. Next, the System Theory Theoretic Process Analysis approach for Security (STPA Sec) is tailored and presented in three phases which support the development of conceptual-level security requirements, applicable design-level criteria, and architectural-level security specifications. This work uniquely presents a detailed case study of a conceptual-level systems security analysis of a notional aerial refueling system based on the tailored STPA-Sec approach. This work is critically important for advancing the science of systems security engineering by providing a standardized approach for understanding security, safety, and resiliency requirements in complex systems with traceability and testability

Apodized pupil Lyot coronagraphs for arbitrary apertures. V. Hybrid Shaped Pupil designs for imaging Earth-like planets with future space observatories

We introduce a new class of solutions for Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraphs (APLC) with segmented aperture telescopes to remove broadband diffracted light from a star with a contrast level of $10^{10}$. These new coronagraphs provide a key advance to enabling direct imaging and spectroscopy of Earth twins with future large space missions. Building on shaped pupil (SP) apodization optimizations, our approach enables two-dimensional optimizations of the system to address any aperture features such as central obstruction, support structures or segment gaps. We illustrate the technique with a design that could reach $10^{10}$ contrast level at 34\,mas for a 12\,m segmented telescope over a 10\% bandpass centered at a wavelength $\lambda_0=$500\,nm. These designs can be optimized specifically for the presence of a resolved star, and in our example, for stellar angular size up to 1.1\,mas. This would allow probing the vicinity of Sun-like stars located beyond 4.4\,pc, therefore fully retiring this concern. If the fraction of stars with Earth-like planets is \eta_{\Earth}=0.1, with 18\% throughput, assuming a perfect, stable wavefront and considering photon noise only, 12.5 exo-Earth candidates could be detected around nearby stars with this design and a 12\,m space telescope during a five-year mission with two years dedicated to exo-Earth detection (one total year of exposure time and another year of overheads). Our new hybrid APLC/SP solutions represent the first numerical solution of a coronagraph based on existing mask technologies and compatible with segmented apertures, and that can provide contrast compatible with detecting and studying Earth-like planets around nearby stars. They represent an important step forward towards enabling these science goals with future large space missions.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, ApJ accepted on 01/04/201

THE USER SATISFACTION LEVEL OF ELEARNING FOR BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT SUBJECTS BASED ON TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE MODEL

Elearning is the implementation of information technology in learning. Elearning was used in courses in Introduction to Business and Management, Business Process Management and Ebusiness. This study aims to use the Technology Acceptance model (TAM) to measure the level of user satisfaction. TAM method is used to determine the relationship between content, accuracy, format, ease of use, timelines, organizational support, user attitudes towards the information system (user attitude towards information). system) and perceived attitude of top management on the level of satisfaction of using e-learning on learning business courses and management at the Faculty of Computer Science, Duta Bangsa University Surakarta. This research is a descriptive study using the modified End User Computing Satisfaction (EUCS) approach method. The results of the evaluation study show that the 5 variables (content), the level of accuracy of the system, format, easy of use, and timeliness significantly influence user satisfaction. While organizational support variables have a significant effect on user satifaction but variable usser attitude toward information system and perceived attitude of top management has an effect but not significant to the support organization. Key words : elearning, user satisfaction, technology acceptance model, end user computing satisfaction

QUANTITATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE METHODS, SOCIAL NETWORKS, AND SCALAR MISMATCHES: ADVANCING SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS SCIENCE TOWARDS ADAPTATION AND TRANSFORMATION

The adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems to maintain resilience or undergo transformation is increasingly important for navigating global change. Although social interactions and ecological disturbances are often cited as an essential element of social-ecological systems, social interactions are often undertheorized and simplistic, and the relative effects of both social and ecological processes are rarely considered in tandem. In this dissertation, I work towards advancing social-ecological systems research by highlighting opportunities for improved quantitative social science methods, using structurally explicit methods to evaluate the mechanisms underpinning social interactions, and characterizing scalar mismatches in a social-ecological system experiencing a regime shift. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview and introduction for my dissertation. In Chapter 2, I undertook a literature review of social-ecological system studies that quantified social interactions, concluding with a typology for improving conceptual clarity, a compendium of social interaction measures including mapped empirical relationships of each to focal concepts in social-ecological systems science to support theoretical development, and a discussion of opportunities for improved treatment of social interaction complexity in future studies. In Chapter 3, I assessed how social networks and disturbance influenced behaviors of agricultural producers navigating a wide-spread regime shift in the Great Plains biome of Nebraska, US. This social-ecological system is experiencing a regime shift, whereby eastern redcedar is encroaching upon grasslands causing persistent change. I found social network measures were not only more predictive of management behavior than disturbance, but also more predictive of transformative, rather than adaptive, behavior. These findings indicate social interactions, though often overlooked, are critical for influencing adaptive and transformative behavior in social-ecological systems. In Chapter 4, I characterized scalar mismatches between social and ecological components of the Great Plains biome in Nebraska. I found that individual producers respond to collective-level factors and regional-level disturbance as they attempt to manage this regime shift, often with limited success, indicating that the social level responsible for managing this transition is misaligned with the ecological level of the process. These findings highlight opportunities for higher social levels to support individual-level efforts to manage regime shifts in this social-ecological system in Nebraska with implications for detecting and characterizing scalar mismatches globally. In Chapter 5, I synthesize my findings and provide an arc of my contribution to social-ecological systems system

Galois : a system for parallel execution of irregular algorithms

textA programming model which allows users to program with high productivity and which produces high performance executions has been a goal for decades. This dissertation makes progress towards this elusive goal by describing the design and implementation of the Galois system, a parallel programming model for shared-memory, multicore machines. Central to the design is the idea that scheduling of a program can be decoupled from the core computational operator and data structures. However, efficient programs often require application-specific scheduling to achieve best performance. To bridge this gap, an extensible and abstract scheduling policy language is proposed, which allows programmers to focus on selecting high-level scheduling policies while delegating the tedious task of implementing the policy to a scheduler synthesizer and runtime system. Implementations of deterministic and prioritized scheduling also are described. An evaluation of a well-studied benchmark suite reveals that factoring programs into operators, schedulers and data structures can produce significant performance improvements over unfactored approaches. Comparison of the Galois system with existing programming models for graph analytics shows significant performance improvements, often orders of magnitude more, due to (1) better support for the restrictive programming models of existing systems and (2) better support for more sophisticated algorithms and scheduling, which cannot be expressed in other systems.Computer Science

Standards-based Grading: An Alternative to Score-based Assessment

Standards-based grading involves assessment of student development towards achieving the course objectives throughout the duration of a course. Final course grades are then determined based on students’ overall development towards achieving the course objectives. There have been no studies to date that investigate this specific system for undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. This groundbreaking study involves the implementation of standards-based grading in a sophomore-level undergraduate course in Mechanics of Materials. The goals of this study are: 1) to obtain insight in how to best implement standards-based grading in an undergraduate STEM course, and 2) to obtain a sense of how students respond to standards-based grading. Students (N=30) were asked two questions at the end of the course: 1) if the standards-based grading system is more conducive to learning than the traditional, summative score-based grading system, and 2) if they prefer standards-based grading to the traditional grading system. The preliminary results suggest that the vast majority of the students, at a minimum, agree that standards-based grading is more conducive to learning (89.3%) and that they prefer standards-based grading (85.7%). Student comments also support the quantitive results. In addition, this study provides significant insight regarding implementation of standards-based grading for undergraduate courses in STEM

A Decentralized Approach Towards Responsible AI in Social Ecosystems

For AI technology to fulfill its full promises, we must design effective mechanisms into the AI systems to support responsible AI behavior and curtail potential irresponsible use, e.g. in areas of privacy protection, human autonomy, robustness, and prevention of biases and discrimination in automated decision making. In this paper, we present a framework that provides computational facilities for parties in a social ecosystem to produce the desired responsible AI behaviors. To achieve this goal, we analyze AI systems at the architecture level and propose two decentralized cryptographic mechanisms for an AI system architecture: (1) using Autonomous Identity to empower human users, and (2) automating rules and adopting conventions within social institutions. We then propose a decentralized approach and outline the key concepts and mechanisms based on Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VC) for a general-purpose computational infrastructure to realize these mechanisms. We argue the case that a decentralized approach is the most promising path towards Responsible AI from both the computer science and social science perspectives