Towards a Formal Model of Privacy-Sensitive Dynamic Coalitions

The concept of dynamic coalitions (also virtual organizations) describes the temporary interconnection of autonomous agents, who share information or resources in order to achieve a common goal. Through modern technologies these coalitions may form across company, organization and system borders. Therefor questions of access control and security are of vital significance for the architectures supporting these coalitions. In this paper, we present our first steps to reach a formal framework for modeling and verifying the design of privacy-sensitive dynamic coalition infrastructures and their processes. In order to do so we extend existing dynamic coalition modeling approaches with an access-control-concept, which manages access to information through policies. Furthermore we regard the processes underlying these coalitions and present first works in formalizing these processes. As a result of the present paper we illustrate the usefulness of the Abstract State Machine (ASM) method for this task. We demonstrate a formal treatment of privacy-sensitive dynamic coalitions by two example ASMs which model certain access control situations. A logical consideration of these ASMs can lead to a better understanding and a verification of the ASMs according to the aspired specification.Comment: In Proceedings FAVO 2011, arXiv:1204.579

Sensor Control for Multi-Object Tracking Using Labeled Multi-Bernoulli Filter

The recently developed labeled multi-Bernoulli (LMB) filter uses better approximations in its update step, compared to the unlabeled multi-Bernoulli filters, and more importantly, it provides us with not only the estimates for the number of targets and their states, but also with labels for existing tracks. This paper presents a novel sensor-control method to be used for optimal multi-target tracking within the LMB filter. The proposed method uses a task-driven cost function in which both the state estimation errors and cardinality estimation errors are taken into consideration. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully guide a mobile sensor in a challenging multi-target tracking scenario

Information theoretic approach to robust multi-Bernoulli sensor control

A novel sensor control solution is presented, formulated within a Multi-Bernoulli-based multi-target tracking framework. The proposed method is especially designed for the general multi-target tracking case, where no prior knowledge of the clutter distribution or the probability of detection profile are available. In an information theoretic approach, our method makes use of R\`{e}nyi divergence as the reward function to be maximized for finding the optimal sensor control command at each step. We devise a Monte Carlo sampling method for computation of the reward. Simulation results demonstrate successful performance of the proposed method in a challenging scenario involving five targets maneuvering in a relatively uncertain space with unknown distance-dependent clutter rate and probability of detection

Multi-Bernoulli Sensor-Control via Minimization of Expected Estimation Errors

This paper presents a sensor-control method for choosing the best next state of the sensor(s), that provide(s) accurate estimation results in a multi-target tracking application. The proposed solution is formulated for a multi-Bernoulli filter and works via minimization of a new estimation error-based cost function. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of computation time and robustness to clutter while delivering similar accuracy

Women's club work

"In the following pages no attempt is made to define the entire scope and possibilities of home maker's clubs. The purpose of this circular is rather to outline a plan of study and work in which the college of Agriculture can offer definite cooperation through its Agricultural Extension Service. For the sake of economy in the distribution of time and in the expenditure of state and federal funds, the College urges the organization of women's clubs through which its home economics extension activities may,. in the' main, be taken to the home makers of the state."--Page 3