Fast Reachable Set Approximations via State Decoupling Disturbances

With the recent surge of interest in using robotics and automation for civil purposes, providing safety and performance guarantees has become extremely important. In the past, differential games have been successfully used for the analysis of safety-critical systems. In particular, the Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) formulation of differential games provides a flexible way to compute the reachable set, which can characterize the set of states which lead to either desirable or undesirable configurations, depending on the application. While HJ reachability is applicable to many small practical systems, the curse of dimensionality prevents the direct application of HJ reachability to many larger systems. To address computation complexity issues, various efficient computation methods in the literature have been developed for approximating or exactly computing the solution to HJ partial differential equations, but only when the system dynamics are of specific forms. In this paper, we propose a flexible method to trade off optimality with computation complexity in HJ reachability analysis. To achieve this, we propose to simplify system dynamics by treating state variables as disturbances. We prove that the resulting approximation is conservative in the desired direction, and demonstrate our method using a four-dimensional plane model.Comment: in Proceedings of the IEE Conference on Decision and Control, 201

A Review Examining Biases in Workplace Hiring and Promotion Processes

This review examined three different types of workplace biases: racial, gender, and unconscious biases. First, the review studied how these biases affect the hiring process and found that even though there have been marginal improvements for some minority groups, racial biases still exist in the workplace. Certain minorities, such as African Americans, experienced the same amount of hiring discrimination since the 1990s. Second, the review looked at how these biases influence the promotion process and inhibit marginalized groups from reaching higher paying jobs. Despite Asian Americans experiencing fewer struggles with the hiring process, they are the least likely race to be promoted in the workplace. Finally, the review suggested a combination of awareness training and unconscious bias training to make concrete change within an organization’s hiring and promoting process. This methodology should help companies prioritize diversity and inclusion through creating a transparent and fair environment