Distributed and Communication-Efficient Continuous Data Processing in Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems

Processing the data produced by modern connected vehicles is of increasing interest for vehicle manufacturers to gain knowledge and develop novel functions and applications for the future of mobility.Connected vehicles form Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems (VCPSs) that continuously sense increasingly large data volumes from high-bandwidth sensors such as LiDARs (an array of laser-based distance sensors that create a 3D map of the surroundings).The straightforward attempt of gathering all raw data from a VCPS to a central location for analysis often fails due to limits imposed by the infrastructure on the communication and storage capacities. In this Licentiate thesis, I present the results from my research that investigates techniques aiming at reducing the data volumes that need to be transmitted from vehicles through online compression and adaptive selection of participating vehicles. As explained in this work, the key to reducing the communication volume is in pushing parts of the necessary processing onto the vehicles\u27 on-board computers, thereby favorably leveraging the available distributed processing infrastructure in a VCPS.The findings highlight that existing analysis workflows can be sped up significantly while reducing their data volume footprint and incurring only modest accuracy decreases. At the same time, the adaptive selection of vehicles for analyses proves to provide a sufficiently large subset of vehicles that have compliant data for further analyses, while balancing the time needed for selection and the induced computational load

THE PERMANENT INCOME HYPOthesis: REGARDING THE HOUSING BOOM

The influential work by R. Hall (1987) is replicated with more recent data to test the modified version of the Permanent Income Hypothesis, specifically in testing the predictability and stability of the reduced consumption function. One aspect is to test the implication of the joint permanent income hypothesis with rational expectations is that no other lagged variable other than the previous period\u27s consumption, value of stock prices, and the index of housing prices should be of any use to predict current consumption. The data used are quarterly time series data from 1954-2012. Hall\u27s results are replicated, that the previous period\u27s real disposable income is confirmed to be insignificant in predicting current consumption with the addition to the significance of housing prices. The second aspect is to test whether a reduced consumption function on periods is stable during the significant increases and decreases of housing prices. The paper concludes that the reduced consumption function is indeed stable even during the two separate events

Moving the Goalposts: American Sports Coverage in Newspapers and the Construction of Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Olympics in 1928, 1932, 1936.

This thesis takes an in-depth look at the media coverage of women in the Olympics in 1928, 1932 and 1936. Specifically following the track athletes Kinue Hitomi, Louise Stokes, Tidye Pickett and Mildred “Babe” Didrikson the thesis explores how by being athletic women they had their identities as feminine figures heavily questioned and scrutinized in newspapers at the global level. The harshest of these critics was often the American media, who held strict standards of race, gender and sexuality in the late 1920s-mid 1930s. They sought to uphold these standards at the global scale, and the American media’s interrogation of these women’s identities and speculation on their sexuality helped cause a global questioning of acceptable femininity tied to women’s health and social acceptability concerns. Throughout the three Olympics covered, the women involved had their identities placed on blast at every opportunity. They were accused of being men, they had their builds overexamined and their sexuality and private lives exposed to the public simply for partaking in sports. In addition to this social concern, physical educators and media members feared for the women’s health. They raised concerns regarding their menstrual health, and overall physical ability compared to male athletes, and worried that sports would cause women to become less feminine and potentially lead to death due to menstrual complications. They often ignored the success these athletes brought to their countries and continued to push the globe back to where women could not run track and field. This thesis finds that while these concerns came from a genuine place, they had incredibly harmful impacts. In 1928, media panic combined with pre-existing anxiety about women’s sports led to the eight-hundred-meter race being removed until 1960, and also implemented harsh sex-testing policies for many years. While the media did not create these fears over women in sports, they worsened them. They continued to echo them and exaggerate them, stirring up more fear in the American (and global) public, created more barriers against women in sports. The conclusion of the thesis shows that despite wider participation for women in sports in the modern day, American media outlets still create harmful barriers to women’s participation, highlighting the particular relevance of this thesis

Estimating Parasitoid Wasp Assemblages on Fragmented Land : Do Habitat and Trap Type Matter?

Parasitoid wasps are a hyper-diverse monophyletic group of Apocrita (Hymenoptera) that typically oviposit inside or on an arthropodal host, whereafter the wasp larvae obtain nutritional resources for development. Although some species are well-studied as agents in biological control, little is known about the biology of the less diverse and less abundant superfamilies; and even less about assemblages of parasitoid wasp taxa within a given habitat. The aim of the present study was twofold: to estimate parasitoid wasp assemblages within two habitats common in central and northern New Jersey, USA, and to develop a protocol to increase the yield and diversity of parasitoid wasps collected through the use of different trap types, across different months, and in different habitats. Specimens of Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea were most frequently collected; with more Chalcidoidea collected than Ichneumonoidea, which was surprising for the latitude of the study location. Meadow habitats yielded more parasitoid wasps than wooded habitats, and yellow pan traps captured more specimens than flight intercept or malaise traps. Potential factors underlying these outcomes may include availability of hosts, competition, developmental time of the parasitoid offspring, temporal dispersal of adults, and gregarious oviposition. A trapping protocol is suggested, in which strategically utilizing yellow pan traps in a meadow habitat during July would give the highest trapping success in terms of count by unit effort

Cybercrime victimisation among older adults: A probability sample survey in England and Wales

Background Younger people are more likely to report cybercrime than older people. As older people spend more time online, this may change. If similarly exposed, risk factors including social isolation and poor health could make older adults disproportionally susceptible. We aimed to explore whether cybercrime risks and their predictors vary between age groups. Methods We analysed responses from 35,069 participants aged 16+ in the 2019/20 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). We investigated, among people who have used the internet in the past year, risks of experiencing any cybercrime, repeat victimisation and associated financial loss across age groups. Results Despite being at lower risk of reporting any cybercrime in the past year, people aged 75+ were more likely to report financial loss resulting from cybercrime victimisation (OR 4.25, p = 0.037) and repeat cybercrime victimisation (OR 2.03, p = 0.074) than younger people. Men, those from Mixed or Black ethnic groups, more deprived areas, managerial professional groups, and with worse health were at greater cybercrime risk. Discussion While younger adults are more at risk from cybercrime, older adults disclosed more severe cases (repetitive victimisation and associated financial loss), perhaps due to lesser awareness of scams and reporting options. As most people experience declining health as they age, greater understanding of why poor health predicts cybercrime could inform prevention initiatives that would particularly benefit older age groups and mitigate risks of growing internet use among older adults. Health and social care professionals may be well positioned to support prevention

Zahlungssicherheit beim Bauen – mit Sicherheit Sicherheiten?!

Der Verfasser behandelt das Problem der Sicherheiten, die dazu dienen, das wirtschaftliche Risiko für den Fall zu vermindern, dass der Vertragspartner Vertragspflichten nicht nachkommen will oder kann: Sicherheiten des § 17 VOB/B, Sicherheiten nach § 648 BGB / § 648 a BG

Time- and Computation-Efficient Data Localization at Vehicular Networks\u27 Edge

As Vehicular Networks rely increasingly on sensed data to enhance functionality and safety, efficient and distributed data analysis is needed to effectively leverage new technologies in real-world applications. Considering the tens of GBs per hour sensed by modern connected vehicles, traditional analysis, based on global data accumulation, can rapidly exhaust the capacity of the underlying network, becoming increasingly costly, slow, or even infeasible. Employing the edge processing paradigm, which aims at alleviating this drawback by leveraging vehicles\u27 computational power, we are the first to study how to localize, efficiently and distributively, relevant data in a vehicular fleet for analysis applications. This is achieved by appropriate methods to spread requests across the fleet, while efficiently balancing the time needed to identify relevant vehicles, and the computational overhead induced on the Vehicular Network. We evaluate our techniques using two large sets of real-world data in a realistic environment where vehicles join or leave the fleet during the distributed data localization process. As we show, our algorithms are both efficient and configurable, outperforming the baseline algorithms by up to a 40 7 speedup while reducing computational overhead by up to 3 7 , while providing good estimates for the fraction of vehicles with relevant data and fairly spreading the workload over the fleet. All code as well as detailed instructions are available at https://github.com/dcs-chalmers/dataloc_vn