ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A COMBAT UGV SWARM IN URBAN OPERATIONS

Due to its complexity, an urban area is a challenging multi-dimensional environment for ground warfare. Recent technological advancements have enabled militaries to utilize different-size unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to support a variety of missions. This thesis presents guidance algorithms for a search and kill mission developed for some generic UGV swarms, which may be an attractive application, particularly for smaller UGVs operating in an urban environment. Through a series of computer simulations, the research evaluates the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithms in executing such a mission in indoor and outdoor urban environments. The developed simulation allows varying many parameters, thus achieving closeness to the real-world situation when different environments, platforms, sensors, and weapons are used. Computer simulations presented in this paper may also assist military leaders in choosing key mission parameters to maximize the outcome of potential future engagements.http://archive.org/details/assessingtheeffe1094560354Outstanding ThesisArmy, SingaporeApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

In the Pause and Listening to the Little People: A Folk Healer’s Journey

Rockey Robbins, PhD (Cherokee/Choctaw), is an associate professor in counseling psychology at the University of Oklahoma. His research has been primarily with Native Americans in the areas of spirituality, family resiliency, boarding school experiences, and renorming psychological assessment instruments.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Transformative Models to Promote Prescription Drug Innovation and Access: A Landscape Analysis

The patent-based pharmaceutical innovation system in the US does not incentivize the development of drugs with the greatest impact on patient or public health. It has also led to drug prices that patients and health care systems cannot afford. Three alternate approaches to promoting pharmaceutical innovation have been proposed to address these shortcomings. Delinkage models involve payments for drug innovation based on public health value rather than on a per-use basis. Public manufacturing models call upon governments and nonprofit organizations to lead drug discovery, development, and production. Public-private partnership models entail publicly-funded organizations working closely with for-profit partners on drug development and price-setting. Each model exhibits promise in promoting prescription drug innovation and access. This paper reviews these transformative models in detail, examining their key characteristics, advantages, and limitations

Imitative Follower Deception in Stackelberg Games

Information uncertainty is one of the major challenges facing applications of game theory. In the context of Stackelberg games, various approaches have been proposed to deal with the leader's incomplete knowledge about the follower's payoffs, typically by gathering information from the leader's interaction with the follower. Unfortunately, these approaches rely crucially on the assumption that the follower will not strategically exploit this information asymmetry, i.e., the follower behaves truthfully during the interaction according to their actual payoffs. As we show in this paper, the follower may have strong incentives to deceitfully imitate the behavior of a different follower type and, in doing this, benefit significantly from inducing the leader into choosing a highly suboptimal strategy. This raises a fundamental question: how to design a leader strategy in the presence of a deceitful follower? To answer this question, we put forward a basic model of Stackelberg games with (imitative) follower deception and show that the leader is indeed able to reduce the loss due to follower deception with carefully designed policies. We then provide a systematic study of the problem of computing the optimal leader policy and draw a relatively complete picture of the complexity landscape; essentially matching positive and negative complexity results are provided for natural variants of the model. Our intractability results are in sharp contrast to the situation with no deception, where the leader's optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time, and thus illustrate the intrinsic difficulty of handling follower deception. Through simulations we also examine the benefit of considering follower deception in randomly generated games

Quantum teleportation implies symmetry-protected topological order

We constrain a broad class of teleportation protocols using insights from locality. In the "standard" teleportation protocols we consider, all outcome-dependent unitaries are Pauli operators conditioned on linear functions of the measurement outcomes. We find that all such protocols involve preparing a "resource state" exhibiting symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order with Abelian protecting symmetry $\mathcal{G}_{k}= (\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2)^k$. The $k$ logical states are teleported between the edges of the chain by measuring the corresponding $2k$ string order parameters in the bulk and applying outcome-dependent Paulis. Hence, this single class of nontrivial SPT states is both necessary and sufficient for the standard teleportation of $k$ qubits. We illustrate this result with several examples, including a nonstabilizer hypergraph state.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figure

Mini-chromosome maintenance complexes form a filament to remodel DNA structure and topology.

Deregulation of mini-chromosome maintenance (MCM) proteins is associated with genomic instability and cancer. MCM complexes are recruited to replication origins for genome duplication. Paradoxically, MCM proteins are in excess than the number of origins and are associated with chromatin regions away from the origins during G1 and S phases. Here, we report an unusually wide left-handed filament structure for an archaeal MCM, as determined by X-ray and electron microscopy. The crystal structure reveals that an α-helix bundle formed between two neighboring subunits plays a critical role in filament formation. The filament has a remarkably strong electro-positive surface spiraling along the inner filament channel for DNA binding. We show that this MCM filament binding to DNA causes dramatic DNA topology change. This newly identified function of MCM to change DNA topology may imply a wider functional role for MCM in DNA metabolisms beyond helicase function. Finally, using yeast genetics, we show that the inter-subunit interactions, important for MCM filament formation, play a role for cell growth and survival

Locality and error correction in quantum dynamics with measurement

The speed of light $c$ sets a strict upper bound on the speed of information transfer in both classical and quantum systems. In nonrelativistic systems, the Lieb-Robinson Theorem imposes an emergent speed limit $v \hspace{-0.2mm} \ll \hspace{-0.2mm} c$, establishing locality under unitary quantum dynamics and constraining the time needed to perform useful quantum tasks. We extend the Lieb-Robinson Theorem to quantum dynamics with measurements. In contrast to the general expectation that measurements can arbitrarily violate spatial locality, we find at most an $(M \hspace{-0.5mm} +\hspace{-0.5mm} 1)$-fold enhancement to the speed of quantum information $v$, provided the outcomes of $M$ local measurements are known; this holds even when classical communication is instantaneous. Our bound is asymptotically optimal, and saturated by existing measurement-based protocols. We tightly constrain the resource requirements for quantum computation, error correction, teleportation, and generating entangled resource states (Bell, GHZ, W, and spin-squeezed states) from short-range entangled states. Our results impose limits on the use of measurements and active feedback to speed up quantum information processing, resolve fundamental questions about the nature of measurements in quantum dynamics, and constrain the scalability of a wide range of proposed quantum technologies.Comment: 5 pages + 3 figures main text; 55 pages + 4 figures supplement; v3 supplement has overview section, clarified interpretation of main theorem, additional bounds and protocol

Acceleration of FM-Index Queries Through Prefix-Free Parsing

FM-indexes are a crucial data structure in DNA alignment, but searching with them usually takes at least one random access per character in the query pattern. Ferragina and Fischer [Ferragina and Fischer, 2007] observed in 2007 that word-based indexes often use fewer random accesses than character-based indexes, and thus support faster searches. Since DNA lacks natural word-boundaries, however, it is necessary to parse it somehow before applying word-based FM-indexing. Last year, Deng et al. [Deng et al., 2022] proposed parsing genomic data by induced suffix sorting, and showed the resulting word-based FM-indexes support faster counting queries than standard FM-indexes when patterns are a few thousand characters or longer. In this paper we show that using prefix-free parsing - which takes parameters that let us tune the average length of the phrases - instead of induced suffix sorting, gives a significant speedup for patterns of only a few hundred characters. We implement our method and demonstrate it is between 3 and 18 times faster than competing methods on queries to GRCh38. And was consistently faster on queries made to 25,000, 50,000 and 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Hence, it is very clear that our method accelerates the performance of count over all state-of-the-art methods with a minor increase in the memory