Online Platform for Interactive Tutorials: Provisioning Virtual Environments

Traditionally, whenever students learn a new technology, they need to either setup their working environments on their own machines or go to physical laboratories provided by the teaching institutions. In the first case, the setup of the needed tools is cumbersome or even impossible on all personal computers; in the second case, laboratories for certain topics are not feasible due to the threat to the stability and security of the system. Recently, virtualization has been extensively used to provide dedicated environments with full control over the system and to create interactive tutorials that engage the student with the learning resources through a web browser. However, most of the tools that are publicly available are built for specific purposes and are not extensible. There are many situations where organizations need customized solutions that give them full control over the system to offer better support as well as progress tracking and automated assessment. This thesis describes the implementation of OnPIT, an online plat-form for interactive tutorials. Different from the existing work, OnPIT is based on software containers. Moreover, it provides access to learning environments through a web browser, side by side with the tasks to be completed during a tutorial. Furthermore, OnPIT allows the creation of new tutorials that are pre-configured with the necessary tools, it can be scaled based on the demand and the available resources, and it also supports automated assessment. The thesis overviews the overall design and implementation of OnPIT. Afterwards, it details the provisioning of dedicated environments based on software containers, including the security issues and technology limitations as well as possible solutions to overcome them

Combined Global and Local Search for the Falsification of Hybrid Systems

In this paper we solve the problem of finding a trajectory that shows that a given hybrid dynamical system with deterministic evolution leaves a given set of states considered to be safe. The algorithm combines local with global search for achieving both efficiency and global convergence. In local search, it exploits derivatives for efficient computation. Unlike other methods for falsification of hybrid systems with deterministic evolution, we do not restrict our search to trajectories of a certain bounded length but search for error trajectories of arbitrary length

Tax policies on behavior of taxpayers

The tax base is one of the most important systems in the economy, at the same time it is one of the main sources of the government’s income. The Albanian state has experienced many changes of this system over the years due to the policies and different regimes that have followed but there has always been a tendency for improvement. The tax system and the informality are the mirror of the economy of the country, especially the favorable tax/fiscal policies that have been adapted to the economy, which bring economical development and integration of all the gaps to a proper economic environment. The study’s research question is: how have all the raid changes in the tax system has affected the taxpayers? Do they feel threat from all this tax control? Furthermore the study focuses on how the business performance has been indicated from the tax control. The data was collected from a survey which was focused in small and big businesses that operates in Tirana. The questionnaire was realized in unities which mainly operates in Tirana. The period in which this data where taken was April 2018. The main finds of the study are the different perception of businesses for the tax control and the impact of the fiscal changes on these businesses. All this fiscal changes that the businesses faced were more in disfavor of the small businesses

Motion Memory: Leveraging Past Experiences to Accelerate Future Motion Planning

When facing a new motion-planning problem, most motion planners solve it from scratch, e.g., via sampling and exploration or starting optimization from a straight-line path. However, most motion planners have to experience a variety of planning problems throughout their lifetimes, which are yet to be leveraged for future planning. In this paper, we present a simple but efficient method called Motion Memory, which allows different motion planners to accelerate future planning using past experiences. Treating existing motion planners as either a closed or open box, we present a variety of ways that Motion Memory can contribute to reduce the planning time when facing a new planning problem. We provide extensive experiment results with three different motion planners on three classes of planning problems with over 30,000 problem instances and show that planning speed can be significantly reduced by up to 89% with the proposed Motion Memory technique and with increasing past planning experiences

OOPS for Motion Planning: An Online Open-source Programming System

Abstract — The success of sampling-based motion planners has resulted in a plethora of methods for improving planning components, such as sampling and connection strategies, local planners and collision checking primitives. Although this rapid progress indicates the importance of the motion planning problem and the maturity of the field, it also makes the evaluation of new methods time consuming. We propose that a systems approach is needed for the development and the experimental validation of new motion planners and/or components in existing motion planners. In this paper, we present the Online, Open-source, Programming System for Motion Planning (OOPSMP), a programming infrastructure that provides implementations of various existing algorithms in a modular, object-oriented fashion that is easily extendible. The system is open-source, since a community-based effort better facilitates the development of a common infrastructure and is less prone to errors. We hope that researchers will contribute their optimized implementations of their methods and thus improve the quality of the code available for use. A dynamic web interface and a dynamic linking architecture at the programming level allows users to easily add new planning components, algorithms, benchmarks, and experiment with different parameters. The system allows the direct comparison of new contributions with existing approaches on the same hardware and programming infrastructure. I

Sistema Assicurativo Messicano

Il Messico e’ un paese che negli ultimi decenni ha vissuto una notevole crescita economica ed una consolidazione dia dal punto di vista economico che quello istituzionale e politico. A questo va aggiunto anche l’ubicazione geografica di assoluto privilegio che fa del Messico un ponte tra gli Stati uniti e l’ America Latina. Questa tesi ha lo scopo di fornire una conoscenza generale del sistema assicurativo messicano ,apparire dalle sue origini fino al giorno d’oggi. Il primo capitolo da un breve ceno dei principali istituzioni di vigilanza Messicani , l’evoluzione del quadro normativo e delle leggi più importanti riguardo alle assicurazioni. Il secondo capitolo va a rivedere le principali differenze, attraverso una descrizione qualitativa, tra la legislazione esistente e la nuova legge delle istituzioni di assicurazione e finanza che entrerà in vigore nel 2015, in materia di Riserve tecniche e del Requisito patrimoniale di solvibilità,nel contesto di Solvency II. L'entrata in vigore della Legge sulle Istituzioni di assicurazione e di Finanza nel 2015 implicherà dei cambiamenti importanti che avranno conseguenze nella gestione dei rischi e la gestione finanziaria delle compagnie di assicurazione. È necessario che il settore assicurativo messicano comprendere l'impatto di tali modifiche e che inizia ad adottarli come parte della sua gestione operativa quotidiana, in caso contrario, le compagnie di assicurazione potrebbero dover affrontare gravi situazioni di insolvenza che minacciano la loro capacità di far fronte ai loro obblighi nei confronti dei assicurati. Il terzo capitolo viene in forma di uno studio del mercato ,prendendo in considerazione il numero delle compagnie estere e quelle interne che operano nel territorio Messicano,in specifico prendendo in considerazione un caso di successo di una compagnia estera ed una messicana

Discrete Search Leading Continuous Exploration for Kinodynamic Motion Planning

This paper presents the Discrete Search Leading continuous eXploration (DSLX) planner, a multi-resolution approach to motion planning that is suitable for challenging problems involving robots with kinodynamic constraints. Initially the method decomposes the workspace to build a graph that encodes the physical adjacency of the decomposed regions. This graph is searched to obtain leads, that is, sequences of regions that can be explored with sampling-based tree methods to generate solution trajectories. Instead of treating the discrete search of the adjacency graph and the exploration of the continuous state space as separate components, DSLX passes information from one to the other in innovative ways. Each lead suggests what regions to explore and the exploration feeds back information to the discrete search to improve the quality of future leads. Information is encoded in edge weights, which indicate the importance of including the regions associated with an edge in the next exploration step. Computation of weights, leads, and the actual exploration make the core loop of the algorithm. Extensive experimentation shows that DSLX is very versatile. The discrete search can drastically change the lead to reflect new information allowing DSLX to find solutions even when sampling-based tree planners get stuck. Experimental results on a variety of challenging kinodynamic motion planning problems show computational speedups of two orders of magnitude over other widely used motion planning methods

Evaluation of NR-Sidelink for Cooperative Industrial AGVs

Industry 4.0 has brought to attention the need for a connected, flexible, and autonomous production environment. The New Radio (NR)-sidelink, which was introduced by the third-generation partnership project (3GPP) in Release 16, can be particularly helpful for factories that need to facilitate cooperative and close-range communication. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are important for material handling and carriage within these environments, and using NR-sidelink communication can further enhance their performance. An efficient resource allocation mechanism is required to ensure reliable communication and avoid interference between AGVs and other wireless systems in the factory using NR-sidelink. This work evaluates the 3GPP standardized resource allocation algorithm for NR-sidelink for a use case of cooperative carrying AGVs. We suggest further improvements that are tailored to the quality of service (QoS) requirements of an indoor factory communication scenario with cooperative AGVs.The use of NR-sidelink communication has the potential to help meet the QoS requirements for different Industry 4.0 use cases. This work can be a foundation for further improvements in NR-sidelink in 3GPP Release 18 and beyond