Autonomous Highway Systems Safety and Security

Automated vehicles are getting closer each day to large-scale deployment. It is expected that self-driving cars will be able to alleviate traffic congestion by safely operating at distances closer than human drivers are capable of and will overall improve traffic throughput. In these conditions, passenger safety and security is of utmost importance. When multiple autonomous cars follow each other on a highway, they will form what is known as a cyber-physical system. In a general setting, there are tools to assess the level of influence a possible attacker can have on such a system, which then describes the level of safety and security. An attacker might attempt to counter the benefits of automation by causing collisions and/or decreasing highway throughput. These strings (platoons) of automated vehicles will rely on control algorithms to maintain required distances from other cars and objects around them. The vehicle dynamics themselves and the controllers used will form the cyber-physical system and its response to an attacker can be assessed in the context of multiple interacting vehicles. While the vehicle dynamics play a pivotal role in the security of this system, the choice of controller can also be leveraged to enhance the safety of such a system. After knowledge of some attacker capabilities, adversarial-aware controllers can be designed to react to the presence of an attacker, adding an extra level of security. This work will attempt to address these issues in vehicular platooning. Firstly, a general analysis concerning the capabilities of possible attacks in terms of control system theory will be presented. Secondly, mitigation strategies to some of these attacks will be discussed. Finally, the results of an experimental validation of these mitigation strategies and their implications will be shown

Impact of Culture on Entrepreneur Intention

The main purpose of this study is to identify the role of entrepreneurship in Pakistan. After reviewing the literature, researchers identify those predictors who influence the entrepreneur’s intention with the help of socio cognitive model. National culture of a country influences the entrepreneur’s intention to start new business. Perceived feasibility, perceived desirability and entrepreneurs experience has a direct impact on entrepreneur’s intention. The study finds out the impact of culture on entrepreneur intention, different cultures have different ways to influence the entrepreneur intention and different ways to impact on intentions towards perceived feasibility and perceived desirability .The study helps entrepreneur’s decision making process and also helps out the development of further new business in Pakistan, motivates students to become entrepreneurs and analyzes their feasibility and desirability. Culture varies from country to country, within country different provinces, how different cultures, different traditions, norms and values. So in future, it helps to analyze entrepreneur’s intention in different cultures

ETHICAL ISSUES IN RANDOMIZED CONTROL TRIALS: A REVIEW

Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) are scientific experiments that are used to investigate the effectiveness of various interventions in the field of Medicine and public health. As a result of complexity of the process, even the competent individuals are not able to understand the process of randomization with anticipated consequences associated with it. There is rise in trend of research and conduct of RCTs in developing countries; hence, there is a need to review all ethical issues confronted by the researchers during conduct of such trials. An Online literature search was carried out in April 2015 to May 2015 from Google Scholar, BioMed Central Ethics and PubMed using the key term “Trials”, “Randomized Control Trials”, “Ethical issues” and various synonymous terms from the titles of the articles. This resulted in 25 articles. Following, which these articles were scrolled down, and all articles with ethical issues encountered with different type of trials, were included. Avoiding the duplication of issues, 13 articles were finally selected for review. From the review narrates that ethical issues of patient autonomy, informed consent, therapeutic misconceptions, state of equipoise for individuals, clinicians and researchers, controversies between placebo and active control orthodoxies, design biases, role of gate keepers, benefit verses risk assessment and protection of vulnerable groups are the important ethical issues highlighted by various researchers. There can be issues related to some surgeries, early cessation of RCTs due to some apparent benefits and conduct of trials in third world countries. It is imperative that institutional review boards should consider all such issues during ethical assessment of such trials. Keywords:Benefit verses risk assessment Institutional review board (IRB), Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), vulnerable groups

Amelioration Of Educational Conditions Through School Management Committees

Community participation in planning and managing for increased educational opportunity is necessary. To ensure the involvement of local community, the government of Pakistan experimentally launched a scheme in 1994 by establishing School Management Committees (S.M.Cs).  The major purpose of the present study was to observe the functions and performance of  S.M.Cs in Promoting Education in Pakistan.              The government schools of Punjab Province were considered to be the target population. The study sample consisted of SMCs. of eight government higher secondary schools, 34 government high schools and 34 government elementary schools the Punjab. A survey-type study questionnaire was used to gather the data which were collected and interpreted by using simple statistical techniques of percentage, mean, standard deviation, and t-test.  Tentative conclusions are drawn with regard to observations of head teachers and memebrs of SMCs

Optical Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Visible Light Communication

The proliferation of mobile Internet and connected devices, offering a variety of services at different levels of performance, represents a major challenge for the fifth generation wireless networks and beyond. This requires a paradigm shift towards the development of key enabling techniques for the next generation wireless networks. In this respect, visible light communication (VLC) has recently emerged as a new communication paradigm that is capable of providing ubiquitous connectivity by complementing radio frequency communications. One of the main challenges of VLC systems, however, is the low modulation bandwidth of the light-emitting-diodes, which is in the megahertz range. This article presents a promising technology, referred to as "optical- non-orthogonal multiple access (O-NOMA)", which is envisioned to address the key challenges in the next generation of wireless networks. We provide a detailed overview and analysis of the state-of-the-art integration of O-NOMA in VLC networks. Furthermore, we provide insights on the potential opportunities and challenges as well as some open research problems that are envisioned to pave the way for the future design and implementation of O-NOMA in VLC systems

Q-learning Assisted Energy-Aware Traffic Offloading and Cell Switching in Heterogeneous Networks

Cell switching has been identified as a major approach to significantly reduce the energy consumption of Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). The main idea behind cell switching is to turn off idle or lightly loaded Base Stations (BSs) and to offload their traffic to neighbouring active cell(s). However, the impact of the offloaded traffic on the power consumption of the neighbouring cell(s) has not been studied sufficiently in the literature, thereby leading to the development of sub-optimal cell switching mechanisms. In this work, we first considered a Control/Data Separated Architecture (CDSA) with a macro cell serving as the Control Base Station (CBS) and multiple small cells as Data Base Stations (DBS). Then, a Q-learning assisted cell switching algorithm is developed in order to determine the small cells to switch off by considering the increase in power consumption of the macro cell due to offloaded traffic from the sleeping cells. The capacity of the macro cell is also taken into consideration to ensure that the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of users are maintained. Simulation results show that the proposed cell switching algorithm can achieve up to 50% reduction in the total energy consumption of the considered HetNet scenario