While drones did not introduce targeted assassinations, 9/11 and new technologies have pushed the boundaries of the tactic’s acceptability

Despite its rejection by the Ford administration in the 1970s, the tactic of state-led assassination has been resurgent since 9/11, and has found its latest expression in the use of unmanned drone strikes. Andris Banka writes that innovative drone technologies have refashioned the centuries old tactic of targeted assassination in previously unimaginable ways by making the risks minimal and success rates high. He argues that while 9/11 created the opportunity for lawmakers to push again for targeted assassinations, drone technology itself has helped to expand the boundaries of what the public considers to be acceptable

Contemporary Chinese Art as a Product and Reflection of Globalisation in Culture

At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, China underwent an important social transformation, which was among others manifested by the renouncement of revolutionary aesthetics in both art and everyday life. As a result, one can observe the emergence of a new, pluralistic culture, which nowadays appears to combine the unfinished modernist project with postmodernity. The mutual defining of these two factors constitutes also an important aspect of the ongoing Chinese globalisation within the area of culture, where the global is modified by the local, and concurrently the latter invalidates the identity of the former. This article describes the relation between these two factors in the field of contemporary Chinese art. The analysis of selected artworks by Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, MadeIn, Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei and Wang Qingsong serves as a departure point of assessing whether the new cultural quality constitutes strong distortion of Chinese aesthetic order or is a new challenge it has to confront

Iterative Machine Learning for Precision Trajectory Tracking with Series Elastic Actuators

When robots operate in unknown environments small errors in postions can lead to large variations in the contact forces, especially with typical high-impedance designs. This can potentially damage the surroundings and/or the robot. Series elastic actuators (SEAs) are a popular way to reduce the output impedance of a robotic arm to improve control authority over the force exerted on the environment. However this increased control over forces with lower impedance comes at the cost of lower positioning precision and bandwidth. This article examines the use of an iteratively-learned feedforward command to improve position tracking when using SEAs. Over each iteration, the output responses of the system to the quantized inputs are used to estimate a linearized local system models. These estimated models are obtained using a complex-valued Gaussian Process Regression (cGPR) technique and then, used to generate a new feedforward input command based on the previous iteration's error. This article illustrates this iterative machine learning (IML) technique for a two degree of freedom (2-DOF) robotic arm, and demonstrates successful convergence of the IML approach to reduce the tracking error.Comment: 9 pages, 16 figure. Submitted to AMC Worksho

Energy saving on Edges: State-of-the-art and future directions

Internet of Things (IoT) comprises a set of devices that are interconnected ranging from our daily used objects to advanced networked devices. It is a constantly evolving phenomenon as the number of devices owned by the regular user is increasing at a rapid rate. These devices are used for various reasons such as social networking, monitoring, performing complex operations and with the increase of advanced technologies, they demand more energy to perform such tasks. Cloud computing enables these communications to seamlessly perform complex tasks in a cloud environment but utilizing these resources properly to perform at the best is the key. In this paper, Energy efficiency and effective functioning of the devices that run on the cloud has been thoroughly analyzed and we have presented the strengths and weakness of various researches in each area

A Study on Mental Health Status of the Secondary School Students in SPSR Nellore District

The purpose of the study was to determine the influence of demographic variables such as gender, locality, delivery type, type of management, class, father’s education, father’s occupation, family income and birth order on mental health status. Mental Health Status inventory by Dr. Jagadeesh & A.K. Srivastva was administered to assess the mental health status of the subjects (N=200). To test the hypotheses, the collected data were analyzed using t-test and Chi-square test. Findings suggested that there is significant impact of demographic variables on mental health; the class of secondary school students is positively related to their mental health; the birth order of secondary school students is positively related to their mental health; the mental health status of urban area students is slightly better than of rural area students; the mental health status of caesarean delivered students is slightly better than that of normal delivered and the mental health status of girls is slightly better than that of boys

GR-38 Energy Cost and Efficiency on Edge Computing: Challenges and Vision

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been the key for many advancements in next-generation technologies for the past few years. With a conceptual grouping of ecosystem elements such as sensors, actuators, and smart objects connected to perform complex operations to perform environmental monitoring, intelligent transport system, smart building, smart cities, and endless other possibilities. Edge computing helps the IoT’s reach even further and be more robust by connecting multiple censored devices through the internet and forming powerful computational capabilities. Unfortunately, this computation level comes at a cost as the devices are constantly being used to communicate and perform specific actions. Energy efficiency has focused on finding the optimal way to utilize the latest technologies while retaining the battery power’s longevity. In this paper, we present an outline of the difficulties engaged with planning energy-efficient IoT edge devices and depict recent research that has proposed promising answers that address these challenges. First, we analyze the challenges that IoT devices bring in terms of energy consumption. Next, we discuss the different approaches such as computation offloading, modifying the IoT devices’ designs, and the number of algorithms that help reduce energy consumption and few latest technologies. Finally, we will look at the case study that outlines the energy-saving techniques in smart grids, smart cities, electric vehicles, smart home devices, and VR/AR in real time to apply the concepts proposed.Advisors(s): Dr. Kun SuoTopic(s): IoT/Cloud/Networkin

The great body has no shape, the great art is embodied : conception of body in Zhang Huan’s performance art

Zhang Huan (b. 1965) can be considered a pioneering contemporary performance artist in China. His position on the Chinese art scene is highly regarded not only from a historical perspective. The use of the artist’s body as a means of expression can serve multiple purposes, which can touch upon, e.g. social or political issues, and seldom re- flects the role of the human body as a vehicle for mediation. Through his artistic activity, the artist tries to discuss this issue based on the Chinese philosophical intuitions of this aspect of human existence. In our paper, we shall try to examine the theoretical foundations of the artist’s approaches to performance and illustrate them with selected works