China en la Encrucijada Geopolítica Energética: cuestiones estratégicas

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar os contornos da (in)segurança energética chinesa, realçando em especial, o caso do petróleo. O argumento central é o de que a China enfrenta uma considerável escassez energética, a qual procura combater por meio, por exemplo, das massivas aquisições de petróleo que tem vindo a realizar no estrangeiro. Em alternativa à observação participante e não-participante, privilegiou-se a entrevista semiestruturada. O trabalho de campo baseou-se em entrevistas conduzidas essencialmente em Portugal e na Ásia Central. O método qualitativo – através da análise hermenêutica – é a metodologia na qual se alicerça a presente investigação. Como recomendação estratégica, sugerimos que a China procure aperfeiçoar o seu soft power, no sentido de inspirar (maior) confiança aos mercados energéticos mundiais, e de mitigar, entre outros, o elevado protecionismo e reticências da Rússia e EUA em permitir que as NOCs chinesas adquiram participações na exploração do seu setor energético.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CHINA’S ENERGY (IN)SECURITY: AN ASSESSMENT

This article aims to analyze the contours of China's energy (in)security, highlighting the case of electricity, coal and, in particular, oil. The central argument is that China faces a significant energy shortage, which it seeks to fight through, for example, the massive purchases of oil that it has been operating abroad. Indeed, since 1993 - when China became a net oil importer - the Chinese have been investing in a sophisticated 'black gold' diplomacy that enables them to acquire more and more oil to meet their energy needs

Vehicle-to-grid plug-in forecasting for participation in ancillary services markets

Electric vehicle (EV) charge points (CPs) can be used by aggregators to provide frequency response (FR) services. Aggregators must have day-ahead half-hourly forecasts of minimum aggregate vehicle-to-grid (V2G) plug-in to produce meaningful bids for the day-ahead ancillary services market. However, there is a lack of understanding on what features should be considered and how complex the forecasting model should be. This paper explores the dependency of aggregate V2G plug-in on historic plug-in levels, calendar variables, and weather conditions. These investigations are used to develop three day-ahead forecasts of minimum aggregate V2G plug-in during 30-minute window. A neural network that considers previous V2G plug-in values the day before, three days before, and seven days before, in addition to day of the week, month, and hour, is found to be the most accurate

Blockchain Technology in the Intrusion Detection Domain

The ability of blockchain technology to improve security and transparency across a range of industries has receivedA great deal of attention has been garnered lately in correcting the sentence.. In the domain of intrusion detection, where the identification and mitigation of cyber threats are paramount, blockchain has emerged as a promising solution. This abstract examines how blockchain is used in intrusion detection systems and emphasizes its advantages. Blockchain technology improves the security and integrity of intrusion detection systems by using a decentralized and immutable ledger. It provides an immutable audit trail, distributed consensus, and increased resilience to attacks. Moreover, blockchain fosters trust, transparency, and collaboration among stakeholders, enabling faster threat detection and response. This research can explore novel approaches to integrating blockchain into intrusion detection systems, providing stronger protection against cyber threats.Immutable Audit Trail: In the context of intrusion detection, the capacity of blockchain to produce an unalterable and transparent audit trail is of enormous value. Research in this area can focus on developing techniques to leverage the blockchain's audit trail for effective incident response, forensic investigations, and attribution of cyberattacks. We will use theweighted product model in this study, which is a research approach that gives weights to various factors and combines them to make conclusions based on their relative relevance in a weighted way. Taken as alternative is“IDS1, IDS2, IDS3, IDS4, IDS5, IDS6, IDS7, and IDS8”.Detection Quality, Performance, Stability, User Interface, Profile update, ConvenienceThe By this we can see that IDS4 has 1 RANK and IDS5 has the 8th RANK.In conclusion, blockchain technology holds great potential in the intrusion detection domain. Its decentralized and immutable nature can enhance the security and reliability of intrusion detection systems by providing transparent and tamper-proof logs of network activity. Blockchain-based solutions can improve threat detection, facilitate secure information sharing among entities, and enhance the overall resilience of intrusion detection systems. As the technology continues to evolve, further research and development in integrating blockchain with intrusion detection will unlock new possibilities for combating cyber threats

Parameters of Solidifying Mixtures Transporting at Underground Ore Mining

The article is devoted to the problem of providing mining enterprises with solidifying filling mixtures at underground mining. The results of analytical studies using the data of foreign and domestic practice of solidifying mixtures delivery to stopes are given. On the basis of experimental practice the parameters of transportation of solidifying filling mixtures are given with an increase in their quality due to the effect of vibration in the pipeline. The mechanism of the delivery process and the procedure for determining the parameters of the forced oscillations of the pipeline, the characteristics of the transporting processes, the rigidity of the elastic elements of pipeline section supports and the magnitude of vibrator’ driving force are detailed. It is determined that the quality of solidifying filling mixtures can be increased due to the rational use of technical resources during the transportation of mixtures, and as a result the mixtures are characterized by a more even distribution of the aggregate. The algorithm for calculating the parameters of the pipe vibro-transport of solidifying filling mixtures can be in demand in the design of mineral deposits underground mining technology

FLARE: Fingerprinting Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents using Universal Adversarial Masks

We propose FLARE, the first fingerprinting mechanism to verify whether a suspected Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policy is an illegitimate copy of another (victim) policy. We first show that it is possible to find non-transferable, universal adversarial masks, i.e., perturbations, to generate adversarial examples that can successfully transfer from a victim policy to its modified versions but not to independently trained policies. FLARE employs these masks as fingerprints to verify the true ownership of stolen DRL policies by measuring an action agreement value over states perturbed via such masks. Our empirical evaluations show that FLARE is effective (100% action agreement on stolen copies) and does not falsely accuse independent policies (no false positives). FLARE is also robust to model modification attacks and cannot be easily evaded by more informed adversaries without negatively impacting agent performance. We also show that not all universal adversarial masks are suitable candidates for fingerprints due to the inherent characteristics of DRL policies. The spatio-temporal dynamics of DRL problems and sequential decision-making process make characterizing the decision boundary of DRL policies more difficult, as well as searching for universal masks that capture the geometry of it.Comment: Will appear in the proceedings of ACSAC 2023; 13 pages, 5 figures, 7 table

Enhancing information retrieval in fact extraction and verification

Modern fact verification systems have distanced themselves from the black box paradigm by providing the evidence used to infer their veracity judgments. Hence, evidence-backed fact verification systems’ performance heavily depends on the capabilities of their retrieval component to identify these facts. A popular evaluation benchmark for these systems is the FEVER task, which consists of determining the veracity of short claims using sentences extracted from Wikipedia. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the the retrieval steps of the FEVER task leveraging the graph structure of Wikipedia. The retrieval models surpass state of the art results at both sentence and document level. Additionally, we show that by feeding our retrieved evidence to the best-performing textual entailment model, we set a new state of the art in the FEVER competition

Interesses Energéticos e Implicações Políticas: RPC e os EUA em Angola, no Sudão e na Nigéria

Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciência Política e Relações InternacionaisO crescimento impetuoso da economia da República Popular da China, acompanhada por uma procura interna de matérias-primas e energia tem conduzido à criação de relevantes relações energéticas e comerciais com alguns dos maiores países produtores de petróleo da África Subsariana. Neste contexto, Angola, Sudão, Sudão do Sul, e a Nigéria são países de vital importância para a China. Por seu turno, os Estados Unidos da América, com uma forte presença no mercado energético subsariano, têm procurado fomentar a influência das suas companhias petrolíferas internacionais, particularmente focadas em dois países, Angola e Nigéria. Países esses onde há praticamente duas décadas, a China surgiu como sendo o seu grande concorrente. Dada a crescente procura de novas regiões petrolíferas, o investimento em países africanos exportadores de petróleo tem sido permanente e contínuo, indispensável para acompanhar o crescimento dos maiores consumidores de energia mundiais, a República Popular da China e os Estados Unidos da América. A diplomacia energética da China dirigida a esta região petrolífera subsariana, tem por objectivo a obtenção de contractos de médio e longo prazo para a prospecção, a exploração e a produção em campos petrolíferos situados em onshore e em offshore, através de acordos, de parcerias, de joint-ventures, ou mesmo através da aquisição de activos de outras companhias. Esta investigação, justifica-se, assim, pela actualidade da evolução das relações de Pequim com os países subsarianos exportadores de petróleo. A competição pelos recursos energéticos entre Pequim e Washington, e a análise que as diferentes teorias de Relações Internacionais vêm dedicando a deste tema, contribuem decisivamente para o constituir em uma matéria bastante relevante pretendendo-se, com este trabalho contribuir para o avanço do estudo das relações petrolíferas da China e dos Estados Unidos da América, na África Subsariana