Model analysis of remotely controlled rendezvous and docking with display prediction

Manual control of rendezvous and docking (RVD) of two spacecraft in low earth orbit by a remote human operator is discussed. Experimental evidence has shown that control performance degradation for large transmission delays (between spacecraft and operations control center) can be substantially improved by the introduction of predictor displays. An intial Optimal Control Model (OCM) analysis of RVD translational and rotational perturbation control was performed, with emphasis placed on the predictive capabilities of the combined Kalman estimator/optimal predictor with respect to control performance, for a range of time delays, motor noise levels and tracking axes. OCM predictions are then used as a reference for comparing tracking performance with a simple predictor display, as well as with no display prediction at all. Use is made here of an imperfect internal model formulation, whereby it is assumed that the human operator has no knowledge of the system transmission delay

A network-based threshold model for the spreading of fads in society and markets

We investigate the behavior of a threshold model for the spreading of fads and similar phenomena in society. The model is giving the fad dynamics and is intended to be confined to an underlying network structure. We investigate the whole parameter space of the fad dynamics on three types of network models. The dynamics we discover is rich and highly dependent on the underlying network structure. For some range of the parameter space, for all types of substrate networks, there are a great variety of sizes and life-lengths of the fads -- what one see in real-world social and economical systems

Networks and Our Limited Information Horizon

In this paper we quantify our limited information horizon, by measuring the information necessary to locate specific nodes in a network. To investigate different ways to overcome this horizon, and the interplay between communication and topology in social networks, we let agents communicate in a model society. Thereby they build a perception of the network that they can use to create strategic links to improve their standing in the network. We observe a narrow distribution of links when the communication is low and a network with a broad distribution of links when the communication is high.Comment: 5 pages and 5 figure

Dynamic rewiring in small world networks

We investigate equilibrium properties of small world networks, in which both connectivity and spin variables are dynamic, using replicated transfer matrices within the replica symmetric approximation. Population dynamics techniques allow us to examine order parameters of our system at total equilibrium, probing both spin- and graph-statistics. Of these, interestingly, the degree distribution is found to acquire a Poisson-like form (both within and outside the ordered phase). Comparison with Glauber simulations confirms our results satisfactorily.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

Quantum computing of delocalization in small-world networks

We study a quantum small-world network with disorder and show that the system exhibits a delocalization transition. A quantum algorithm is built up which simulates the evolution operator of the model in a polynomial number of gates for exponential number of vertices in the network. The total computational gain is shown to depend on the parameters of the network and a larger than quadratic speed-up can be reached. We also investigate the robustness of the algorithm in presence of imperfections.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, research done at http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr

Mining Missing Hyperlinks from Human Navigation Traces: A Case Study of Wikipedia

Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web. They are especially important for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: an article can often only be understood in the context of related articles, and hyperlinks make it easy to explore this context. But important links are often missing, and several methods have been proposed to alleviate this problem by learning a linking model based on the structure of the existing links. Here we propose a novel approach to identifying missing links in Wikipedia. We build on the fact that the ultimate purpose of Wikipedia links is to aid navigation. Rather than merely suggesting new links that are in tune with the structure of existing links, our method finds missing links that would immediately enhance Wikipedia's navigability. We leverage data sets of navigation paths collected through a Wikipedia-based human-computation game in which users must find a short path from a start to a target article by only clicking links encountered along the way. We harness human navigational traces to identify a set of candidates for missing links and then rank these candidates. Experiments show that our procedure identifies missing links of high quality

CONTEST : a Controllable Test Matrix Toolbox for MATLAB

Large, sparse networks that describe complex interactions are a common feature across a number of disciplines, giving rise to many challenging matrix computational tasks. Several random graph models have been proposed that capture key properties of real-life networks. These models provide realistic, parametrized matrices for testing linear system and eigenvalue solvers. CONTEST (CONtrollable TEST matrices) is a random network toolbox for MATLAB that implements nine models. The models produce unweighted directed or undirected graphs; that is, symmetric or unsymmetric matrices with elements equal to zero or one. They have one or more parameters that affect features such as sparsity and characteristic pathlength and all can be of arbitrary dimension. Utility functions are supplied for rewiring, adding extra shortcuts and subsampling in order to create further classes of networks. Other utilities convert the adjacency matrices into real-valued coefficient matrices for naturally arising computational tasks that reduce to sparse linear system and eigenvalue problems