This paper develops a path planner that minimizes risk (e.g. motion execution) while maximizing accumulated reward (e.g., quality of sensor viewpoint) motivated by visual assistance or tracking scenarios in unstructured or confined environments. In these scenarios, the robot should maintain the best viewpoint as it moves to the goal. However, in unstructured or confined environments, some paths may increase the risk of collision; therefore there is a tradeoff between risk and reward. Conventional state-dependent risk or probabilistic uncertainty modeling do not consider path-level risk or is difficult to acquire. This risk-reward planner explicitly represents risk as a function of motion plans, i.e., paths. Without manual assignment of the negative impact to the planner caused by risk, this planner takes in a pre-established viewpoint quality map and plans target location and path leading to it simultaneously, in order to maximize overall reward along the entire path while minimizing risk. Exact and approximate algorithms are presented, whose solution is further demonstrated on a physical tethered aerial vehicle. Other than the visual assistance problem, the proposed framework also provides a new planning paradigm to address minimum-risk planning under dynamical risk and absence of substructure optimality and to balance the trade-off between reward and risk.
The trade-off between reward and risk was mostly addressed as chance or probability of success failure. @cite_12 @cite_2 proposed chance-constrained rapidly-exploring random tree (CC-RRT) approaches, which used chance constraints to guarantee probabilistic feasibility at each time step and over entire trajectory. Another popular approach to handle reward and risk is to use (PO)MDP. As standard MDP inherently contains reward but not risk, researchers have looked into representing risk as negative reward (penalty) @cite_21 or constraints (C-POMDP) with unit cost for constraint violation @cite_11 @cite_23 @cite_25 . Going beyond unit cost, CC-POMDP was proposed by @cite_1 , which was based on a bound on the probability (chance) of some event happening during policy execution. RMPC is another alternative, with an emphasis on risk allocation, i.e., to allocate more risk for more rewarding actions @cite_7 @cite_13 .
@cite_7 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_12 @cite_11
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Autonomous agents operating in partially observable stochastic environments often face the problem of optimizing expected performance while bounding the risk of violating safety constraints. Such problems can be modeled as chance-constrained POMDP's (CC-POMDP's). Our first contribution is a systematic derivation of execution risk in POMDP domains, which improves upon how chance constraints are handled in the constrained POMDP literature. Second, we present RAO*, a heuristic forward search algorithm producing optimal, deterministic, finite-horizon policies for CC-POMDP's. In addition to the utility heuristic, RAO* leverages an admissible execution risk heuristic to quickly detect and prune overly-risky policy branches. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of RAO* in two challenging domains of practical interest: power supply restoration and autonomous science agents. between planner conservatism and the risk of infeasibility. This paper presents a novel real-time planning algorithm, chance constrained rapidly-exploring random trees (CC-RRT), which uses chance constraints to guarantee probabilistic feasibility for linear systems subject to process noise and or uncertain, possibly dynamic obstacles. By using RRT, the algorithm enjoys the computational benets of sampling-based algorithms, such as trajectory-wise constraint checking and incorporation of heuristics, while explicitly incorporating uncertainty within the formulation. Under the assumption of Gaussian noise, probabilistic feasibility at each time step can be established through simple simulation of the state conditional mean and the evaluation of linear constraints. Alternatively, a small amount of additional computation can be used to explicitly compute a less conservative probability bound at each time step. Simulation results show that this algorithm can be used for ecient identication and execution of probabilistically safe paths in real time. When controlling dynamic systems, such as mobile robots in uncertain environments, there is a trade off between risk and reward. For example, a race car can turn a corner faster by taking a more challenging path. This paper proposes a new approach to planning a control sequence with a guaranteed risk bound. Given a stochastic dynamic model, the problem is to find a control sequence that optimizes a performance metric, while satisfying chance constraints i.e. constraints on the upper bound of the probability of failure. We propose a two-stage optimization approach, with the upper stage optimizing the risk allocation and the lower stage calculating the optimal control sequence that maximizes reward. In general, the upper-stage is a non-convex optimization problem, which is hard to solve. We develop a new iterative algorithm for this stage that efficiently computes the risk allocation with a small penalty to optimality. The algorithm is implemented and tested on the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) depth planning problem, and demonstrates a substantial improvement in computation cost and suboptimality, compared to the prior arts. High correlation in failure of information systems due to worms and viruses has been cited as major impediment to cyber-insurance. However, of the many cyber-risk classes that influence failure of information systems, not all exhibit similar correlation properties. In this paper, we introduce a new classification of correlation properties of cyber-risks based on a twin-tier approach. At the first tier, is the correlation of cyber-risks within a firm i.e. correlated failure of multiple systems on its internal network. At second tier, is the correlation in risk at a global level i.e. correlation across independent firms in an insurers portfolio. Various classes of cyber-risks exhibit dierent level of correlation at two tiers, for instance, insider attacks exhibit high internal but low global correlation. While internal risk correlation within a firm influences its decision to seek insurance, the global correlation influences insurers decision in setting the premium. Citing real data we study the combined dynamics of the two-step risk arrival process to determine conditions conducive to the existence of cyber-insurance market. We address technical, managerial and policy choices influencing the correlation at both steps and the business implications thereof. In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that cite them, these science maps are only rough proxies for the potential of a scholar, organization, or country, to enter a new academic field. Here we use a large dataset of scholarly publications disambiguated at the individual level to create a map of science-or research space-where links connect pairs of fields based on the probability that an individual has published in both of them. We find that the research space is a significantly more accurate predictor of the fields that individuals and organizations will enter in the future than citation based science maps. At the country level, however, the research space and citations based science maps are equally accurate. These findings show that data on career trajectories-the set of fields that individuals have previously published in-provide more accurate predictors of future research output for more focalized units-such as individuals or organizations-than citation based science maps. Scholars are increasingly citing electronic web references which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To webcite a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. This journal has amended its instructions for authors accordingly, asking authors to archive cited Web pages before submitting a manuscript. Almost 200 other journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) prospectively before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted citing articles (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. This paper proposes a novel two-stage optimization method for robust model predictive control (RMPC) with Gaussian disturbance and state estimation error. Since the disturbance is unbounded, it is impossible to achieve zero probability of violating constraints. Our goal is to optimize the expected value of an objective function while limiting the probability of violating any constraints over the planning horizon (joint chance constraint). Prior arts include ellipsoidal relaxation approach [1] and particle control [2], but the former yields very conservative result and the latter is computationally intensive. Our approach divide the optimization problem into two stages; the upper-stage that optimizes risk allocation, and the lower-stage that optimizes control sequence with tightened constraints. The lower-stage is a regular convex optimization, such as linear programming or quadratic programming. The upper-stage is also convex, but the objective function is not always differentiable. We developed a fast descent algorithm for the upper-stage called iterative risk allocation (IRA), which yield much smaller suboptimality than ellipsoidal relaxation method while achieving a substantial speedup compared to and particle control. Purpose  The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations.Design methodology approach  ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets  a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a selfcitation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation  using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database.Findings  ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited ...