In my book Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education, ( original Bergin &Garvey, 1999: chp. 11; paperback edition, Paradigm Press, 2006) I consider Foucault as a complexity theorist and relate him to contemporary conceptions of complexity as they are being utilised in the physical and social sciences. In order to set the background to a discussion of Foucault as complexity theorist it is neces...

In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) architecture with three networks, an action network, a critic network, and a reference network, to develop internal goalrepresentation for online learning and optimization. Unlike the traditional ADP design normally with an action network and a critic network, our approach integrates the third network, a reference network, int...

In this work, we propose to apply trust region optimization to deep reinforcement learning using a recently proposed Kronecker-factored approximation to the curvature. We extend the framework of natural policy gradient and propose to optimize both the actor and the critic using Kronecker-factored approximate curvature (K-FAC) with trust region; hence we call our method Actor Critic using Kronec...

Approximate/adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) has been studied extensively in recent years for its potential scalability to solve large state and control space problems, including those involving continuous states and continuous controls. The applicability of ADP algorithms, especially the adaptive critic designs has been demonstrated in several case studies. Direct heuristic dynamic programmi...

This work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant ECS-9904378. Abstract Adaptive critic based approximate dynamic programming techniques are gradient based methods for finding optimal policies for multi-stage decision processes. We believe adaptive critic methods are now developed to the point that they can be applied to the full spectrum of decision and control problem...

A novel supervised Actor–Critic (SAC) approach for adaptive cruise control (ACC) problem is proposed in this paper. The key elements required by the SAC algorithm namely Actor and Critic, are approximated by feed-forward neural networks respectively. The output of Actor and the state are input to Critic to approximate the performance index function. A Lyapunov stability analysis approach has be...

Pierre Bourdieu is without a doubt one of the main figures in the sociological study of culture today. Yet, for a theorist so central to the subject matter of cultural studies, it is clear that there is no coherent account of Bourdieu’s stance in relation to the ‘concept of culture’ among current commentators. More importantly, in the sister-discipline of anthropology, Bourdieu’s is thought of ...

The present volume of UDT is devoted to Robert F. Tichy on the occasion of his 50th birthday. We cordially congratulate him on this occasion and wish him the best for the future. In this short note we collect highlights of his scientific work. Together with more than 70 coauthors he has written over 200 papers so far, with topics that range from number theory to applications in actuarial mathem...