Cooperation in a large society of self-interested individuals is notoriously difficult to achieve when the externality of one individual's action is spread thin and wide on the whole society. This leads to the 'tragedy of the commons' in which rational action will ultimately make everyone worse-off. Traditional policies to promote cooperation involve Pigouvian taxation or subsidies that make in...

A sampling-based framework for finding the optimal representation of a finite energy optical field using a finite number of bits is presented. For a given bit budget, we determine the optimum number and spacing of the samples in order to represent the field with as low error as possible. We present the associated performance bounds as trade-off curves between the error and the cost budget. In c...

Available online 21 June 2009

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the most sensitive radio telescope in the world. This unprecedented sensitivity will be achieved by combining and analyzing signals from 262,144 antennas and 350 dishes at a raw datarate of petabits per second. The processing pipeline to create useful astronomical data will require hundreds of peta-operations per second, at a very limited power budget. W...

The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) has made people reliant on continuous, high-speed, low-cost networks in order to get work done. Ideally, one should be able to browse the Web anytime, anywhere, whether connected to such a network or not. This paper describes the design of TeleWeb, a system we are building to support this goal. We believe that fine-grained cost control is crucial and ...

Modern radio astronomy relies on very large amounts of data that need to be transferred between various parts of astronomical instruments, over distances that are often in the range of tens or hundreds of kilometres. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world’s largest radio telescope, data rates between its components will exceed Terabits per second. This will impose a huge challenge o...

NextGen air/ground operations with ground-based automated separation assurance have been initially evaluated with controllers and pilots in the loop at the NASA Ames Research Center. Nominal and off-nominal situations were investigated in a highly automated environment, under 2x and 3x traffic densities. The paper starts with a review of previous simulations on nominal operations, followed by a...