The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Urban Challenge, a contest that pitted robots against each other for 6 h without human intervention, was aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in research for perception, planning, sensors, and situational awareness with the goal of military application. The event was a success, gaining national media attention for DARPA and robotics; but...

We present two efficient iterative Monte Carlo algorithms in the grand canonical ensemble with which the chemical potentials corresponding to prescribed (targeted) partial densities can be determined. The first algorithm works by always using the targeted densities in the kT log(rho(i)) (ideal gas) terms and updating the excess chemical potentials from the previous iteration. The second algorit...

Stein’s method provides a way of bounding the distance of a probability distribution to a target distribution μ. Here we develop Stein’s method for the class of discrete Gibbs measures with a density e , where V is the energy function. Using size bias couplings, we treat an example of Gibbs convergence for strongly correlated random variables due to Chayes and Klein [Helv. Phys. Acta 67 (1994) ...

In this article, the smart grid is modeled as a decentralized and hierarchical network, made of three categories of agents: producers, providers and microgrids. To optimize their decisions concerning the energy prices and the traded quantities of energy, the agents need to forecast the energy productions and the demand of the microgrids. The biases resulting from the decentralized learning migh...

We present results of a simulation of QCD on a 16 × 4 lattice with 2 continuum flavors of p4-improved staggered fermion with mass m/T = 0.4. Derivatives of the thermodynamic grand potential Ω with respect to quark chemical potential μq up to fourth order are calculated, enabling estimates of the pressure, quark number density and associated susceptibilities as functions of μq via Taylor series ...

In this article, the smart grid is modeled as a decentralized and hierarchical network, made of three categories of agents: producers, providers and microgrids. To optimize their decisions concerning the energy prices and the traded quantities of energy, the agents need to forecast the energy productions and the demand of the microgrids. The biases resulting from the decentralized learning migh...

This paper deals with the computation of robust iris templates from video sequences. The main contribution is to propose (i) optimal tracking and robust detection of the pupil, (ii) smart selection of iris images to be enrolled, and (iii) multi-thread and quality-driven decomposition of tasks to reach real-time processing. The evaluation of the system was done on the Multiple Biometric Grand Ch...

The impressive results of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge showed that fully autonomous vehicles are technologically feasible with current intelligent vehicle hardware. It is natural to ask how current transportation infrastructure can be improved when most vehicles are driven autonomously in the future. Dresner and Stone proposed a new intersection control mechanism called Autonomous Intersectio...