One fundamental aspect of any IP communications infrastructure is its addressing plan. With its new address architecture and allocation policies, the introduction of IPv6 into a network means that network designers and operators need to reconsider their existing approaches to network addressing. Lack of guidelines on handling this aspect of network design could slow down the deployment and inte...

While exploring to nd better solutions, an agent performing on-line reinforcement learning (RL) can perform worse than is acceptable. In some cases, exploration might have unsafe, or even catastrophic , results, often modeled in terms of reaching`failure' states of the agent's environment. This paper presents a method that uses domain knowledge to reduce the number of failures during exploratio...

During the past four decades the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, has witnessed a remarkable rapid urban growth. This has coincided with lack of a planning framework, weak institutional and poor policies, which have caused haphazard and interrelated land use and transportation issues. Current land use and transport planning policies and practice in Jeddah seem to focus on different visions, caus...

We analyze optimal production and pricing strategies in the single period (newsvendor) dual sourcing problem that entails local and offshore suppliers. The local supplier is used reactively as an emergency source following the realization of random demand. A multiplicative demand model is employed. We show that dual sourcing flexibility may decrease optimal price when emergency supply cost is s...

English language teaching (ELT) in Iran has experienced a turbulent history reflecting an often dynamic context and changing attitudes toward English, yet framed within a discourse of tolerance rather than one of embrace, as this study is going to show. The discourse was much brighter before the Islamic Revolution and this study reveals that there were much fewer adverse policies toward the spr...

Privacy policies often place restrictions on the purposes for which a governed entity may use personal information. For example, regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), require that hospital employees use medical information for only certain purposes, such as treatment, but not for others, such as gossip. Thus, using formal or automated methods for ...

One of the problems that must be solved during coalition operations is the planning problem: finding a course of actions for the operation. Knowledge-based planning is a technique that can be used to address this problem. However, traditional planning has focussed on the finding of a plan that achieves a given goal or accomplishes a given task. During a coalition operation such a plan may need ...