This paper analyzes a connection between risk-sensitive and minimax criteria for discrete-time, nite-states Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We synthesize optimal policies with respect to both criteria, both for nite horizon and discounted in nite horizon problem. A generalized decision-making framework is introduced, which includes as special cases a number of approaches that have been consid...

During any marine oil spill, floating oil slicks that reach shorelines threaten a wide array of coastal habitats. To assess the presence of oil near shorelines during the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill, we scanned the library of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery collected during the event to determine which images intersected shorelines and appeared to contain oil. In total, 715 SAR ima...

Issues of feasibility and stability are considered for a nite horizon formulation of receding horizon control for linear systems under mixed linear state and control constraints. We prove that given any compact set of initial conditions that is feasible for the innnite horizon problem, there exists a nite horizon length above which a receding horizon policy will provide both feasibility and sta...

Tacit knowledge, intuition, intuitive heritage are very broad concepts and sometimes too vague to provide for any practical applications (as a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush). Only some of the many possible intuitive factors in science are chosen. Indo-European mythology belongs to the heritage of humanity, but has nothing to do with the mathematical creation of set theory. It is pos...

Monetary policy is sometimes formulated in terms of a target level of inflation, a fixed time horizon and a constant interest rate that is anticipated to achieve the target at the specified horizon. These requirements lead to constant interest rate (CIR) instrument rules. Using the standard New Keynesian model, it is shown that some forms of CIR policy lead to both indeterminacy of equilibria a...

Despite 180 years of theory on magnetism, it appears that the practice of calculating forces on magnetic media is ambiguous, as illustrated by a recent article by Casperson [1]. Potentially troubling issues include: Which field B or H should be used? Should the total field be used, or only the external field? And if the latter, what is meant by “external”? Can/should effects of magnetization cu...

Many approaches have been proposed for the visualization of time series. The reduced line charts (small multiples for time series) and the more recent horizon graphs are two of these visualization techniques with benefits for visualizing multiple time series that we propose to unify, using a variant of the pan and zoom interaction on the y axis. We compare in a user study reduced line charts, h...

Detecting a horizontal line in an infrared image is an important component of automatic surveillance applications such as detecting ships, missiles on the horizon, unmanned aerial vehicle control, flight navigation, and port security. Most of the existing solutions for the problems only use single image to detect horizon line. Although this results in good accuracy for some images, it often fai...

Recently, substantial progress has been made towards designing, building and test-flying remotely piloted Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). This progress in overcoming the aerodynamic obstacles to flight at very small scales has, unfortunately, not been matched by similar progress in autonomous MAV flight. Thus, we propose a robust, vision-based horizon detection algorithm as the first step towards au...