Introduction

The title of this book, Hard Lesson: Reflections on Crime control in Late Modernity, contains a number of clues about its general theoretical direction. It is a book concerned, fist and foremost, with the vagaries of crime control in western neo-liberal and English speaking countries. More specifically, Hard Lessons draws attention to a number of examples in which discrete populations – those who have in one way or another offended against the criminal law - have become the subjects of various forms of stare intervention, regulation and control. We are concerned most of all with the ways in which recent criminal justice policies and practices have resulted in what are variously described as unintended consequences, unforeseen outcomes, unanticipated results, counter-productive effects or negative side effects. At their simplest, such terms refer to the apparent gulf between intention and outcome; they often form the basis for considerable amount of policy reappraisal, soul searching and even nihilistic despair among the mamandirns of crime control. Unintended consequences can, of course, be both positive and negative. Occasionally, crime control measures may result in beneficial outcomes, such as the use of DNA to acquit wrongly convicted prisoners. Generally, however, unforeseen effects tend to be negative and even entirely counterproductive, and/or directly opposite to what were originally intended. All this, of course, presupposes some sort of rational, well meaning and transparent policy making process so beloved by liberal social policy theorists. Yet, as Judith Bessant points out in her chapter, this view of policy formulation tends to obscure the often covert, regulatory and downright malevolent intentions contained in many government policies and practices. Indeed, history is replete with examples of governments seeking to mask their real aims from a prying public eye. Denials and various sorts of ‘techniques of neutralisation’ serve to cloak the real or ‘underlying’ aims of the powerful (Cohen 2000). The latest crop of ‘spin doctors’ and ‘official spokespersons’ has ensured that the process of governmental obfuscation, distortion and concealment remains deeply embedded in neo-liberal forms of governance. There is little new or surprising in this; nor should we be shocked when things ‘go wrong’ in the domain of crime control since many unintended consequences are, more often than not, quite predictable. Prison riots, high rates of recidivism and breaches of supervision orders, expansion rather than contraction of control systems, laws that create the opposite of what was intended – all these are normative features of western crime control. Indeed, without the deep fault lines running between policy and outcome it would be hard to imagine what many policy makers, administrators and practitioners would do: their day to day work practices and (and incomes) are directly dependent upon emergent ‘service delivery’ problems. Despite recurrent howls of official anguish and occasional despondency it is apparent that those involved in the propping up the apparatus of crime control have a vested interest in ensuring that polices and practices remain in an enduring state of review and reform.

Mining trading partners’ preferences for efficient multi-issue bargaining in E‑business

Classical negotiation models are weak in supporting real-world business negotiations because these models often assume that the preference information of each negotiator is made public. Although parametric learning methods have been proposed for acquiring the preference information of negotiation opponents, these methods suffer from the strong assumptions about the specific utility function and negotiation mechanism employed by the opponents. Consequently, it is difficult to apply these learning methods to the heterogeneous negotiation agents participating in e‑marketplaces. This paper illustrates the design, development, and evaluation of a nonparametric negotiation knowledge discovery method which is underpinned by the well-known Bayesian learning paradigm. According to our empirical testing, the novel knowledge discovery method can speed up the negotiation processes while maintaining negotiation effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nonparametric negotiation knowledge discovery method developed and evaluated in the context of multi-issue bargaining over e‑marketplaces.

Fast reconstruction of aerodynamic shapes using evolutionary algorithms and virtual Nash strategies in a CFD design environment

This paper compares the performances of two different optimisation techniques for solving inverse problems; the first one deals with the Hierarchical Asynchronous Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms software (HAPEA) and the second is implemented with a game strategy named Nash-EA. The HAPEA software is based on a hierarchical topology and asynchronous parallel computation. The Nash-EA methodology is introduced as a distributed virtual game and consists of splitting the wing design variables - aerofoil sections - supervised by players optimising their own strategy. The HAPEA and Nash-EA software methodologies are applied to a single objective aerodynamic ONERA M6 wing reconstruction. Numerical results from the two approaches are compared in terms of the quality of model and computational expense and demonstrate the superiority of the distributed Nash-EA methodology in a parallel environment for a similar design quality.

Measuring CRM and SCM benefits : a preliminary measurement model

Organizations invest heavily in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems, and their related infrastructure, presumably expecting positive benefits to the organization. Assessing the benefits of such applications is an important aspect of managing such systems. Considering the salient differences between CRM and SCM applications with other intra-organizational applications, existing Information Systems benefits measurement models and frameworks are ill-suited to gauge benefits of inter-organizational systems. This paper reports the preliminary findings of a measurement model developed to assess benefits of CRM and SCM applications. The preliminary model, which reflects the characteristics of the Analytic Theory, is derived using a review of 55 academic studies and 44 papers from the practice. Six hundred and six identified benefits were then synthesized in to 74 non-overlapping benefits, arranged under six dimensions.

Computer vision onboard UAVs for civilian tasks

Computer vision is much more than a technique to sense and recover environmental information from an UAV. It should play a main role regarding UAVs’ functionality because of the big amount of information that can be extracted, its possible uses and applications, and its natural connection to human driven tasks, taking into account that vision is our main interface to world understanding. Our current research’s focus lays on the development of techniques that allow UAVs to maneuver in spaces using visual information as their main input source. This task involves the creation of techniques that allow an UAV to maneuver towards features of interest whenever a GPS signal is not reliable or sufficient, e.g. when signal dropouts occur (which usually happens in urban areas, when flying through terrestrial urban canyons or when operating on remote planetary bodies), or when tracking or inspecting visual targets—including moving ones—without knowing their exact UMT coordinates. This paper also investigates visual serving control techniques that use velocity and position of suitable image features to compute the references for flight control. This paper aims to give a global view of the main aspects related to the research field of computer vision for UAVs, clustered in four main active research lines: visual serving and control, stereo-based visual navigation, image processing algorithms for detection and tracking, and visual SLAM. Finally, the results of applying these techniques in several applications are presented and discussed: this study will encompass power line inspection, mobile target tracking, stereo distance estimation, mapping and positioning.

Survey research

This book aims to provide an overview of approaches to assist researchers and practitioners to explore ways of undertaking research in the information literacy field. The first chapter provides an introductory overview of research by Dr Kirsty Williamson (author of Research Methods for Students, Academics and Professionals: Information Management and Systems) and this sets the scene for the rest of the chapters where each author explores the key aspects of a specific method and explains how it may be applied in practice. The methods covered include those representing qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Both a chapter on the topical evidence-based practice approach, and another critiquing it, are also included. The final chapter points the way towards potential new directions for the burgeoning field

FAB-MAP + RatSLAM : appearance-based SLAM for multiple times of day

Appearance-based mapping and localisation is especially challenging when separate processes of mapping and localisation occur at different times of day. The problem is exacerbated in the outdoors where continuous change in sun angle can drastically affect the appearance of a scene. We confront this challenge by fusing the probabilistic local feature based data association method of FAB-MAP with the pose cell filtering and experience mapping of RatSLAM. We evaluate the effectiveness of our amalgamation of methods using five datasets captured throughout the day from a single camera driven through a network of suburban streets. We show further results when the streets are re-visited three weeks later, and draw conclusions on the value of the system for lifelong mapping.

Solar powered UAV for fire prevention and planning

This project aims to develop a methodology for designing and conducting a systems engineering analysis to build and fly continuously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy for one week with a 0.25Kg payload consuming 0.5 watt without fuel or pollution. An airplane able to fly autonomously for many days could find many applications. Including coastal or border surveillance, atmospherical and weather research and prediction, environmental, forestry, agricultural, and oceanic monitoring, imaging for the media and real-estate industries, etc. Additional advantages of solar airplanes are their low cost and the simplicity with which they can be launched. For example, in the case of potential forest fire risks during a warm and dry period, swarms of solar airplanes, easily launched with the hand, could efficiently monitor a large surface, reporting rapidly any fire starts. This would allow a fast intervention and thus reduce the cost of such disaster, in terms of human and material losses. At higher dimension, solar HALE platforms are expected to play a major role as communication relays and could replace advantageously satellites in a near future.

Darjeeling, a feature-rich VM for the resource poor

The programming and retasking of sensor nodes could benefit greatly from the use of a virtual machine (VM) since byte code is compact, can be loaded on demand, and interpreted on a heterogeneous set of devices. The challenge is to ensure good programming tools and a small footprint for the virtual machine to meet the memory constraints of typical WSN platforms. To this end we propose Darjeeling, a virtual machine modelled after the Java VM and capable of executing a substantial subset of the Java language, but designed specifically to run on 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers with 2 - 10 KB of RAM. The Darjeeling VM uses a 16- rather than a 32-bit architecture, which is more efficient on the targeted platforms. Darjeeling features a novel memory organisation with strict separation of reference from non-reference types which eliminates the need for run-time type inspection in the underlying compacting garbage collector. Darjeeling uses a linked stack model that provides light-weight threads, and supports synchronisation. The VM has been implemented on three different platforms and was evaluated with micro benchmarks and a real-world application. The latter includes a pure Java implementation of the collection tree routing protocol conveniently programmed as a set of cooperating threads, and a reimplementation of an existing environmental monitoring application. The results show that Darjeeling is a viable solution for deploying large-scale heterogeneous sensor networks. Copyright 2009 ACM.

Deployment and connectivity repair of a sensor net with a flying robot

We consider multi-robot systems that include sensor nodes and aerial or ground robots networked together. Such networks are suitable for tasks such as large-scale environmental monitoring or for command and control in emergency situations. We present a sensor network deployment method using autonomous aerial vehicles and describe in detail the algorithms used for deployment and for measuring network connectivity and provide experimental data collected from field trials. A particular focus is on determining gaps in connectivity of the deployed network and generating a plan for repair, to complete the connectivity. This project is the result of a collaboration between three robotics labs (CSIRO, USC, and Dartmouth). © Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2006.

Dragline automation: experimental evaluation through productivity trial

Since 1993 we have been working on the automation of dragline excavators, the largest earthmoving machines that exist. Recently we completed a large-scale experimental program where the automation system was used for production purposes over a two week period and moved over 200,000 tonnes of overburden. This is a landmark achievement in the history of automated excavation. In this paper we briefly describe the robotic system and how it works cooperatively with the machine operator. We then describe our methodology for gauging machine performance, analyze results from the production trial and comment on the effectiveness of the system that we have created. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.

Automated symbolic and numeric procedure for manipulator rigid-body dynamic significance analysis and simplification

This paper describes an automated procedure for analysing the significance of each of the many terms in the equations of motion for a serial-link robot manipulator. Significance analysis provides insight into the rigid-body dynamic effects that are significant locally or globally in the manipulator's state space. Deleting those terms that do not contribute significantly to the total joint torque can greatly reduce the computational burden for online control, and a Monte-Carlo style simulation is used to investigate the errors thus introduced. The procedures described are a hybrid of symbolic and numeric techniques, and can be readily implemented using standard computer algebra packages.

Combining Cartesian and polar coordinates in IBVS

Image-based visual servo (IBVS) is a simple, efficient and robust technique for vision-based control. Although technically a local method in practice it demonstrates almost global convergence. However IBVS performs very poorly for cases that involve large rotations about the optical axis. It is well known that re-parameterizing the problem by using polar, instead of Cartesian coordinates, of feature points overcomes this limitation. First, simulation and experimental results are presented to show the complementarity of these two parameter-izations. We then describe a new hybrid visual servo strategy based on combining polar and Cartesian image Jacobians. © 2009 IEEE.

Automation of an underground mining vehicle using reactive navigation and opportunistic localization

This paper describes the implementation of an autonomous navigation system onto a 30 tonne Load-Haul-Dump truck. The control architecture is based on a robust reactive wall-following behaviour. To make it purposeful we provide driving hints derived from an approximate nodal-map. For most of the time, the vehicle is driven with weak localization (odometry). This need only be improved at intersections where decisions must be made - a technique we refer to as opportunistic localization. The truck has achieved full-speed autonomous operation at an artificial test mine, and subsequently, at a operational underground mine.

Data muling over underwater wireless sensor networks using an autonomous underwater vehicle

We present algorithms, systems, and experimental results for underwater data muling. In data muling a mobile agent interacts with static agents to upload, download, or transport data to a different physical location. We consider a system comprising an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and many static Underwater Sensor Nodes (USN) networked together optically and acoustically. The AUV can locate the static nodes using vision and hover above the static nodes for data upload. We describe the hardware and software architecture of this underwater system, as well as experimental data. © 2006 IEEE.