Search results for "Security"

BDI Modelling and Simulation of Human Behaviours in Bushfires

2016

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destruction of property. Emergency management strategies rely on expected citizens’ behaviour which differs from reality. In order to raise their awareness about the real population behaviour, we want to provide them with a realistic agent-based simulation. The philosophically-grounded BDI architecture provides a very suitable approach but is little used due to the lack of adapted tools. This paper uses this case study to illustrate two new tools to fill this gap: the Tactics Development Framework (TDF) and GAMA BDI architecture.

Kick Detection and Influx Size Estimation during Offshore Drilling Operations using Deep Learning

2019

An uncontrolled or unobserved influx or kick during drilling has the potential to induce a well blowout, one of the most harmful incidences during drilling both in regards to economic and environmental cost. Since kicks during drilling are serious risks, it is important to improve kick and loss detection performance and capabilities and to develop automatic flux detection methodology. There are clear patterns during a influx incident. However, due to complex processes and sparse instrumentation it is difficult to predict the behaviour of kicks or losses based on sensor data combined with physical models alone. Emerging technologies within Deep Learning are however quite adapt at picking up …

Towards a Bangsamoro in Mindanao?

2017

Mindanao was already settled by Muslims when the Spanish colonization began. Today, the western part of the island and the Sulu archipelago are territories with a majority Muslim population, whereas the rest of the Philippines is predominantly Christian. Since the sixteenth century, the “Moros” of Mindanao have fought outsiders, Spaniards first, then the Americans, and throughout history the other Filipinos. The settlement migration policy of the Philippine government in the middle of the twentieth century has transformed the human landscape of the central and eastern parts of Mindanao, now predominantly Christian, and created a major area of commercial plantations. Political opposition to …

Comprehensive defence in Latvia – rebranding state defence and call for society's involvement

2020

Abstract This article explores how comprehensive defence has been introduced in Latvia, and focuses on society's involvement and tasks in the state defence. This approach envisages a significant change in society's relationship with the armed forces and state defence. Differently from many other countries, Latvia maintains its system without introducing conscription and instead puts efforts towards youth education in defence. Additionally, the Ministry of Defence involves different society groups and NGOs in defining their role in state defence. This article also discusses the concepts of resistance and non-collaboration as part of comprehensive defence.

Introduction: Research Interest and Research Questions

2017

This chapter explores the theoretical and empirical puzzles of regionalism in the Global South on the example of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The SADC is one of the most realistic and promising examples of the new regionalism and shows constant dynamics in a number of policy areas. The main research interest of this much-needed analysis is to explain the emergence, institutional design and performance of regionalism in the SADC from a political science perspective. In order to provide innovative research, the analytical focus is on the role and influence of regional key countries and, particularly, external actors. Moreover, this chapter offers a comprehensive overview…

Backlash against the procedural consensus

2020

While the politics of backlash is typically described as a reaction to policy decisions in favour of minority rights, immigration or globalisation, this essay focuses on the fact that backlash typically also involves a reaction against the procedural consensus liberal democracy is based upon. This challenge to democratic procedures and institutions may be even more dangerous in its effects than the substantial objectives of backlash. I use the composite definition of backlash suggested by Alter and Zürn to assess in how far the attacks on the institutions of liberal democracy have retrograde objectives in themselves or in how far they are merely instrumental to the pursuit of other retrogr…

The “Refugee Crisis,” Immigration Attitudes, and Euroscepticism

2019

Between 2015 and 2017, the European Union (EU) was confronted with a major crisis in its history, the so-called “European refugee crisis.” Since the multifaceted crisis has provoked many different responses, it is also likely to have influenced individuals’ assessments of immigrants and European integration. Using data from three waves of the European Social Survey (ESS) — the wave before the crisis in 2012, the wave at the beginning of the crisis in 2014, and the wave right after the (perceived) height of the crisis in 2016 — we test the degree to which the European refugee crisis increased Europeans’ anti-immigrant sentiment and Euroscepticism, as well as the influence of Europeans’ anti-…

Image-Evoked Affect and its Impact on Eeg-Based Biometrics

2019

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals provide a representation of the brain’s activity patterns and have been recently exploited for user identification and authentication due to their uniqueness and their robustness to interception and artificial replication. Nevertheless, such signals are commonly affected by the individual’s emotional state. In this work, we examine the use of images as stimulus for acquiring EEG signals and study whether the use of images that evoke similar emotional responses leads to higher identification accuracy compared to images that evoke different emotional responses. Results show that identification accuracy increases when the system is trained with EEG recordin…

ES1D: A Deep Network for EEG-Based Subject Identification

2017

Security systems are starting to meet new technologies and new machine learning techniques, and a variety of methods to identify individuals from physiological signals have been developed. In this paper, we present ESID, a deep learning approach to identify subjects from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals captured by using a low cost device. The system consists of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is fed with the power spectral density of different EEG recordings belonging to different individuals. The network is trained for a period of one million iterations, in order to learn features related to local patterns in the spectral domain of the original signal. The performance of the…

2018

Physical fitness is crucial to warfighters' performance in the battlefield. Previous studies have shown negative changes in their hormonal and neuromuscular responses induced by military field training (MFT). The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in hormonal and immunological values and body composition during a prolonged MFT and to find out how warfighters' physical condition influences these changes. Conscripts (n = 49, age 20 ± 1 years, height 179 ± 9 cm, body mass 73.8 ± 7.8 kg, fat 12.6 ± 3.7% and BMI 23 kg/m²) were measured before, during, after MFT, and after a 4-day recovery period. Serum insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), i…