Prof. Dr.-Ing. Daniele Nardi

Small UAVs for Emergency Response

Wednesday, February 24th 2010
11:00, Room L4.1.114
Lakeside Labs.

The talk addresses the potential for application of small UAVs, such as quadrotors, for emergency response. We initially analyze a number of emergency scenarios and motivate the need for situation awareness, in order to plan and monitor the actions of the emergency response team. We argue that small UAVs can be effectively deployed to improve the situation awareness, and, consequently, the performance of the operation. Besides the flying and control capabilities of the platform, a key issue for the development of effective solutions in the targeted domain, is the ability to easily develop software that acquires data on the scenario in such a way as to maximize the amount of knowledge for the operator. Specifically, we describe the main features of the OpenRDK framework for developing robotic applications, implemented at Sapienza Univ. Di Roma, and currently distributed to a few other research groups. Moreover, we present some examples developed through OpenRDK on our experimental quadrotor system. We conclude by addressing future research, and, in particular, forms of cooperation in robotic teams including UAVs.

Biography:
Daniele Nardi is Full Professor at Facoltà Ingegneria, Sapienza Univ. Roma, Dipartimento Informatica e Sistemistica, since 2000. His current research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Robotics, Multi-Agent/Multi-Robot Systems and Search and Rescue Robotics. He is author of more than 100 scientific publications, recipient of “IJCAI-91 Publisher’s Prize” and of Prize “Intelligenza Artificiale 1993″ and ECCAI Fellow. He is currently Vice President of RoboCup Federation, Coordinator of the Curricula in Computer Engineering at Sapienza Univ. Roma and Director of the research laboratory “Cognitive Robot Teams”.

Economics as a self-organized evolutionary system

Monday, December 14th 2009 4 pm, presentation-room B4.1.114, Lakeside Labs.

Abstract:

We propose a simple model of evolution dynamics and demonstrate it in a framework of economic dynamics. New goods and services are endogenously produced through combinations of existing goods. As soon as new goods enter the market they may compete against already existing goods, in other words new products can have destructive effects on existing goods. As a result of this competition existing goods may be driven out from the market – often causing cascades of secondary defects (Schumpeterian gales of destruction).
The model leads to generic dynamics characterized by phases of relative economic stability followed by phases of massive restructuring of markets — which could be interpreted as Schumpeterian  business cycles. Model timeseries of product diversity and productivity reproduce several stylized facts of economics timeseries on long timescales such as GDP or business failures, including non-Gaussian fat tailed distributions, volatility clustering etc. The model is phrased in an open, non-equilibrium setup which can be understood as a self organized critical system. Its diversity dynamics can be understood by the time-varying topology of the active production networks.