Flexible Computation Offloading at the Edge for Autonomous Drones with Uncertain Flight Times

An ever increasing number of applications can employ aerial unmanned vehicles, or so-called drones, to perform different sensing and possibly also actuation tasks from the air. In some cases, the data that is captured at a given point has to be processed before moving to the next one. Drones can exploit nearby edge servers to offload the computation instead of performing it locally. However, doing this in a naive way can be suboptimal if servers have limited computing resources and drones have limited energy resources. In this paper, we propose a protocol and resource reservation scheme for each drone and edge server to decide, in a dynamic and fully decentralized way, whether to offload the computation and respectively whether to accept such an offloading requests, with the objective to evenly reduce the drones' mission times. We evaluate our approach through extensive simulation experiments, showing that it can significantly reduce the mission times compared to a no-offloading scenario by up to 26.2%, while outperforming an offloading schedule that has been computed offline by up to 7.4% as well as a purely opportunistic approach by up to 23.9%.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, preprint accepted in the 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT

Covid-19: how has the EU reacted so far?

Dionyssis G Dimitrakopoulos and Georgette Lalis analyse the EU's actions so far in the Covid-19 outbreak. They argue that despite a slow and initially haphazard approach, the response has ultimately been substantial. Public health care systems, alongside state bureaucracies and public finances, are being tested to their limits by the Covid-19 pandemic. The same can be said – albeit in a different way – about the European Union. Indeed, since the problem at hand knows no borders, appealing to an organisation that operates at the ‘supranational’ level is not an unreasonable reaction to a crisis such as this and an existential threat like this pandemic. So, how has the EU fared thus far in this process

COVID-19: a preliminary assessment of the European Union’s reaction

How well has the European Union handled the Covid-19 pandemic? Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos and Georgette Lalis present a detailed analysis of the EU’s actions thus far in the outbreak. They write that despite a slow and initially haphazard approach, there has ultimately been a substantial response

Peran modal sosial pada kelompok tani dalam meningkatkan kesejahteraan anggota di Desa Sodonghilir Kecamatan Sodonghilir Kabupaten Tasikmalaya

Luasnya lahan persawahan di Indonesia ternyata tak juga mampu membuat taraf hidup petani meningkat, masih banyak petani sawah yang mengalami kesulitan dalam menjalani hidup tak jarang pula kita dapatkan petani sawah di pedesaan yang berada dalam garis kemiskinan. Kelompok tani merupakan ujung tombak pembangunan pertanian di Indonesia. Perkembangan kelompok tani seiring dengan berjalannya waktu mengalami peningkatan, hal tersebut terlihat pada masyarakat petani khususnya masyarakat yang tergabung dalam kelompok tani Budiluhur di Desa Sodonghilir Kecamatan Sodonghilir Kabupaten Tasikmalaya. Peningkatan tersebut didukung oleh suasana kondusif hubungan sosial di dalamnya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengidentifikasi realitas kesejahteraan masyarakat Desa Sodonghilir, dan mengidentifikasi gambaran modal sosial yang ada pada kelompok tani Budiluhur Desa Sodonghilir. Modal sosial dapat memberikan energi sosial bagi berjalannya sebuah kelompok tani supaya lebih dinamis. Penelitian ini juga bertujuan untuk mengetahui faktor pendorong dan penghambat pemanfaatan modal sosial pada kelompok tani Budiluhur. Peneliti menggunakan teori modal sosial yang menggambarkan segala sesuatu yang membuat masyarakat bersekutu untuk mencapai tujuan bersama atas dasar kebersamaan, serta didalamnya diikat oleh nilai-nilai dan norma-norma yang tumbuh dan dipatuhi. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif, metode kualitatif ini berupa metode deskriptif, yaitu metode yang bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan atau menggambarkan dengan studi kasus di lapangan. Hal itu dapat diartikan sebagai kegiatan meliputi pengumpulan data dalam rangka menjawab pertanyaan yang menyangkut keadaan pada permasalahan yang ada. Selain wawancara dan observasi, penulis juga melengkapi data dengan studi kepustakaan yang berkaitan dengan modal sosial. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa realitas kesejahteraan masyarakat Desa Sodonghilir ditunjukan dengan jumlah KK terbesar berada pada golongan KS-I yang hanya cukup memenuhi kebutuahn sehari-hari saja dengan mayoritas bekerja sebagai petani. Modal sosial telah memberikan asas bagi kelompok tani dalam meningkatkan motivasi masyarakat untuk bergabung menjadi anggota kelompok tani dan memberikan kontribusi terhadap perkembangan kesejahteraan sosial. Dengan kepemimpinan, pembinaan intensif, sekolah lapangan dan mengembangkan dana PUAP dan adanaya penyuluhan yang menjadi faktor pendorongnya. Namun tidak lepas dari adanya hambatan dalam mencapai kesejahteraan yang disebabkan oleh kurangnya motivasi diri,kecilnya skala usaha tani, kurangnya permodalan,lemahnya tingkat teknologi,kurang optimalnya dalam pemasaran hasil produksi dan keterbatasan pengetahuan dalam meningkatkan kemampuan bertani

Cross-Domain DRL Agents for Efficient Job Placement in the Cloud-Edge Continuum

The growing computational demands of modern applications call for resource management strategies that effectively utilize the strengths of both cloud and edge computing. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown great promise in addressing these challenges, offering advanced decision-making capabilities that optimize resource allocation and system performance. However, deploying DRL agents in cloud-edge continuum infrastructures remains a significant challenge due to their dependence on infrastructure-specific state-Action representations. This paper presents a novel architectural framework for DRL agents that incorporates feature extraction and adaptation mechanisms to enable their seamless operation across diverse environments. By transforming state features into an infrastructure-Agnostic representation, our approach reduces the need for extensive retraining when system configurations change. Experimental results show that our method outperforms both a heuristic method and a DRL baseline algorithm while achieving faster convergence when infrastructure and workloads change. This work is an important step forward in developing transferable and adaptable DRL solutions for real-world cloud-edge resource management challenges.</p

Ethical decision system for autonomous vehicles in unavoidable accident scenarios

The automotive industry is heading towards the introduction of fully autonomous vehicles. However, before this type of vehicles are commercially available at mass scale, some issues need to be solved. A major issue is the ethics involved in the decision-making during an accident; this research presents an analysis of how to approach this issue and a way to implement a solution based on concepts from Belief-Desire-Intention agent modelling. The first part of this research identifies and defines a pre-programmed system with different ethical settings based on five formal ethical theories. For each, eight ethical concerns are defined and ordered accordingly. These concerns are defined in terms of harm to self and harm to others. The ethical concerns are used as a guideline to define the level of importance of each person or object in an accident scenario. The resulting rank of concerns is novel in the field of ethical decision-making for autonomous vehicles, and serves as the basis for the implementation of an ethical decision-making agent for unavoidable collisions. The second part of this thesis focuses on the design, derivation and implementation of the decision-making system in a BDI agent framework. With the proposed system, the vehicle is partially tailored to the ethical preferences of different users while still being bounded by legal requirements to avoid any misuse. The resulting outcomes of the decision-making system under different scenarios are shown and discussed. In these discussions it is clear that the proposed system successfully captures ethical concerns, priorities and behaves in accordance to the ethical theories

PENINGKATAN DISIPLIN BELAJAR SANTRI MELALUI BIMBINGAN DAN KONSELING

This study aims to determine the increase in discipline of learning santri through guidance and counseling. The scope of the study refers to: obedience at the time of entrance of activities, obedience and compliance to the rules in the pesantren, completing the tasks of teachers in boarding schools, coaching sanctions for those who violate. The research method using Descriptive Qualitative Research, with data collection techniques in the form of observation and interview. The subjects of the study were santri in Pondok Pesantren Al-Hadi Min Ahlisunnah Wal Jamaah Pekalongan. The results showed that the discipline of learning santri low, so that the boarding school pesantren impose a system of punishment on students who are not disciplined. Students feel bound by the rules but do not implement and comply with the rules that apply in the boarding school. Through the role of boarding school board members in providing guidance and counseling services using behavioral approach, able to improve the discipline of learning santri