Jesus Garcia

Ebrahim Navid Sadjadi, Jesus Garcia, Jose M. Molina et al.

This paper develops a smooth model identification and self-learning strategy for dynamic systems taking into account possible parameter variations and uncertainties. We have tried to solve the problem such that the model follows the changes and variations in the system on a continuous and smooth surface. Running the model to adaptively gain the optimum values of the parameters on a smooth surface would facilitate further improvements in the application of other derivative based optimization control algorithms such as MPC or robust control algorithms to achieve a combined modeling-control scheme. Compared to the earlier works on the smooth fuzzy modeling structures, we could reach a desired trade-off between the model optimality and the computational load. The proposed method has been evaluated on a test problem as well as the non-linear dynamic of a chemical process.

Adam Lerner, Giulia Fanti, Yahel Ben-David et al.

In recent years governments have shown themselves willing to impose blackouts to shut off key communication infrastructure during times of civil strife, and to surveil citizen communications whenever possible. However, it is exactly during such strife that citizens need reliable and anonymous communications the most. In this paper, we present Rangzen, a system for anonymous broadcast messaging during network blackouts. Rangzen is distinctive in both aim and design. Our aim is to provide an anonymous, one-to-many messaging layer that requires only users' smartphones and can withstand network-level attacks. Our design is a delay-tolerant mesh network which deprioritizes adversarial messages by means of a social graph while preserving user anonymity. We built a complete implementation that runs on Android smartphones, present benchmarks of its performance and battery usage, and present simulation results suggesting Rangzen's efficacy at scale.