scholarly journals Counter-Mapping the Spaces of Autonomous Driving

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis F. Alvarez León
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Black Boxes ◽  
Self Driving Cars

In this article I provide an account of key tensions shaping the development of autonomous driving technologies, and explores how such tensions can open up avenues for counter-mapping the data spaces produced through these navigation technologies. The design and massive commercialization of autonomous vehicles implies the production of new models of space, generated through the integration of data collected through technologies such as lidar scanning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This production of space is bounded within the confines of the technological black boxes of the vehicles themselves, as well as the corporate black boxes of the companies that design and deploy them. However, there are key sources of tension surrounding the creation of these black boxes: those between market competitors; between the state and the private sector; and between civil society, the private sector, and the state. In this article I explore these tensions by focusing on the potential for counter-mapping as a means of critique, transparency, and political action across three separate aspects of the autonomous driving space-making process: (1) legislation, by examining the emergence of Right to Repair laws across the United States, beginning with the Automotive Right to Repair Law passed in Massachusetts in 2012; (2) design, through open source projects for building self-driving cars, exemplified by Udacity, a pioneer in this area; and (3) hacking, specifically interventions designed to open, critique, or disrupt autonomous driving technologies. These examinations are embedded in a political economic account that interrogates the ownership and control over the spaces produced through autonomous driving, as well as the economic value associated with such production of space. 

The ideological divide in public perceptions of self-driving cars

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-451
Author(s):  
Yilang Peng
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
United States ◽  
Scientific Literacy ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
New Information ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Self Driving Cars ◽  
Social Conservatism

Applications in artificial intelligence such as self-driving cars may profoundly transform our society, yet emerging technologies are frequently faced with suspicion or even hostility. Meanwhile, public opinions about scientific issues are increasingly polarized along the ideological line. By analyzing a nationally representative panel in the United States, we reveal an emerging ideological divide in public reactions to self-driving cars. Compared with liberals and Democrats, conservatives and Republicans express more concern about autonomous vehicles and more support for restrictively regulating autonomous vehicles. This ideological gap is largely driven by social conservatism. Moreover, both familiarity with driverless vehicles and scientific literacy reduce respondents’ concerns over driverless vehicles and support for regulation policies. Still, the effects of familiarity and scientific literacy are weaker among social conservatives, indicating that people may assimilate new information in a biased manner that promotes their worldviews.

State ownership, firm innovation and the moderating role of private-sector competition: the case of China

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongyan Yang ◽  
H. Kevin Steensma ◽  
Ting Ren
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
New Products ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
State Ownership ◽  
The State ◽  
Innovation Performance ◽  
Firm Characteristics ◽  
Content Type

Purpose This paper aims to study how state ownership influences the innovation process in terms of allocating resources toward searching for new solutions and converting these efforts into economic value. On one hand, deep pockets of the state provide slack resources that may facilitate risk taking and innovation. On the other hand, soft budgets can create incentive problems and dampen the efficient use of resources. The authors suggest how accounting for competitive context can disentangle these countervailing forces. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a panel of over 240,000 Chinese firms over the years 2004–2008. The broad sample and period afforded substantial variability in terms of state ownership within and across firms. The authors use a two-stage model and a within-firm (i.e. fixed-effects) design, controlling for all time-invariant firm characteristics and the problematic unobserved heterogeneity that can often lead to erroneous inferences. Furthermore, the relatively short window limits the likelihood of time-varying unobserved firm characteristics biasing the empirical results. Findings The authors found that private-sector competition has the opposite effect on the relationship between state ownership and the second step of the innovation process. In industries where there is robust private-sector competition, state ownership diminishes the firm’s ability to convert R&D efforts into economic value. Private-sector competition competes away any advantages state-owned firms may have in terms of developing or accessing the complementary resources needed for commercialization. Ultimately, the inefficiencies of state ownership in terms of relatively undisciplined selection and monitoring of R&D activities outweigh any potential resource advantages derived from state ownership. Originality/value The state remains a prominent player in many economies throughout the world. The authors explored how state ownership of firms influences the resources they expend in searching out new solutions, and their success in converting such resources into economically valuable new products and services. State ownership has potentially countervailing effects on innovation. The authors disentangle these countervailing effects through consideration of how accounting for competitive context could determine whether the beneficial effects of state ownership dominate its detrimental effects for both searching for new solutions and converting these efforts into economically valuable new products. With a focus of market competition as an external force that drives the difference in innovation between SOEs and the private-sector, this study serves as a parallel effort to Jia et al. (2019) who investigate the joint effect of public and corporate governance on SOEs’ innovation performance, and Zhou et al. (2017) who concern the balance of the institution and efficiency logics on the comparative advantage of SOEs over privately owned enterprises in innovation performance.

Governance models of public utility commissions in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Howe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Utility ◽  
Political Action Committees ◽  
Special Interest Groups ◽  
Governance Model

Regulation of utilities at the state level in the United States is undertaken by a commission on which anywhere from three to seven commissioners sit and must vote on virtually all significant utility actions, including rate requests, resource plans, acquisitions and mergers, and financing mechanisms. Public utility commissions (PUCs) are, in a very real sense, courts with adjudicatory responsibility over the area of state utility laws. In hearing a utility case, they must follow the state’s statutes and court rules. The commissioners function as judges in this court of public utility law. In a majority of states, commissioners are appointed by the state’s governor with the advice and consent of the state legislature. In a significant minority of states, commissioners are elected by popular vote. However, recent changes in US election law have made it easier for corporations and special interest groups, called political action committees, to influence elections through donations targeting direct voter outreach on behalf of specific candidates. This chapter examines what the entry of political spending in PUC elections means, and whether elected commissioners can adjudicate in the public interest, or will adjudicate for special interests. The chapter concludes that while both the appointment and election governance model can produce both “good” and “bad” commissioners, it is the elected commission that is most at risk of selecting commissioners that will not be truly independent and objective arbiters of the law.

Current Developments in Autonomous Vehicle Policy in the United States: Federalism’s Influence in State and National Regulatory Law and Policy

Global Jurist ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Salatiello ◽  
Troy B. Felver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Autonomous Vehicle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Promise ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Regulatory Law ◽  
Regulatory Bodies ◽  
Self Driving Cars

Abstract With the advent of autonomous vehicles, especially self-driving cars, there is great promise for society. However, cars are not islands; they operate in a community of vehicles. Laws and regulations are crafted to allow the maximum benefit for the community while imposing the fewest costs. Unfortunately, a full accounting of these benefits and costs is not entirely clear at promulgation. Because the technologies and how they will be used are so uncertain, regulatory bodies have to try to build on what they have done in the past, sometimes successfully and sometimes unevenly. This paper will examine several regulatory attempts involving these new technologies in the United States, both on the federal and state levels. Also considered will be the interaction of these regulations under a federal system with defined and specific responsibilities for both sovereigns. A view on future developments is provided to gauge the directions additional regulation could take. Finally, generalizable lessons from this approached will be summarized.

Religious Traditions in Politics: Judaism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth D. Wald
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Political Opportunity Structure ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Opportunity Structure ◽  
Playing Field

Lacking sovereignty, a well-developed theology of politics, and a central organizing mechanism, the Jewish political experience is unique among the three Abrahamic faiths. Apart from research on the political content implicit in Jewish scriptures, there has been little scholarship on what Jews do when they engage in political action. Using a contextual framework, this article examines the politics of Jews by reviewing both single-country studies and the few extant cross-national analyses. In considering why Jewish political behavior differs from one place to another, political process theory and Medding’s theory of Jewish interests guide the analysis. Medding argued that Jewish politics is primarily a response to threats perceived in the political environment. The ability of Jewish communities to resist such threats depends largely on the rules governing the political environment, the political opportunity structure. Where Jews are a majority and control the rules, as in the state of Israel, they have adopted a regime that prioritizes the Jewish character of the state against perceived threats from the country’s Arab citizens. Where Jews are a minority, as in the United States, their ability to control the political environment is limited. However, the political rules of the game embodied in the U.S. Constitution have levelled the playing field to the advantage of religious minorities like Jews. Specifically, by rejecting “blood and soil” citizenship and denying the religious character of the state, those rules provide Jews and other minorities a valuable resource and access to sympathetic allies in the political system. Hence American Jews have been able to counter what they perceive as the major threat to their political interests—a replacement of the secular state by a confessional regime. Focusing on threats, the political opportunity structure, and political context helps to anchor Jewish political studies in research on ethnic political cohesion and to bring such research into the scholarly mainstream.

Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization, the State and the Extra-Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
System A ◽  
The World ◽  
Transnational Civil Society ◽  
Mexican Politics

How should we conceptualize membership, citizenship and political community in a world where migrants and their home states increasingly maintain and cultivate their formal and informal ties? This study analyzes the extra-territorial conduct of Mexican politics and the emergence of new migrant membership practices and relations between migrants and home states. Standard globalist, transnationalist or citizenship theories cannot properly contextualize and analyze such practices. I propose that we rethink the concept of membership in a political community not only as a Marshallian status granted by states, but also as an instituted process embedded within four other institutions and processes: home state domestic politics; the home state's relationship to the world system; a semi-autonomous transnational civil society created in part by migration; and the context of reception of migrants in the United States. A main conclusion is that the state itself plays a key role in creating transnational political action by migrants and new migrant membership practices. The article draws on printed sources and interviews and ethnography done since 1990.

scholarly journals Model-based estimation of the state of vehicle automation as derived from the driver’s spontaneous visual strategies

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Damien Schnebelen ◽  
Camilo Charron ◽  
Franck Mars
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
The State ◽  
Partial Least Square ◽  
Least Square ◽  
Transition Matrices ◽  
Automated Driving ◽  
Gaze Behaviour ◽  
Motor Actions ◽  
Dynamic Indicators

When manually steering a car, the driver’s visual perception of the driving scene and his or her motor actions to control the vehicle are closely linked. Since motor behaviour is no longer required in an automated vehicle, the sampling of the visual scene is affected. Autonomous driving typically results in less gaze being directed towards the road centre and a broader exploration of the driving scene, compared to manual driving. To examine the corollary of this situation, this study estimated the state of automation (manual or automated) on the basis of gaze behaviour. To do so, models based on partial least square regressions were computed by considering the gaze behaviour in multiple ways, using static indicators (percentage of time spent gazing at 13 areas of interests), dynamic indicators (transition matrices between areas) or both together. Analysis of the quality of predictions for the different models showed that the best result was obtained by considering both static and dynamic indicators. However, gaze dynamics played the most important role in distinguishing between manual and automated driving. This study may be relevant to the issue of driver monitoring in autonomous vehicles.

scholarly journals Autonomous Recognition Model

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 67-73
Author(s):  
Akash gupta ◽  
Rahat Ali ◽  
Abhay Pratap Singh ◽  
P.Raja Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Automobile Industry ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Future Generation ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Traffic Signs ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
Human Driver ◽  
New Research ◽  
Self Driving Cars

Nowdays we are witnessing the technology transforming everything the way we used to do things and how the automobile industry is transforming itself with the use of technology IOT,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning.Companies shifting its products and its utilities in diferent way and they now want to acquire and introduce level-5 autonomous to future generation and big automobile companies are trying to achieve autonomous vechicles and we have researhed about the model that will help in assisting autonomous vechicles and trying to achieve that.We will develop this model with help of technologies like Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Deep learning.Autonomous vehcicles will become a reality on our roads in the near future. However, the absence of a human driver requires technical solutions for a range of issues, and these are still being developed and optimised. It is a great contribution for the automotive industry which is going towards innovation and economic growth. If we talking about some past decade the momentum of new research and the world is now at the very advanced stage of technological revolution. “Autonomous-driving” vehicles. The term Self-driving cars, autonomous car, or the driverless cars have different name with common objective. The main focus is to keep the human being out of the vehicle control loop and to relieve them from the task of driving. Everyday automotive technology researchers solve challenges. In the future, without human assistance, robots will produce autonomous vehicles using IoT technology based on customer needs and prefer that these vehicles are more secure and comfortable in mobility systems such as the movement of people or goods. We will build a deep neural network model that can classify traffic signs present in the image into different categories. With this model, we are able to read and understand traffic signs which are a very important task for all autonomous vehicles .This model we have tested it and resulted in 95% accuracy.

scholarly journals Regrounding Critical Theory: Lenin on Imperialism, Nationalism, and Strategy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Pahnke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Political Right

Abstract We live at a time of heightened nationalism on the political right and left, from the mobilization of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and Europe, to promoting Palestinian liberation. This article, focusing on Lenin's work concerning imperialism, shows the importance, yet shortcomings of foregrounding the nation in calling for social transformation. The piece reads Lenin's contributions on imperialism, highlighting his understanding of strategy and the dual nature of nationalism, in light of debates within Critical Theory more generally. As I argue, Lenin offers insights for Critical Theorists, particularly on the place of nationalism within transformative political projects, as well as on the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and territorial acquisition. Lenin's work on imperialism draws our attention to the idea that only by mobilizing beyond the state/society binary—which many Critical Theorists and activists reify, sometimes unintentionally—can we explore the nature of emancipatory political action.

scholarly journals On-Board Road Friction Estimation Technique for Autonomous Driving Vehicle-Following Maneuvers

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 2197
Author(s):  
Stefania Santini ◽  
Nicola Albarella ◽  
Vincenzo Maria Arricale ◽  
Renato Brancati ◽  
Aleksandr Sakhnevych
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Heavy Rain ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
The State ◽  
Driver Assistance Systems ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Road Friction ◽  
Friction Estimation

In recent years, autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems have drawn a great deal of attention from both research and industry, because of their demonstrated benefit in reducing the rate of accidents or, at least, their severity. The main flaw of this system is related to the poor performances in adverse environmental conditions, due to the reduction of friction, which is mainly related to the state of the road. In this paper, a new model-based technique is proposed for real-time road friction estimation in different environmental conditions. The proposed technique is based on both bicycle model to evaluate the state of the vehicle and a tire Magic Formula model based on a slip-slope approach to evaluate the potential friction. The results, in terms of the maximum achievable grip value, have been involved in autonomous driving vehicle-following maneuvers, as well as the operating condition of the vehicle at which such grip value can be reached. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is disclosed via an extensive numerical analysis covering a wide range of environmental, traffic, and vehicle kinematic conditions. Results confirm the ability of the approach to properly automatically adapting the inter-vehicle space gap and to avoiding collisions also in adverse road conditions (e.g., ice, heavy rain).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document