Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Tom Hallaq / Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or drones as they are commonly known, could allow journalists to report the news like never before. A drone is a tool with great potential, yet fraught with controversy as the result of its military past. In 2012, the Unmanned Aerial System had become domesticated and could have become the hottest new technology since the cell phone. The first unmanned systems came to service gathering intelligence and in the delivery of lethal and non-lethal payloads for the military. With the domestication of UAS technologies, not only have numerous commercial uses been revealed for the UAS, the drone has made it to the hands of the general public, raising concerns of how this technology is to be used. At the time of this thesis, in the United States, the only legal use of UAS was by hobbyists. Also, at the time of this thesis, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had not provided comprehensive regulations or guidelines regarding the commercial use of UAS platforms (FAA, 2015). Of the many uses purposed for UAS platforms, one use of interest for journalists is the increased potential for newsgathering and surveillance. With UAS/drone technologies becoming increasingly more available, concerns are raised about safety, privacy, context, and the integrity of news source or (conflict of interest). The researcher interviewed working journalists from four major networks with stations located in states mandated as test sites by the FAA. The journalists were asked about their concerns pertaining to the ethical uses of drone for journalistic newsgathering. The interviews reveled that with proper training, regulations, and common sense the concerns about safety, privacy, context, and conflict of interest could be moderated.

Thèse de doctorat : Mécanique-Automatique : Evry-Val d'Essonne : 2009. Thèse de doctorat : Mécanique-Automatique : Ecole Polytechnique EPT TUNISIE : 2009. / Thèse soutenue en co-tutelle. Titre provenant de l'écran-titre.

Escrever uma tese sobre as variações da literatura é, em muitos sentidos, variar junto com ela, isto é, empreender um exercício de comparação entre a teoria literária e outras teorias. Neste espírito, o texto a seguir dedica-se à especulação em torno do funcionamento de algumas categorias da teoria literária como autoria, referencialidade e iterabilidade por meio da investigação de outros assuntos que em um primeiro momento não pareceriam pertencer à ordem do literário, como a hipnose, os drones, os feminicídios, entre outros. Com isso propõe-se tensionar os limites da literatura e da teoria literária, em especial aquela que se organiza ao redor das indagações sobre o sentido do sentido. / To write a thesis on the variations of literature is, in many ways, to vary with it, that is, to carry out the task of comparing literary theory to other theories. In this spirit, the following pages present speculations on the inner workings of some literary categories such as authorship, referentiality and iterability by means of an investigation of other subject matter that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with literature, such as hypnosis, drones and feminicides, among others. With this I propose to prod the limits of literature and literary theory, particularly that which organizes itself around questions regarding the meaning of meaning.

Escrever uma tese sobre as variações da literatura é, em muitos sentidos, variar junto com ela, isto é, empreender um exercício de comparação entre a teoria literária e outras teorias. Neste espírito, o texto a seguir dedica-se à especulação em torno do funcionamento de algumas categorias da teoria literária como autoria, referencialidade e iterabilidade por meio da investigação de outros assuntos que em um primeiro momento não pareceriam pertencer à ordem do literário, como a hipnose, os drones, os feminicídios, entre outros. Com isso propõe-se tensionar os limites da literatura e da teoria literária, em especial aquela que se organiza ao redor das indagações sobre o sentido do sentido. / To write a thesis on the variations of literature is, in many ways, to vary with it, that is, to carry out the task of comparing literary theory to other theories. In this spirit, the following pages present speculations on the inner workings of some literary categories such as authorship, referentiality and iterability by means of an investigation of other subject matter that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with literature, such as hypnosis, drones and feminicides, among others. With this I propose to prod the limits of literature and literary theory, particularly that which organizes itself around questions regarding the meaning of meaning.

Utiliser une interface visuo-tactile peut être une gêne lorsqu'il est nécessaire de rester mobile et conscient de son environnement. Cela s'avère particulièrement problématique en milieu hostile comme pour la commande d'un drone militaire de contact.Dans ces travaux nous faisons l'hypothèse que le geste est une modalité de commande moins contraignante puisqu'elle n'impose pas de visualiser ni de manipuler une interface physique.Ainsi, différents travaux nous ont permis de confirmer d'une part, les avantages pratiques, et d'autre part, la faisabilité technique de la commande d'un robot mobile par geste.Tout d'abord, l'étude théorique du geste a permis de construire un modèle d'interaction. Celui-ci consiste en l'activation de commandes automatiques par la réalisation de gestes sémaphoriques normalisés. Des messages sonores permettent de renseigner l'opérateur et un mécanisme de confirmation sécurise l'interaction.Ensuite, le dictionnaire des gestes à utiliser a été constitué. Pour cela, une méthodologie a été proposée et appliquée : des utilisateurs proposent puis élisent les gestes les plus pertinents.Notre modèle d'interaction et le vocabulaire gestuel ont ensuite été évalués. Une étude en laboratoire nous a permis de montrer que l'interaction gestuelle telle que proposée est simple à apprendre et utiliser et qu'elle permet de conserver une bonne conscience de l'environnement.Un système interactif complet a ensuite été développé. Son architecture a été déduite du modèle d'interaction et une brique de reconnaissance gestuelle a été mise en oeuvre. En marge des méthodes classiques, la brique proposée utilise un principe de description formelle des gestes avec une grammaire régulière.Finalement, ce système a été évalué lors de tests utilisateurs. L'évaluation par des participants militaires a confirmé notre hypothèse de la pertinence du geste pour une interaction visuellement et physiquement moins contraignante. / Using a visuo-tactil interface may be restrictive when mobility and situation awareness are required. This is particularly problematic in hostile environment as commanding a drone on a battlefield.In the work presented here, we hypothesize that gesture is a less restrictive modaility as it doesn't require to manipulate nor to look at a device.Thus we followed a user-centered approach to confirm practical advantages and technical feasibility of gestural interaction for drones.First, the theoretical study of gestures allowed us to design an interaction model. It consists on activating commands by executing standardized semaphoric gestures. Sound messages inform the user and a confirmation mechanism secure the interaction.Second, a gestural vocabulary has been built. To do so, a methodology has been proposed and used : end users elicited then elected the most appropriate gestures.Then, the interaction model and the selected gestures have been evaluated. A laboratory study showed that they are both easy to learn and use and helps situation awareness.An interactive system as then been developed. It's architecture has been deducted from our interaction model and a gesture recognizer as been buit. Different from usual methods, the recognizer we proposed is based on formal description of gestures using regular expressions.Finaly, we conducted a user testing of the proposed system. The evaluation by end-users confirmed our hypothesis that gestures are a modality less distractive both visualy and physicaly.

Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Droit privé et public--Aix-Marseille 3, 2006. / En appendice, choix de documents dont plusieurs en anglais et un en allemand. Bibliogr. p. 486-489. Webliogr. p. 490-491.

abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become readily available for both the average consumer and professional due to decreases in price and increases in technological capabilities. This work ventured to explore the feasible use of UAV-technology in the area of roof analysis for facilities management purposes and contrast it to traditional techniques of inspection. An underlying goal of this work was two-fold. First, it was to calculate the upfront cost of investing in appropriate UAV equipment and training for a typical staff member to become proficient at doing such maintenance work in the practice of actual roof inspections on a sample set of roofs. Secondly, it was to compare the value of using this UAV method of investigation to traditional practices of inspecting roofs manually by personally viewing and walking roofs. The two methods for inspecting roofs were compared using various metrics, including time, cost, value, safety, and other relevant measurables. In addition to the study goals, this research was able to identify specific benefits and hazards for both methods of inspection through empirical trials. These points illustrate the study as Lessons Learned from the experience, which may be of interest to those Facilities Managers who are considering investing resources in UAV training and equipment for industrial purposes. Overall, this study helps to identify the utility of UAV technology in a well-established professional field in a way that has not been previously conducted in academia. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Construction Management 2020

The purpose of this work is to examine the effect of the use of combat drones for the practice of targeted killing on international order. The understanding of these effects is critical for if the use of combat drones for targeted killing undermines critical institutions of international society, which serves as the basis for international order, then the international order itself would be undermined. It is a qualitative study of drones and their effect on select primary institutions found within the theoretical framework of the English School (ES) of International Relations. The institutions used in this work are sovereignty, territoriality, international law, great power management, and war. This work builds its case on open source primary and secondary documents from the UN and news outlets to gauge the effect and reaction of states to the use of drones over the last 15 years. It found that drones and targeted killing have indeed had a detrimental effect on the institutions of sovereignty, territoriality, and international law. However, drones have also met positive approval by great power management and have helped change the nature of the institution of war. / Master of Arts

No description available.

Drones can be used for several civil applications including search and rescue, coverage, and aerial imaging. Newer applications like construction and delivery of goods are also emerging. Performing tasks as a team of drones is often beneficial but requires coordination through communication. In this thesis, the communication requirements of video streaming drone applications based on existing works are studied. The existing communication technologies are then analyzed to understand if the communication requirements posed by these drone applications can be met by the available technologies. The shortcomings of existing technologies with respect to drone applications are identified and potential requirements for future technologies are suggested. The existing communication and routing protocols including ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV), location-aided routing (LAR), and greedy perimeter stateless routing (GPSR) protocols are studied to identify their limitations in context to the drone networks. An application scenario where a team of drones covers multiple areas of interest is considered, where the drones follow known trajectories and transmit continuous streams of sensed traffic (images or video) to a ground station. A route switching (RS) algorithm is proposed that utilizes both the location and the trajectory information of the drones to schedule and update routes to overcome route discovery and route error overhead. Simulation results show that the RS scheme outperforms LAR and AODV by achieving higher network performance in terms of throughput and delay. Video streaming drone applications such as search and rescue, surveillance, and disaster management, benefit from multicast wireless video streaming to transmit identical data to multiple users. Video multicast streaming using IEEE 802.11 poses challenges of reliability, performance, and fairness under tight delay bounds. Because of the mobility of the video sources and the high data-rate of the videos, the transmission rate should be adapted based on receivers' link conditions. Rate-adaptive video multicast streaming in IEEE 802.11 requires wireless link estimation as well as frequent feedback from multiple receivers. A contribution to this thesis is an application-layer rate-adaptive video multicast streaming framework using an 802.11 ad-hoc network that is applicable when both the sender and the receiver nodes are mobile. The receiver nodes of a multicast group are assigned with roles dynamically based on their link conditions. An application layer video multicast gateway (ALVM-GW) adapts the transmission rate and the video encoding rate based on the received feedback. Role switching between multiple receiver nodes (designated nodes) cater for mobility and rate adaptation addresses the challenges of performance and fairness. The reliability challenge is addressed through re-transmission of lost packets while delays under given bounds are achieved through video encoding rate adaptation. Emulation and experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms legacy multicast in terms of packet loss and video quality.