Understanding Communications Networks – for Emerging Cybernetics Applications


Book Description

Information networking has emerged as a multidisciplinary diversified area of research over the past few decades. From traditional wired telephony to cellular voice telephony and from wired access to wireless access to the Internet, information networks have profoundly impacted our lifestyles as they have undergone enormous growth. To understand this technology, students need to learn several disciplines and develop an intuitive feeling of how they interact with one another. To achieve this goal, the book describes important networking standards, classifying their underlying technologies in a logical manner and gives detailed examples of successful applications.The emergence of wireless access and dominance of the Ethernet in LAN technologies has shifted the innovations in networking towards the physical layer and characteristics of the medium. This book pays attention to the physical layer while we provide fundamentals of information networking technologies which are used in wired and wireless networks designed for local and wide area operations. The book provides a comprehensive treatment of the wired IEEE802.3 Ethernet, and Internet as well as ITU cellular 2G-6G wireless networks, IEEE 802.11 for Wi-Fi, and IEEE 802.15 for Bluetooth, ZigBee and ultra-wideband (UWB) technologies. The novelty of the book is that it places emphasis on physical communications issues related to formation and transmission of packets and characteristics of the medium for transmission in variety of networks.Material presented in the book will be beneficial for students of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, or other disciplines who are interested in integration of navigation into their multi-disciplinary projects. The book provides examples with supporting MATLAB codes and hands-on projects throughout to improve the ability of the readers to understand and implement variety of algorithms.




Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition


Book Description

A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.







The Cyber Security Network Guide


Book Description

This book presents a unique, step-by-step approach for monitoring, detecting, analyzing and mitigating complex network cyber threats. It includes updated processes in response to asymmetric threats, as well as descriptions of the current tools to mitigate cyber threats. Featuring comprehensive computer science material relating to a complete network baseline with the characterization hardware and software configuration, the book also identifies potential emerging cyber threats and the vulnerabilities of the network architecture to provide students with a guide to responding to threats. The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate college students who are unfamiliar with the cyber paradigm and processes in responding to attacks.




How Not to Network a Nation


Book Description

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.




Advances in Cybernetics, Cognition, and Machine Learning for Communication Technologies


Book Description

This book highlights recent advances in Cybernetics, Machine Learning and Cognitive Science applied to Communications Engineering and Technologies, and presents high-quality research conducted by experts in this area. It provides a valuable reference guide for students, researchers and industry practitioners who want to keep abreast of the latest developments in this dynamic, exciting and interesting research field of communication engineering, driven by next-generation IT-enabled techniques. The book will also benefit practitioners whose work involves the development of communication systems using advanced cybernetics, data processing, swarm intelligence and cyber-physical systems; applied mathematicians; and developers of embedded and real-time systems. Moreover, it shares insights into applying concepts from Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, Cybernetics and other areas of artificial intelligence to wireless and mobile systems, control systems and biomedical engineering.




Intelligent Systems in Cybernetics and Automation Control Theory


Book Description

This book presents real-world problems and pioneering research that reflect novel approaches to cybernetics, algorithms and software engineering in the context of intelligent systems. It gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 2nd Computational Methods in Systems and Software 2018 (CoMeSySo 2018), a conference that broke down traditional barriers by being held online. The goal of the event was to provide an international forum for discussing the latest high-quality research results.




Cybernetic Revolutionaries


Book Description

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.




Robust Control System Networks


Book Description

From the researcher who was one of the first to identify and analyze the infamous industrial control system malware "Stuxnet," comes a book that takes a new, radical approach to making Industrial control systems safe from such cyber attacks: design the controls systems themselves to be "robust." Other security experts advocate risk management, implementing more firewalls and carefully managing passwords and access. Not so this book: those measures, while necessary, can still be circumvented. Instead, this book shows in clear, concise detail how a system that has been set up with an eye toward quality design in the first place is much more likely to remain secure and less vulnerable to hacking, sabotage or malicious control. It blends several well-established concepts and methods from control theory, systems theory, cybernetics and quality engineering to create the ideal protected system. The book's maxim is taken from the famous quality engineer William Edwards Deming, "If I had to reduce my message to management to just a few words, I'd say it all has to do with reducing variation." Highlights include: - An overview of the problem of "cyber fragility" in industrial control systems - How to make an industrial control system "robust," including principal design objectives and overall strategic planning - Why using the methods of quality engineering like the Taguchi method, SOP and UML will help to design more "armored" industrial control systems.




Handbook of Systems Sciences


Book Description

The primary purpose of this handbook is to clearly describe the current state of theories of systems sciences and to support their use and practice. There are many ways in which systems sciences can be described. This handbook takes a multifaceted view of systems sciences and describes them in terms of a relatively large number of dimensions, from natural and engineering science to social science and systems management perspectives. It is not the authors’ intent, however, to produce a catalog of systems science concepts, methodologies, tools, or products. Instead, the focus is on the structural network of a variety of topics. Special emphasis is given to a cyclic–interrelated view; for example, when a theory of systems sciences is described, there is also discussion of how and why the theory is relevant to modeling or practice in reality. Such an interrelationship between theory and practice is also illustrated when an applied research field in systems sciences is explained. The chapters in the handbook present definitive discussions of systems sciences from a wide array of perspectives. The needs of practitioners in industry and government as well as students aspiring to careers in systems sciences provide the motivation for the majority of the chapters. The handbook begins with a comprehensive introduction to the coverage that follows. It provides not only an introduction to systems sciences but also a brief overview and integration of the succeeding chapters in terms of a knowledge map. The introduction is intended to be used as a field guide that indicates why, when, and how to use the materials or topics contained in the handbook.