Fawzi A. Alghamdi

Intelligent Agents in Extreme Conditions – Modeling and Simulation of Suicide Bombing for Risk Assessment

Intelligent agents in extreme conditions is an attempt to use agent based simulation to save lives, predict the outcome of catastrophic events like suicide bombing, and model the behavior of crowd in emergency situations. This work is set to implement, test, analyze and measure intelligent agents’ behavior and its consequences under extreme conditions like suicide bombing through multi-agent simulation. Suicide bombing has become one of the most lethal and favorite modus operandi of terrorist organizations around the world. It claims 48% of the casualties, while only 3% of all terrorist attacks can be classified as suicide bombing attacks. On average, there is a suicide bombing attack somewhere in the world on every 6th day that claims 13.4 lives (on average) per attack (Usmani a, 2009). While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of explosions on structures, little has been done on modeling the impact of a blast wave for an individual or a crowd. There is no tool exist to determine the impact of explosion as a function of crowd dynamics, and explosive characteristics. And there is not a single method available to map the blast overpressure to human injuries that is calibrated against the real-life victims’ data. All of the existing estimates and pressure-lethality curves are based on experiments on pigs, sheep, and data collected from stationary sensors without any consideration of blockage and 3D environment. Explosion modeling is a complicated task that requires the knowledge of physical properties of explosions, projectiles and debris, chemical properties of explosive materials and their reactions, complex details of simulating gaseous and combustion flows with boundary conditions, complex coding for blast waves and fragmentation models, know-how of computational fluid dynamics, and the overall impact of explosions on humans and structures supported by experimental and theoretical studies. This work explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. The work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full blockage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. A virtual simulation tool (BlastSim) has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and 23

Relative Ranking – A Biased Rating

Reviewers’ ratings have become one of the most influential parameters when making a decision to purchase or rent the products or services from the online vendors. Star Rating system is the de-facto standard for rating a product. It is regarded as one of the most visually appealing rating systems that directly interact with the consumers; helping them find products they will like to purchase as well as register their views on the product. It offers visual advantage to pick the popular or most rated product. Any system that is not as appealing as star system will have a chance of rejection by online business community. This paper argues that, the visual advantage is not enough to declare star rating system as a triumphant, the success of a ranking system should be measured by how effectively the system helps customers make decisions that they, retrospectively, consider correct. This paper argues and suggests a novel approach of Relative Ranking within the boundaries of star rating system to overcome a few inherent disadvantages the former system comes with.

Besides Tracking – Simulation of RFID Marketing and Beyond

This paper asks a new question: how we can use RFID technology in marketing products in supermarkets and how we can measure its performance or ROI (Return-on-Investment). We try to answer the question by proposing a simulation model whereby customers become aware of other customers’ real-time shopping behavior and may hence be influenced by their purchases and the levels of purchases. The proposed model is orthogonal to sales model and can have the similar effects: increase in the overall shopping volume. Managers often struggle with the prediction of ROI on purchasing such a technology, this simulation sets to provide them the answers of questions like the percentage of increase in sales given real-time purchase information to other customers. The simulation is also flexible to incorporate any given model of customers’ behavior tailored to particular supermarket, settings, events or promotions. The results, although preliminary, are promising to use RFID technology for marketing products in supermarkets and provide several dimensions to look for influencing customers via feedback, real-time marketing, target advertisement and on-demand promotions. Several other parameters have been discussed including the herd behavior, fake customers, privacy, and optimality of sales-price margin and the ROI of investing in RFID technology for marketing purposes.

I Know What You Did This Summer - Users´ Behavior on Internet

Human age is surrounded by assumed set of rules and behaviors imposed by local culture and the society they live in. This paper introduces software that counts the presence of a person on the Internet and examines the activities he/she conducts online. The paper answers questions such as how “old” are you on the Internet? How soon will a newbie be exposed to adult websites? How long will it take for a new Internet user to know about social networking sites? And how many years a user has to surf online to celebrate his/her first “birthday” of Internet presence? Paper findings from a database of 105 school and university students containing their every click of first 24 hours of Internet usage are presented. The findings provide valuable insights for Internet Marketing, ethics, Internet business and the mapping of Internet life with real life. Privacy and ethical issues related to the study have been discussed at the end.

BlastSim — Multi agent simulation of suicide bombing

This paper introduces BlastSim — physics based stationary multi-agent simulation of blast waves and its impact on human body. The agents are constrained by physical characteristics and mechanics of blast wave. The simulation is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. It also examines variables such as the number and arrangement of people within a crowd for typical layouts, the number of suicide bombers, and the nature of the explosion including equivalent weight of TNT, and the duration of the resulting blast wave pulse. The paper also explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. Furthermore, it also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. The goals of this paper are to determine optimal crowd formations to reduce the deaths and/or injuries of individuals in the crowd. The findings, although preliminary, may have implications for forensics investigations, emergency response and counterterrorism.