prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What is the effect of accounting for path preference on the robot's belief update?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: Paper Info

Title: Incorporating Human Path Preferences in Robot Navigation with Minimal Interventions
Publish Date: 16 Mar 2023
Author List: Oriana Peltzer, Dylan Asmar, Mac Schwager, Mykel Kochenderfer

Figure

Hyperplane arrangement of a twodimensional space containing two obstacles (colored in gray) The robot is located inside the pink polytope, surrounded by three adjacent obstacle-free polytopes Each hyperplane on the boundary of the robot's polytope corresponds to one of the nonredundant constraints in eq (4) (b)Graph derived from the hyperplane arrangement The nodes on the graph designate polytopes, and edges designate transitions to adjacent polytopes To estimate the human's preference, the robot updates a posterior over the goal and over which of the graph transitions φ 1 , φ 2 and φ 3 is preferred by the human (c)Example preference defined over the graph The location of the goal is indicated in yellow in the lower right polytope For each node, the outgoing pink arrow designates the edge on the graph corresponding to the preferred transition between polytopes 
Simple, 10 × 10, 8 polytopes (b) Map 2: Office, 10 × 10, 56 polytopes (c) Map 3: Classroom, 20 × 20, 73 polytopes (d) Sampled observations and robot's executed trajectories 
Fig 5: Maps used for simulating the robot navigation problem with path preferences In (d), the heading angles observed are indicated with arrows The goal is indicated with a pink circle, and the orange robot corresponds to the starting location The blue robot follows a policy that accounts for path preference, while the green robot does not The opacity of the robots increases with time 
Map 1 problem setup and example realizations for goal-only (green) and path preference (blue) solution methods The robot starts at the lower left corner of the environment, and the goal of the task (pink circle) is in the upper left area The robot does not know which goal, among 10 options (shown in light blue squares), is the correct goal The human provides noisy observations, indicated by arrows, at each iteration The green robot selects actions according to the goal-only baseline, and the blue robot uses our proposed method to infer path preferences The polytopes composing G are drawn in blue Probability of correct goal WLPHVWHS +J (c) Entropy of goal distribution g 
Fig  6: Probability of the correct goal, fig 6b, and entropy of the goal belief distribution P (g), fig 6c, for the same problem setup, fig 6a In this problem instance, the human's preference is to go to the goal by passing on the right side of the obstacle Results are averaged over 50 runs and the area filled represents one standard deviation above and below the mean value The goal-only baseline shows an over-confident prediction (shown by the strong reduction in belief entropy) that the correct goal is less likely, making it more difficult to reach the correct goal compared to a method that accounts for path preference 
Success rates in the simple environment (Map 1) The results are averaged over 6 randomly sampled problem instances (start location, goal location, and goal possibilities), and over 50 runs per problem instance ∆T is the number of time steps separating two consecutive human inputs The robot's mission time is Tmax = 30 time steps We selected γ h = 1 5, corresponding to relatively noisy human inputs and making the problem more difficult to solve for the robot 
Computation times for Goal Only and Path Preference methods on Map 1 (fig 5a),Map 2 (fig 5b), and Map 3 (fig 5c),averaged over 100 runs with randomly sampled problem instances The 95 % confidence interval is provided with the mean We evaluate computation time at the first iteration of each run (where the search depth takes on its highest value Tmax) 

abstract

Robots that can effectively understand human intentions from actions are crucial for successful human-robot collaboration  In this work, we address the challenge of a robot navigating towards an unknown goal while also accounting for a human's preference for a particular path in the presence of obstacles 
This problem is particularly challenging when both the goal and path preference are unknown a priori  To overcome this challenge, we propose a method for encoding and inferring path preference online using a partitioning of the space into polytopes  Our approach enables joint inference over the goal and path preference using a stochastic observation model for the human 
We evaluate our method on an unknown-goal navigation problem with sparse human interventions, and find that it outperforms baseline approaches as the human's inputs become increasingly sparse  We find that the time required to update the robot's belief does not increase with the complexity of the environment, which makes our method suitable for online applications 

INTRODUCTION

Collaboration between humans and robots has become increasingly important and one key aspect of this collaboration is the ability for robots to adapt to human decisions  In many scenarios, such as a robot navigating through a busy room to deliver an item, it is important for the robot to take into account human preferences 
For instance, humans may prefer a specific path that would allow their colleagues to notice the item being delivered, but this preference may change dynamically based on various factors such as changes in the environment or unforeseen circumstances  While some preferences can be incorporated into the path-planning process, accommodating dynamic user preferences in real-time remains challenging 
In this paper, we propose a way to enable robots to adapt to human preferences dynamically by leveraging real-time feedback to inform decision-making  In this work, we tackle the problem of robot navigation in which the robot cannot observe the goal or the preferred path to the goal, but must make navigation decisions that are influenced by humans through recommended actions 
Prior work has explored how to adapt to a human's preference through feedback, but such approaches often require a high level of intervention, which can be time-consuming and impractical in real-world scenarios  To optimize the use of human input and quickly infer the human's preference, Fig  : An autonomous robot navigates in a simulated classroom towards a goal location (pink circle) 
At the start of its mission, it receives direction indications (arrows) from a human that indicate which path it should take to get to the goal  In this scenario, the human wants the robot to go around the desks on the right side of the classroom  A robot that does not reason over path preferences (green) will take the shortest path to the goal regardless of the human's input 
Our method (blue) infers the human's path preference from these indications and adapts to their recommendations  we propose an approach that leverages probabilistic representations of human preference and incorporates real-time feedback  Previous research by Bajcsy et al  considered an online adaptation problem in a manipulation task, where the person can apply forces to the robot to indicate their preferences 
By allowing the robot to continue its task while taking into account a probabilistic representation of human preference, their approach does not require frequent inputs  Building on this idea, we adopt a similar approach to adapt to a human's preference in the context of a robot autonomously navigating through a known environment, such as a cluttered office space 
Specifically, we focus on allowing the human to influence the robot's trajectory with respect to obstacles, by providing guidance on preferred routes or paths, while the robot continues to execute its task  Paths can be represented using homotopy classes   However, homotopies can pose computational challenges when used to encode and infer human preferences 
When the robot maintains a belief over homotopy classes, the inference problem can become exponentially complex with the number of obstacles in the space  Additionally, when the goal is unknown, the number of variables increases with the number of candidate destinations  This complexity can render the decision-making problem intractable 
Our solution is to encode path preference based on a partitioning of the environment into polytopes   This representation allows path preferences to be expressed as sets of preferred transitions between adjacent polytopes  Paths belonging to different homotopy classes correspond to different sequences of transitions 
By leveraging conditional independence assumptions, we can make the Bayesian inference problem tractable  These assumptions exploit the fact that human actions provide information about the path in a piece-wise manner  For example, indicating a preference for navigating around a particular obstacle only provides information about the local area and not the entire path 
Finally, after updating its belief representation over the human's preference, the robot can adapt to indications by replanning online  Our contributions are as follows  • We formulate the human-robot collaboration problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) where both the goal of the task and the human's path preference are unknown random variables 
• We propose an encoding of a human's path preference using a partitioning of the environment into polytopes, along with conditional independence assumptions that make the Bayesian inference problem tractable to infer the task goal and path preference online  • Through simulations in two environments of different sizes and complexity, we show that our method is effective for solving problems where the robot must reach a goal that is unknown a-priori while simultaneously adapting to a human's indications 
Our method shows higher success rates compared to baseline approaches when the human inputs are sparse  Our approach enables a robot to make effective navigation decisions in collaboration with a human, even when the goal and path preference are not known in advance, and with minimal human input  In recent years, there has been a growing interest in shared autonomy and interactive systems, where humans and robots work together to accomplish tasks 
Several approaches have been proposed to address the challenge of enabling effective collaboration between human and robot agents while still achieving high task performance  Losey et al  and Jeon, Losey, and Sadigh propose a framework where a human operator is given control of a task-relevant latent action space while an autonomous system handles the rest 
Dragan and Srinivasa present a formalism for arbitrating between a user's input and a robot's policy when both human and robot share control of the same action space  Cognetti et al  [7] provide a method for real-time modifications of a path,       Fig  : We model the intent inference problem with the above diagram 
At each step in time, the robot receives an observation ot from the human conditioned on its current location st, the intended goal g, and the human's path preference θ  The robot updates its belief over g and θ and transitions to a next location st+1  while Hagenow et al  present a method that allows an outside agent to modify key robot state variables and blends the changes with the original control 
However, a common challenge of these approaches is the high level of intervention required from humans  Best and Fitch propose a method for predicting an agent's intended trajectory from observations  Rather than maintaining a belief over the agent's future path, they infer the agent's intended goal among a set of candidate locations at the boundary of the space 
This approach provides information on where the agent is heading and generates a distribution of candidate future trajectories for the agent  Inferring the goal of the task among a discrete set of candidates is also relevant to the area of shared autonomy  Javdani, Srinivasa, and Bagnell propose a formalism for shared control of a robotic arm, where the robot must assist the human in picking up an object but needs to infer which object the human has chosen from joystick inputs 
Planning with homotopy class constraints is useful in problems where the robot's requirements are given with respect to obstacles, and Yi, Goodrich, and Seppi consider topological constraints provided by human operators  Bhattacharya propose an efficient algorithm for solving pathplanning problems under homotopic constraints 
However, the number of homotopy classes for a given problem can be infinite, and as the robot changes location and updates its representation of the world, carrying out inference over homotopy classes in a dynamic environment requires recomputing the set of homotopies at every iteration, making the belief update challenging 
Prior work has addressed the challenge of shared autonomy by considering how robots can infer a human's intended goal, or how they can infer the preferred path to a goal  However, we argue that inferring the goal and the path as separate problems can lead to over-confidence in incorrect beliefs about the user's preferences 
To illustrate this point, consider the following scenario: a robot and a human are collaborating to move an object from one end of a room to Fig  : Using the hyperplanes composing the H-representation of each obstacle, we construct a hyperplane arrangement of the obstacle-free space (a)  We define the human's preference for the robot's one step action choices as the posterior distribution (given all human input up to that point) over transitions from the current to the neighboring polytopes, i e  edges on the graph 
Each time the robot transitions to a new polytope, the set of neighbor polytopes and the distribution over human preferences are updated  another, but there is an obstacle in the way  The human would like the robot to take a path around the obstacle on the left, even though the goal is on the right  If the robot only infers the goal from the human's inputs, it may incorrectly assume that the goal is on the right, and become over-confident in this belief 
On the other hand, if the robot only infers the preferred path, it may mistakenly assume that the goal is on the left, leading to a failure in completing the task  To overcome these challenges, our work proposes a joint inference approach that considers both the human's intended goal and their preferred path to that goal 
Specifically, we model the human's preference over different homotopy classes and leverage a conditional independence assumption to provide a tractable solution  In our approach, we assume that the human's inputs are noisily rational conditioned on both the goal and the preference  By jointly inferring the goal and path preference, we can avoid over-confidence in incorrect beliefs about the user's preferences, leading to improved system performance 
We consider the problem of robot navigation in a known environment to an unknown destination, where a human can intervene and provide a heading direction to the robot using a joystick or force cues  The human also has a preference on which path the robot should take with respect to obstacles, and our objective is for the robot to understand the human's intentions and execute the task with minimal interventions 
Let g be a discrete random variable denoting the goal of the task, belonging to a set of candidates Ω g , and let θ be a discrete-valued random variable representing the human's path preference, belonging to a set of possible preferences Θ  The physical location of the robot at time index t is denoted by s t ∈ R 2 , and the robot's action at time index t, belonging to some action space A, is denoted by a t  
The transition model T (s t+1 | s t , a t ) is deterministic, meaning the robot has full control over its future location  At any time step, the human may provide an observation to the robot  When the human intervenes, the robot receives a direction (heading angle) that can be mapped to a future location in space 
More specifically, we map the direction to an intended location, which is the resulting robot location after advancing in the indicated direction for one time step  For simplicity, we consider that the robot directly makes an observation o t of the location indicated by the human  We assume that the robot has a stochastic observation model for the human P (o t | s t , g, θ) that is conditioned on both the goal of the task g and the human's preferred path θ 
We further assume that having chosen a goal and path preference, the human takes actions to noisily minimize a cost function C g,θ that measures the cost of moving from the robot's current location to the goal along the preferred path  For example, C g,θ (s t , o t ) can be the length of the shortest path from location s t to the goal g after taking a first step to o t , and constrained by path preference θ 
We use C g,θ to induce a probability distribution over observations, given by: where γ h is a hyperparameter that designates the rationality coefficient  This model assumes the human will pick the lowest cost action with the highest probability and the likelihood of an action decreases exponentially with the increase in cost  
Our inclusion of the path preference θ sets our approach apart from   The model is shown in fig  represented as a Bayesian Network 

Inference

At each time step where the human provides an observation, the posterior P (g, θ) is given through the Bayesian update We note that the number of Bayesian updates required at each iteration to update the belief is equal to the cardinality of Ω g × Θ  In addition, each Bayesian update involves computing C g,θ (  
,   ) in eq  ( ), which involves solving an optimization problem (such as a shortest path problem)  In section IV, we propose a specific encoding of preference θ for resolving eq  ( ), while ensuring the number of computations of the cost C g,θ ( ,  ) per update does not grow exponentially with the number of obstacles 

Decision Making

We consider a navigation problem where the robot receives reward according to the model R(s t , g, θ, a t )  We wish to find the optimal policy π that maximizes the expected discounted sum of future rewards, with discount factor γ  The above problem is a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP)  
In this section, we propose an encoding of human's path preference θ for computing the posterior in eq  ( )  Devifrom the concept of homotopy classes, we define the preference according to a partitioning of the environment into polytopes, as shown in fig  , creating a hyperplane arrangement of the space 
Hyperplane arrangements have been used by Vincent and Schwager in the context of Neural Network verification  In our setting, we leverage this representation to define path preferences as preferred transitions between adjacent regions of the space 

Hyperplane Arrangement

We assume a two-dimensional environment composed of m polytopic obstacles, each defined by their half-space representation (H-representation) where A i ∈ R di×2 and b i ∈ R di , and where d i is the number of edges (hyperplanes) composing polytope i  Let n = i d i be the total number of hyperplanes  We leverage each obstacle's H-representation to construct a hyperplane arrangement of the environment as shown in fig 
 e  a partitioning of the space into polytopes  More specifically, each location in space belongs to a polytope j for which we can write an H-representation of the form where α j i ∈ {−1, 1} di is a vector specific to polytope j and obstacle i corresponding to the relative position of any point in the set with respect to each hyperplane in O i  
Fig  : Intent inference model in a hyperplane arrangement of the obstacle free space  We spatially decompose the preference θ into a set of preferred neighboring polytopes per region of the space  Within each polytope j, the human preference pj is a discrete distribution over the preferred neighbor in N (j) 
We assume that for a location st belonging to polytope j, and given goal g and preference pj, the observation ot and any other preference p i,i =j are conditionally independent  Concatenating elements from each obstacle's Hrepresentation, we can write polytope j's H-representation as where Some of the constraints in eq  ( ) (corresponding to rows of A, b and α j ) are redundant, i e  the set P j does not change upon their removal 
We can further reduce the Hrepresentation of a polytope to include only non-redundant constraints  By removing the rows corresponding to redundant constraints, we obtain new matrices A j e , b j e and α j e such that we can write the polytope's reduced H-representation as The non-redundant constraints correspond to edges of the polytope 
In other words, as the robot continually moves in space, the first hyperplane that it will cross upon exiting the polytope will correspond to one of the polytope's nonredundant constraints  Vincent and Schwager outline an iterative method for removing redundant constraints by solving n linear programs 
We use this method in practice for computing α j e for each polytope  We can now characterize each polytope by a vector α j e ∈ {−1, 1} n j e , where n j e ≤ n is the number of essential constraints of the polytope  The polytopes P j partition the environment into a hyperplane arrangement 

Path Preference

In this section, we provide a definition of preference θ according to a graphical representation of the environment based on the hyperplane arrangement  Under this representation, a path preference corresponds to a set of preferred transitions  In other words, for each polytope in the space, the human will have a preference to which neighboring polytope they wish to transition 
Let G := (V, E) be an undirected graph, where vertices are obstacle-free polytopes, and edges connect two adjacent polytopes  Each polytope is described by a unique vector α j as defined in eq  ( )  Two polytopes are adjacent if they share non-redundant constraints (rows in eq  ( )) corresponding to the same hyperplane (i e  they are on opposite sides of the hyperplane) 
Let N (v) be the set of neighbors of a vertex v  For each vertex, we denote p v the discrete-valued random variable describing which edge in N (v) the human intends to transition to  Using this formalism, we define a path preference as the set of preferred transitions over all nodes in the graph, Let m θ = v∈V |N (v)| be the cardinality of Θ, and m g = |Ω g | the number of possible goals 
A priori, the number of Bayesian updates required to update the belief at every iteration should be m θ × m g   Now, let us assume the conditional independence relationships described by the new problem diagram in fig    More specifically, we introduce the assumption that conditioned on a robot location s t , the goal g, and the preference for the corresponding vertex p v in the graph, the observation o t and the preference for any other vertex are conditionally independent 
In other words, the observations the human provides can be defined conditioned only on the robot location, the goal, and the human's preference for its current vertex p v   By introducing this assumption, each update step only requires updating the joint (p v , g), reducing the number of cost computations to |N (v)| × m g  
We can notice that by introducing this assumption, we removed the direct relationship between the number of polytopes in the environment and the complexity of the Bayesian update in eq  ( )  In practice, components of θ are not mutually independent  For example, if the human preference at a vertex v 1 is
, it is unlikely that the human will also prefer p v2 = (v 2 , v 1 ) (turning back)  We can improve our model by assuming a dependent relationship between preferences for adjacent edges, which does not significantly increase the complexity of the inference problem  An interesting property of our encoding is that any two paths that belong to different homotopy classes will cross different sequences of polytopes, i e  they correspond to a different sequence of edges on G 
This can be proved by contradiction  Let us suppose that two continuous trajectories ξ 1 and ξ 2 , with the same start and end points and that do not intersect any obstacle, traverse the same regions in G in the same order  From the construction of the hyperplane arrangement, each polytope that the paths traverse through is obstacle-free 
Therefore, within each polytope, there is no obstacle in the area located in between the portions of ξ 1 and ξ 2 that belong to the region  A smooth transformation of ξ 1 into ξ 2 can be obtained by transforming each portion of ξ 1 belonging to the polytopes it intersects into the corresponding portion of ξ 2 for the same polytopes, where the extremities of the trajectory portions are connected to one another along the polytope's edges (where the same edge is crossed by both paths) 
Along this transformation, the paths do not intersect any obstacle, and therefore ξ 1 and ξ 2 belong to the same homotopy class 

EXPERIMENTS

We evaluate our model on a simulated navigation task where the robot must reach a goal that is unknown a priori while respecting the path preferences indicated by a human  The robot navigates in a grid world containing obstacles  The transition model is deterministic: the robot selects an adjacent location on the grid to reach at the next time step 
The robot is also allowed to take diagonal actions  Each location s t in the map can be mapped to a vertex v t ∈ G  Therefore, the actions leading to locations mapped to different vertices correspond to edges on the graph  We note f (s t , a t ) the edge crossed by taking action a t from location s t  
The robot is given a mission time limit T max for reaching the goal  In this problem, we assume that the human selects actions to noisily minimize a cost function C g,θ , where θ is defined as per eq  ( ), corresponding to the length of the shortest path to the goal constrained by the preference (where the robot is only allowed to make transitions on G along preferred edges) 
More specifically, where δ(s t , g | o t , p vt ) designates the length of the shortest path from s t to g passing by o t and constrained by preference p vt   This is a slight variant of the cost function proposed by Best and Fitch , where we add in a conditioning on the path preference  We compute costs by running the A path planning algorithm on the environment maps (grid worlds with diagonal actions) and impose preference constraints by pruning invalid transitions from the search tree 
Reward model  At each step in time, the robot receives a reward which is a sum of three components: a goal-specific reward a preference-specific reward or penalty We compute solutions to the POMDP defined in section III-B with the online solver POMCP , and with the particularity that within the rollouts, the robot does not expect to collect human inputs 
Each time a solution is computed, the robot takes an action and may receive an observation  If it does, it updates its belief distribution over the unknown problem variables and resolves the POMDP over a receding horizon 

Baselines

• Goal only  The robot solves the POMDP while ignoring the effects of path preference  Similarly to , we assume the human is taking action to minimize a goaldependent cost C g (s t , o t ) = δ(s t , g | o t ), where the conditioning on the preference is removed  We also omit the path preference's contribution to the reward R pref  
• Compliant  The robot complies with the human input, but does not take an initiative  If the user stops providing information, the robot continues in the last direction indicated for 5 time steps (conserving its momentum), then stops  • Blended  We designed an arbitration function to decide between our proposed policy (accounting for path preferences) and the user's recommendation when the robot receives inputs 
Our metric to evaluate confidence in the robot's prediction for the purpose of arbitration is the entropy of the intention distribution H(g, p i ), where p i denotes the preferred neighbor for the current region  Because our representation of the world is discrete, the arbitration is given by a step function 
Denoted by U , the action corresponding to the human's input, and P , the robot's prediction for the optimal action, we write the policy where we chose h = 1 6 as the confidence threshold 

Results

When evaluating the algorithm, we consider that a run is successful if the robot reached the goal within its allocated mission time T max and only made transitions between graph vertices corresponding to the human's preferences  We vary the time delay between human inputs, from constant guidance (∆ T = 1) to only a single observation (∆ T ≥ T max ) 
Success rates  Table I reports the success rates for experiments conducted over six randomly sampled problem instances and 50 runs per instance in Map 1 (fig  )  When the human provides inputs at every iteration, the compliant policy shows the highest success rates  However, as ∆ T increases, the compliant robot is not able to accomplish the task within the allotted time as it does not receive sufficient inputs to do so, and performance decreases compared to the autonomous baselines 
We find that in these runs, accounting for path preference consistently improves performance compared with the goal-only baseline  Results also show that blending the user's input with the robot's policy (Path Preference + Blend) when the human provides information leads to improved performance  Belief entropy 
Figure shows a challenging problem instance where the directions the human provides do not align directly with the shortest path to the goal  By ignoring the effects of preferences in the problem model (goal only), the robot quickly infers from observations that the upper left goal is less likely than others (P (g) drops) 
The strong decrease in entropy shows that the robot becomes overconfident in this prediction  Overconfidence in an incorrect goal will prevent the agent from finding the correct goal once the human's indications directly align with it, as it needs to correct for the wrong predictions, as shown in the path realization (fig 
)  In this realization, the goal-only method (green robot) fails to search the upper left area within the allotted time  By accounting for path preferences in its model, the blue robot's entropy over the goal distribution decreases more steadily, allowing for it to leverage the human's latest observations and reach the goal successfully 
shows an over-confident prediction (shown by the strong reduction in belief entropy) that the correct goal is less likely, making it more difficult to reach the correct goal compared to a method that accounts for path preference  Computation time  In table II we provide the time required to solve the POMDP, and the time required to update the robot's belief as it receives new observations 
We compute solutions on three maps: a simple 10 × 10 grid world with 8 polytopes (fig  ), a 10 × 10 grid world with 56 polytopes (fig  ), and a 20×20 grid world with 73 polytopes (fig  )  The latter environment being larger, we increase the mission time and the depth of the search tree in POMCP from T max = 30 (Map 1 and Map 2) to T max = 60 (Map 3) 
We do not notice an increase in the time required to update the robot's belief with an increase in problem complexity, which is consistent with our observation that the complexity of the Bayesian update should not increase with the number of obstacles or polytopes  On the contrary, the belief update time on Map 2 and Map 3, containing more obstacles, is reduced compared to the first map 
More obstacles result in fewer iterations when solving the constrained shortest path problem with A   Adding constraints due to the obstacles and polytopes reduces the size of the A search tree  C  Limitations Simulation environments  In our simulations, we hardcoded the preference policy over the maps (e g  in Map 1, go around the table counter-clockwise) 
We randomly sampled problem instances (start and goal locations, and goal options) to reduce the bias introduced by these preference choices  To best evaluate and compare the different approaches, it would be best to sample preferences among a distribution of preferences chosen by a human (for example, from benchmarks resulting from a collection of data) 
Creating such a benchmark is an interesting direction for future work  Hyperplane arrangement construction  The main limitation of our approach is that the size and geometry of each polytope depends strongly on the geometry of the obstacles, as seen in fig    Because of this, the robot can make predictions over preferences that are too refined compared with the topology of the environment 
A direct consequence is that when the size of the polytopes is small, the information provided by the human can be incorrectly interpreted as a preference on the robot's immediate action  Our method can be improved by changing the structure of the hyperplane arrangement so that it relies on the topology of the environment, but does not vary strongly with the geometry of the features in the environment 
For this purpose, topometric maps and region construction algorithms are promising directions  We presented an approach for encoding and inferring a human's path preference in an environment with obstacles  By leveraging a partitioning of the space into polytopes and a stochastic observation model, our method allows for joint inference over the goal and path preference even when both are unknown a-priori 
Our experiments on an unknown-goal navigation problem with sparse human interventions demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its suitability for online applications  The time required to update the robot's belief does not increase with the complexity of the environment, which further highlights the practicality of our method 
Context 2: Transport Aircraft for IAF - Page 67 - Bharat Rakshak
Transport Aircraft for IAF
Re: Transport Aircraft for IAF
Postby abhik » 17 Nov 2014 05:55
+1, Air India recently sold their entire fleet of Boeing 777s 
afaik the A330 MRTT does not make any structural mods or add anything internally in cargo or passenger cabin  it just relies on the intrinsic 110 tons of fuel  external refueling pods are added and internally the control station and cameras for the operator i guess 
so its a easy conversion from a passenger layout to the AAR mode - mostly ripping out the passenger cabin of all extra stuff and retuning the FCS for any changes in COG 
this should have been pursued years ago
the IL78 adds a palletized drum tank system inside its cargo bay due to paucity of intrinsic fuel but it can be removed and a/c converted back to cargo hauling or send off to russia for Phalcon structural mods if we want it that way  they will however need to change engines to PS90 as they have the old engines
http://www airplane-pictures net/images     7/5616 jpg
the RAF is already gone that route in 2011
http://www defensenews com/article/2011     -Refuelers
LONDON - Airbus Military has delivered the first of 12 A330-200 airliners due to be converted into in-flight refueling planes for the British Royal Air Force by Cobham Aviation Services 
The aircraft, part of an order of 14 jets, will be modified with aerial refueling pods and other equipment at Cobham's newly refurbished facility in Bournemouth, England  The first two aircraft have already been converted by Airbus in Spain 
The multirole tanker aircraft are being provided to the RAF under a private finance initiative service deal led by Airbus parent EADS 
Seven of the planes will be operated full time by the RAF  The remainder will be available for lease in the third-party market, with the proviso that they can be returned to British military service to meet any surge in demand 
All of the aircraft, to be known as the Voyager in RAF service, will be fitted with two wing-mounted refueling pods, while half the fleet will also be fitted for, but not necessarily with, a center-line mounted unit  The refueling units are being supplied by Cobham 
The first aircraft will become operational in a passenger and freight transport role by the end of this year to start relieving pressure on the RAF's hard-pressed assets 
Despite the increasing fragility of current RAF in-flight refueling operations, the new capability is not contracted to start being used in this role until 2015 
All 14 Voyagers are scheduled to be available for RAF operations by the middle of the decade  The A330 will replace the increasingly ancient Tristar and VC-10 refuelers now in service 
Push the 6 Il-476 from refueler to AEW duty  Phalcon them up
Not sure if that is a good path to follow  For one they all should be sent to pasture in about 8 years  Then if the are to be phalconed up - the requires major structural changes  Not worth that cost 
Whatever happened ot the two new ones that were supposed ot be ordered?
the IL78 can be easily converted back to IL76 cargo hauling  only the fuel tank inside cargo bay needs removal   infact that was even mentioned in initial days as swing role fuel/cargo 
Postby Cybaru » 17 Nov 2014 07:55
I am talking about the new il78 that we ordered recently in refueling role  Sorry for the mix up  They are the same platform, that I why i used 476 or 76 to identify it 
777 carries more internal fuel than the A330  We suck!
From the KC-777 program 
http://www globalsecurity org/military/     kc-777 htm
"the KC-777 would be 209 feet long with a wingspan of 212 feet, 7 inches  That's the same size as the 777-200LR commercial jet  The KC-777 would be able to carry far more fuel, cargo and passengers than either the KC-767 or the Airbus A330 tanker  The KC-767 offers more operational flexibility, while the KC-777 would be better suited for long-range strategic missions in which more cargo needs to be delivered  The KC-777 would be able to carry more than 350,000 pounds (160,000 kilograms) of fuel and offload more than 220,000 pounds (100,000 kg) of it on a mission of 500 nautical miles (900 kilometers)  On the other hand, the KC-767 can lift off with more than 200,000 pounds (90,000 kg) of fuel and offload more than 130,000 pounds (60,000 kg) in a similar mission  The KC-777 would be able to deliver 200 percent more fuel after flying 1,000 nautical miles than older Air Force KC-135s  The KC-777 could carry up to 37 pallets of cargo, compared to the 19 pallets for the KC-767 "
Postby Cosmo_R » 18 Nov 2014 04:31
Viv S wrote: From Ajai Shukla's article -
HAL points out that, since each Avro flies barely 350 hours every year, most of them have a residual life of about 80,000 hours  In a request for information (RFI) released on August 15, HAL has proposed replacing the aircraft’s engines (Rolls Royce Dart) with “modern fuel efficient engines” 
So, the IAF's Avros have a residual life of 228 years at the current rate of usage  Ain't life grand?
At zero up time, it could reach infinity 
Relax Cy  Kc777 has no client  Usaf is going with kc767 and almost everyone else with a330 
We don't have the number of heavies and long missions of usaf else I would say convert an124 
KC777 will be extremely expensive given the demand/backlog for the 777 and the 777x  Any buyer would have to virtually pay for the increase in capacity 
I think the 767 production line is closed  so the proposed KC767 Boeing is supposed to deliver 18 by 2017  that can be managed from mothballed and cargo hauler airframes on the market 
but to meet the final order of around 180 will they not have to open the production line unless such a huge number were available on the market?
I do get the spider feel this program again will be cancelled in favour of a in-production plane like the 777X ?
I wasn't suggesting we get the KC777  All I was doing was comparing what possibly the 777 could offload compared to A330  It carries 171000 liters of fuel versus 130000 liters that the A330 carries  If we had older 777s in stock, we could have quite easily converted them to this config  The cost to us would be miniscule just the refurbishing cost vs acquiring a new type 
Singha wrote: I think the 767 production line is closed  so the proposed KC767 Boeing is supposed to deliver 18 by 2017  that can be managed from mothballed and cargo hauler airframes on the market 
The Line is open, they have a backlog of around 50 (All Fed ex), with Fed Ex placing a small order this year  The Pegasus order is for all new builds, and so will the follow on order  The only reason for any nation to buy the 767 tanker is going to be because of the ability to hard bargain with Boeing given that the commercial future of the 767 is dead  This also allows a potential buyer to purchase cheap spares from the open market, or club its logistical and inventory purchase with that of the USAF  Other than that and perhaps availability (which would be doubtful once USAF pushes through a larger order) there is really no technical reason to purchase the this tanker over the A330 which by all accounts is a superior tanker in addition to being a much much better airliner in general 
IAI is doing conversations for the 767 and its called the 767 MMTT
http://www iai co il/sip_storage/FILES/1/38471 pdf
Cybaru wrote: I wasn't suggesting we get the KC777  All I was doing was comparing what possibly the 777 could offload compared to A330  It carries 171000 liters of fuel versus 130000 liters that the A330 carries  If we had older 777s in stock, we could have quite easily converted them to this config  The cost to us would be miniscule just the refurbishing cost vs acquiring a new type 
The cost of converting a commercial airliner to a tanker, certifying it and running a full fledged test program is by no means small  There is absolutely no justification for that sort of cost over and above the capability that that A330 provides  If it were a certified and tested conversion, that would be a different matter 
Postby Kartik » 21 Nov 2014 12:27
Cybaru wrote:
Why? If the airframe can handle more flight hours, why not?
because it is a very very old airframe as is  Maintenance spares won't be available easily even as of now, then imagine how it'll be 20-30 years from now   and as things stood anyway, the HS-748 offered very little in terms of payload and range versus a C-295 class aircraft  The C-295 offers a very credible light transport, whereas the HS-748's role in the IAF was more akin to a transport trainer and for communication duties with little operational use  Having seen a dozen or so HS-748s parked at Vadodara airport all through my childhood, I never once saw one in the air  They just seemed to be stored out in the open  Upon asking an IAF transport pilot who was my friend's father, he remarked "zyaada kaam ke nahi hain yeh" 
Why would you expend more capital on what is essentially an obsolete airframe, even if theoretically it had not yet reached its service life? You'd have to re-engine it, put new avionics on board and even that wouldn't suffice for para dropping requirements  it was operationally never suitable for para dropping, which is an important mission for transport aircraft and had deficiencies in hot and high climes as well 
Unfortunately, the 748 was never meant to be a military transport  At the request of IAF, its door was enlarged to enable larger cargo items to be loaded and to allow para dropping without hitting the tail plane  However, to load a jeep in it, a 30-ft long ramp was required  The jeep would drive in and insert its front wheels into the aircraft  Then it had to be manually lifted and turned to get it in  Unloading it was just as difficult  Para dropping of troops or cargo even from the aircraft with the enlarged door was considered too dangerous with the risk of hitting the tail plane  The aircraft's performance at hot and high airfields was hopelessly inadequate  Eventually IAF acquired the tail-loading An-32s which were powered specifically for IAF's need for operating in the Himalayas 
BRF article -Avro in IAF service
Now unless you want to overcome all these through a costly, time consuming engineering re-design program, that too without access to original documents since this airplane was designed in the 1960s, there is no question of keeping them going for another 40 years  By which time the original design would be over 80 years old and with no one on earth but the IAF as an operator and HAL as the agency supporting it  Hardly a situation anyone would want 
abhik wrote: +1, Air India recently sold their entire fleet of Boeing 777s 
Only 5 of the Boeing 777-200LR, to Etihad Airways, which IMO was a bad decision  they could have reconfigured the airplanes with just 2 classes and continued to fly them to the US, non-stop 
The remaining 3 777-200LR were offered for lease but are still a part of AI's fleet since they didn't find any takers  This particular model hardly sold much and was developed for ultra-long range flights  it was the least successful 777 model and clearly AI goofed up on the configuration by going for these in place of the 300ER  The economics however didn't make too much sense for AI eventually 
there are 13 777-300ER as a part of their fleet ahd their economics is much better 
Govt  to decide tomorrow on whether to go ahead and allow the IAF to verify the technical details of the C-295 bid by Tata-Airbus instead of scrapping the tender due to single vendor situation 
The government will decide on Saturday whether to press ahead with the Rs 13,000 crore mega project for the private sector to supply 56 medium transport aircraft to the IAF despite only a single bidder, the Tata-Airbus consortium, being in the fray 
Though the defence acquisitions council (DAC) chaired by Manohar Parrikar will take the final decision, MoD sources on Tuesday said the "emerging dominant view" is that green signal should be given to the crucial project designed to promote Indian private sector's entry into the domestic aerospace arena with foreign collaboration 
"The Tata-Airbus technical and commercial bid is a credible offer submitted in a competitive environment  The other seven contenders backed out for one reason or the other," said a source 
IAF has now sought the clearance of the DAC -- the first such meeting to be chaired by Parrikar after becoming defence minister on November 10 -- to begin technical evaluation of the C-295 aircraft offered by Airbus Defence & Space and Tata Advanced Systems 
Though it has become a single-vendor situation, the DAC can approve it if it wants as per existing procurement procedures  Of the eight foreign aviation majors that got the global tender, American Boeing and Lockheed-Martin as well as Brazilian Embraer said they did not manufacture the class of aircraft being sought by IAF 
Refusing to take part in the tender, Russian Rosoboronexport said it wanted a fresh design and development project  Antonov of Ukraine wanted yet another extension of the bid submission deadline due to the ongoing conflict in Crimea  Swedish Saab said it had shut down its assembly line for such aircraft 
Then, Alenia Aermacchi was linked to Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica, which has been slapped with "a partial ban" after the infamous VVIP helicopter scandal  "All this left only the European consortium Airbus  The DAC will have to take a call since re-tendering may lead to the same situation," said the source 
Incidentally, it was the Modi government's first DAC in July -- then headed by Arun Jaitley - which revived the Avro replacement project after it was put on hold by the UPA-2 regime last year due to strong opposition from the powerful PSU lobby and ministers like Praful Patel, as reported by TOI earlier 
Apart from the critical need to encourage the private sector to enter defence production in a big way, especially in the aerospace arena where Hindustan Aeronautics enjoys a monopoly, its felt the defence PSU's order books are already overflowing with projects 
Fingers crossed  Hopefully sense will prevail 
Why was lr got? Er is capable of Dubai to sfo nonstop 
Lr is overkill unless we want Delhi to Peru  
Singha wrote: Why was lr got? Er is capable of Dubai to sfo nonstop 
they wanted it for non-stop routes from India to the west coast of the US  But with fuel prices going higher and with the lower seat count on the 777-200LR, the seat mile costs grew too high  A 3 class configuration only made matters worse  A higher density configuration with more economy class seats and just 12-15 Business class seats would have been better perhaps, especially if they didn't have very high First Class load factors 
LR and ER is better if you want to have a better payload down below for long haul  Ultimately, the best bet is going to come form the 787's that take a fewer people (so you can do the longer routes) with still a competitive CASM, and the B and F class folks will pay good money for newer aircraft 
Postby Kartik » 04 Dec 2014 12:55
Lets see if there is any forward movement on the stalled MTA project once Putin arrives in New Delhi
Major defence deals to be signed during Putin-Modi summit
In this connection, it is expected that during the summit, Russia and India may ultimately resolve several long-delayed agreements on military-technical cooperation projects between the two countries and sign them finally for their implementation  These agreements, above all, include joint Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) project and joint development of Multi-role Transport Aircraft (MTA) 
A final deal on FGFA for production has been delayed because the Indian Air Force (IAF) did not approve the design and work-share  Now Russia has reportedly agreed that the jet would be a two-seat design, not a one-seater  India’s work-share would also be increased from18 percent to 25 percent, and even up to 40-50 percent in the near future, in view of the steady development of the Indian aviation industry 
Defence and SecurityAccording to the agreement, India’s stealth air-to-air missile “Astra” along with Indo-Russian BrahMos supersonic cruise missile will be mounted on the FGFA 
The preliminary design agreement on FGFA had been signed in 2010 between Indian HAL and Russian Sukhoi Design Bureau to build the jet for the use by both countries
Context 3: Brooksley Elizabeth Born (born August 27, 1940) is an American attorney and former public official who, from August 26, 1996, to June 1, 1999, was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency which oversees the U S  futures and commodity options markets  During her tenure on the CFTC, Born lobbied Congress and the President to give the CFTC oversight of off-exchange markets for derivatives, in addition to its role with respect to exchange-traded derivatives, but her warnings were ignored or dismissed, and her calls for reform resisted by other regulators <ref name="nytimes">Goodman, Peter S  The Reckoning - Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy, The New York Times, October 9, 2008 </ref> Born resigned as chairperson on June 1, 1999, shortly after Congress passed legislation prohibiting her agency from regulating derivatives 

In 2009, Born received the John F  Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award, along with Sheila Bair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in recognition of the "political courage she demonstrated in sounding early warnings about conditions that contributed" to the 2007-08 financial crisis 

Early life and education
Born graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School (San Francisco, California) at the age of 16  She then attended Stanford University, where she majored in English and was graduated with the class of 1961   She initially wanted to become a doctor, but a guidance counsellor at Stanford advised her against medicine, so she majored in English literature instead 

She then attended Stanford Law School, one of only seven women in her class   She was the first female student ever to be named president of the Stanford Law Review  She received the "Outstanding Senior" award and graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1964 

Legal career
Immediately after law school Born was selected as a law clerk to judge Henry Edgerton of the U S  Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit  It was during this time that she met her first husband, Jacob C  Landau, who was a journalist covering the Federal courts at the time  Following her clerkship, she became an associate at the Washington, D C -based international law firm of Arnold & Porter  Born was attracted to Arnold & Porter because it was one of the few major law firms to have a woman partner at that time, Carolyn Agger, who was the head of the tax practice  Born took a two-year leave of absence from Arnold & Porter to accompany her first husband to Boston, where he had received a fellowship  During that time she worked as a research assistant to law professor Alan Dershowitz 

Born's early career at Arnold & Porter focused on international trade law, in which she represented a number of Swiss industries and the government of Switzerland  She developed a practice representing clients in numerous complex litigation and arbitration cases involving financial market transactions  Among her high-profile cases was the matter of the Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market in silver in the 1970s  She made partner at Arnold & Porter, after moving to a three-day schedule to help raise her second child, and eventually rose to be the head of the firm's derivatives practice 

Born was among the first female attorneys to systematically address inequities regarding how the laws treated women  Born and another female lawyer, Marna Tucker, taught what is considered to have been the first "Women and the Law" course at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law  The class exclusively concerned prejudicial treatment of women under the laws of the United States, past and present   Born and Tucker were surprised to discover that there was no textbook on the issue at the time   Born is also one of the co-founders of the National Women's Law Center  Born also helped rewrite the American Bar Association rules to make it possible for more women and minorities to sit on federal bench



ground_truth: The belief entropy decreases more steadily.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Besides the Boeing C-17, what other transport aircraft is the IAF considering for acquisition?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2:  The final design contract was to be signed in July-August 2012  But the deadline has already passed  According to the Indian media reports, under the programme, India is expected to build 200 fighter jets at the cost of $30 billion 
FGFA is not the only Indo-Russia joint project  The two countries also signed an agreement on the joint development of MTA in 2007, based on Il-214 Russian plane  The cost of the $600 million project is being equally shared by the two countries  The MTA, when developed, will have ready market for 205 aircraft - 45 for the Indian Air Force, 100 for the Russian Air Force, and 60 more for exporting to friendly countries  The international market for MTA is estimated at 390 planes  Under the agreement, thirty percent of the annual production of planes could be exported to third countries 
The MTA was expected to go in service with the Russian and Indian Air Forces in 2015  But the project faced a number of problems, delaying the development of the MTA  The project got into rough weather after India felt there was nothing much for Indian engineers and scientists to do in the design and development of the MTA 
However, all the issues related to the project were resolved with the Russians when the HAL undertook to carry out design and development of its work-share of MTA at Aircraft R&D Centre at Bangalore  Russian Ilyushin Design Bureau and the Irkut Corporation and HAL are participating in the project  The first flight is expected to take place in 2017-18 
The MTA would replace the AN- 32 aircraft being used by the IAF  It will be used for both cargo and troop transportation, para-drop and air drop of supplies, including low-altitude parachute extraction system 
BrahMos missile exports a challenging proposition
Another key deal expected to be signed during the summit, is for the development of “BrahMos mini missile” by the Indo-Russian joint venture BrahMos Aerospace which manufactures supersonic cruise missile  BrahMos’ new CEO Sudhir Mishra recently said he was hopeful that a deal to develop the mini version of the missile will be signed during Putin’s summit with Modi 
“We are hoping to sign a tripartite agreement between DRDO, NPOM lab and BrahMos Aerospace during the planned visit of Russian President in December,” Mishra said 
He said that the new missile will have a speed of 3 5 mach and carry a payload of 300 km up to a range of 290 km  In size, it will be about half of the present missile, which is around 10 metres long  The missile can be integrated with different platforms, including submarines and FGFA  It is planned to be inducted into service by 2017 
Modi-Abbott to upgrade defence ties
A new dimension:
In a first, India and Australia will also set up a mechanism to discuss “synergies in integrating defence system”, including research and development cooperation on integrating defence equipment that both countries currently purchase, for example, U S’s C-17 Globemaster III, according to officials 
^^That report about MTA is fishy  First it says that India has nothing to learn from an existing design (duh) and then says the issue has been resolved  How? Next it says India's need is 45 planes to replace over 100 An-32s  It also speculates about the export potential which may be nonexistent unless we sell it for peanuts 
This is a scam which only aims to create screwdriver jobs at HAL, stall any attempt to introduce private players into the aviation market and continue the Russian gravy train  My fear is the Russkies have our testiments in a firm grip with key components of Brahmos, nuke subs, Su30mki etc and we may be jerked around 
(They need to be more definitive about "MTA" - Multirole vs  Medium)
The Indians had not selected an engine (among other things) for the MTA with the Russians  Perhaps that has been resolved now 
On export numbers, IIRC, it was the responsibility of Rosoboronexport  ?????
Kartik wrote: The MTA would replace the AN- 32 aircraft being used by the IAF  It will be used for both cargo and troop transportation, para-drop and air drop of supplies, including low-altitude parachute extraction system 
Pardon my ignorance  The Avro and An-32 have different upgrade paths  How are the replacements for these venerable aircraft different in terms of use cases in IAF  Cannot one platform replace both these types? (Either MTA or C-295)
In this case, I feel they should have just gone with screwdrivergiri (production tech) and got to market first  There is no jet-powered transporter in this range! Just license produce the IL-214 with the PD-14M, glass cockpit and a state-of-the-art COTS avionics computer 
In my view, it was a low hanging fruit, which they completely messed up! They could have learnt on how to adopt the plane for the 160-200 seater 
indranilroy wrote: They could have learnt on how to adopt the plane for the 160-200 seater 
Yes, the MTA project should fold the Avro, An-32 and the regional transport role and become a conversion project rather a development one  The driving numbers will come from the regional transport (thousands in India itself) rather than the Avro or medium transport roles (max 300 between them)  This changes the ball game and introduces all kinds of possibilities  But I'm pretty sure that the Il-214/MTA is not the way to go because it will take a decade or more to arrive  A good possibility was another Antonov, the An-148 but it has some mechanical glitches apparently besides being bogged down in the Ukraine mess  Maybe the Russians can "relocate" the aircraft to Russia? The other possibility is the BAe-146 which is ironically another Avro  We should remember that both the HS-748 "Avro" and An-32 were regional airliners that were converted to military use, not the other way around  HAL or a private firm will pick up a lot of experience in the conversion process itself 
The Sukhoi Superjet is already in production/orders,with over 100+ for Russian and intl  customers  It is ideal for regional transport,perfect for flights to smaller Tier-2/3 cities from metros  If we really want a regional jet this is the fastest way toi go,we can set up a manufacturing unti here for the same at an HAL unit 
Postby shaun » 05 Dec 2014 15:24
Its an international projects, with components outsourced from different international vendors   Over 30 foreign partnership companies are involved in the project and partly financed by Italy 
Sukhoi is good for passenger use but wont be suitable for military, rough field use  The shoulder wing jets like the An-148 have slower speeds and better ground clearance  The Bae-146 was usedby Druk Air in Bhutan so it should do OK in the ALGs  If we don't fold our requirements then we should go with something like the Superjet which we will at least be able to make in India and also modify to stretched versions  Unless we have a clear path to operational clearance within 10 yrs for the RTA project vetted by our top industrial houses, it is pie-in-the-sky and should be dropped  The RTA will be big enough to keep 2-3 factories humming and leapfrog our capabilities  If we don't get our act together almost immediately, we will miss the boat, just like our trainer fiascos 
I don't think Superjet fits into our scheme of things  We should think as a country and see to it that our programs don't trample on each other 
First, the more certain ones:
1  Mahindras NM5 and Airvans can care of the low-cost but sturdy 5,8,10 and 18-seater section 
2  Saras had such great potential for being the high performance 14-18 seater  But I have almost given up on it  This section will most probably be taken up by the Tata-built Do-228 NG 
3  We should standardize the C-295 as the Avro/An-32 replacement and create a 70-80 seater variant out of it 
And then the more wishful ones:
1  If the RTA is going to be a jet, then make it a 100-130 seater  I don't expect the first prototype to take the sky before 2025  I feel it is too big of a jump where we don't even have a base  With LCA, at least we were at least license producing other fighters 
4  Building on the IL-214, the MTA was on a more sure footing  But, I can't see how the first prototype can to take to the sky before 2019(more than 10 years since MTAL was formed)! If the transport plane materializes, then one can imagine making a civilian 150-200 seater version of the same  But this program needs a push  Will Putin's visit be able to galvanize this into the next symbol of Indo-Russian cooperation  Probably not!
Postby GeorgeWelch » 12 Dec 2014 23:39
http://www ctvnews ca/canada/defence-de     -1 2144472
The Defence Department intends to purchase a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, a large military transport plane that comes with a price tag of just under $200 million, CTV News has learned
It's difficult to get a good count, but by some sources, if this and the 4 Australia planes go through, there will only be 5 left 
X-Posting from FGFA thread 
Despite Putin’s visit, two pacts on military aircraft still in doldrums
President Vladimir Putin may have come and gone but stalemate largely persists over two key long-pending India-Russian defence projects, the fifth-generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) and military multirole transport aircraft (MTA) 
The deadlock over the MTA, which were initially envisaged to gradually replace IAF's ageing fleet of the medium-lift AN-32 aircraft, seems to be much more serious  India now wants to ascertain the cost viability of the twin-engine transport aircraft in comparison to similar planes available in the market 
There are also questions about the MTA's "predicted timelines for delivery" as well as its failure to meet the high-altitude requirements, which need to be answered before India even thinks of inking the full-scale contract for the project, said sources 
Postby Gyan » 13 Dec 2014 12:29
indranilroy wrote: I don't think Superjet fits into our scheme of things  We should think as a country and see to it that our programs don't trample on each other 
1  Mahindras NM5 and Airvans can care of the low-cost but sturdy 5,8,10 and 18-seater section  Righto
2  Saras had such great potential for being the high performance 14-18 seater  But I have almost given up on it  This section will most probably be taken up by the Tata-built Do-228 NG  We need future extended variants of presurrized aircraft like 30 seater Saras and say 30 seater unpressurized Do-328 NG 
3  We should standardize the C-295 as the Avro/An-32 replacement and create a Civilian turboprop pressurized cabin 70-80 seater variant out of it 
1  If the RTA is going to be a jet, then make it a 100-130 seater  Agreeeeeed I don't expect the first prototype to take the sky before 2025  I feel it is too big of a jump where we don't even have a base  With LCA, at least we were at least license producing other fighters  Though I think that we should participate in Russian MS-21 and also the wide body follow on 
4  Building on the IL-214, the MTA was on a more sure footing  But, I can't see how the first prototype can to take to the sky before 2019(more than 10 years since MTAL was formed)! If the transport plane materializes, then one can imagine making a civilian 150-200 seater version of the same  Though I think that we should participate in Russian MS-21 and also the wide body follow on  But this program needs a push  Will Putin's visit be able to galvanize this into the next symbol of Indo-Russian cooperation  Probably not!
Absence of any specifics on Sukhoi Superjet, MS-21, Wide body aircraft, Mi-38, MRTA, FGFA, even after Putin visit is very disappointing 
FlightGlobal- Boeing sitting on 8 unsold C-17s
By: Dan ParsonsWashington DCSource: Flightglobal com
This story is sourced from Flightglobal com 12 hours agoBoeing has sold two more C-17 transports to an undisclosed customer, but it will likely end the year with eight unsold white tails 
There are 10 Boeing C-17 airlifters in various stages of assembly at the company’s Long Beach, California, production facility 
Two of the aircraft are spoken for by an unnamed customer, Boeing says  Boeing is trying to sell off the other eight white tails, which will be the last produced before the factory is shuttered sometime in the summer of 2015 
The 279th – and final – C-17 fuselage will be mated to its wings in January or February, programme spokeswoman Tiffany Pitts tells Flightglobal  The operation is California’s last remaining aircraft production line and the lone widebody military aircraft production line in the USA, according to Boeing 
At least two countries – Australia and Canada – have publicly announced an intention to purchase a C-17, though neither factor into Boeing’s future planning, Pitts says  Until contracts are finalised, the number available remains eight, she says  The Royal Canadian Air Force already has four C-17As, according to Flightglobal’s World Air Forces 2014 directory 
Canadian news outlets reported earlier in December that the air force would buy one C-17 with money left over at the end of 2015 
Australia is further along with its bid to purchase C-17s  The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency in November announced Australia was approved to buy up to four C-17s and support equipment for $1 6 billion 
Boeing has plans to store any unsold C-17s following closure of its production line, Pitts says 
“I’m hoping they all will be sold before then, but we’ve had plans in place for a very long time to store and maintain the aircraft if that doesn’t happen,” she says 
the IAF will need to factor in the demand vs availability of C-17s and stock up with a follow-on order quickly  The initial plan to have 16 C-17s may not fructify, considering that there are just 8 left now, with Australia having announced plans to buy 4 more 
why are they closing the line if it has demands ???
Real estate sales tactics probably  Buy now last 8 3bhk flats Saar 
krishnan wrote: why are they closing the line if it has demands ???
It requires 3 years lead time to order raw materials/parts from all of its sub-vendors  All current firm orders have been fulfilled, and no new orders have come  Anticipating a need for a few more aircrafts, they produced 10 extra (self-funded) units before production winded down  Bottom line is they don't make money keeping an idle plant around with all its employees and infrastructure  At most what they will likely do is keep a limited infrastructure around for a few more years in case a bunch of new orders come  They can then see if it makes business sense to re-open the plant 
Postby Aditya_V » 17 Dec 2014 12:19
Wish this can be brought to the notice of Journos/ Poster when slamming LCA/ Arjun and other indigenous projects  If there are no orders there will be no efficiency 
Dec 10, 2014 :: Russia launches Il-76MDM upgrade programme
Russia's Ilyushin has started to upgrade a first Russian Air Force (VVS) Ilyushin Il-76MD 'Candid' military transport aircraft to Il-76MDM standard, company officials have told IHS Jane's   The main features of the upgrade include refurbished engines and upgraded avionics 
The modernisation is being conducted at the VVS's Military Transport Aviation (MTA) maintenance facility based at the Ilyushin division in Zhukovsky city near Moscow 
A senior Ilyushin official told IHS Jane's that the upgrade of the first aircraft will be finished in 18 months  Subsequent aircraft will take less time to complete the process, however  When the modernisation is finished the initial Il-76MDM will undergo state trials  The upgrade process for subsequent aircraft will begin when the trials programme is completed 
IHS Jane's was previously told by a VVS senior official that the modernisation of 41 MTA Il-76MDs is planned by 2020  While the Il-76MDM upgrade retains the old D-30KP engine (compared with the PS-90A engine equipping the new Il-76MD-90A/Il-476), the modernisation effort should match the aircraft's onboard electronics with those of the newbuild Il-76MD-90A  This and other efforts mean the cost of modernising the Il-76MD to Il-76MDM is only a third of that of a newbuild Il-76MD-90A 
The existing D-30KP engines are to be enhanced to increase their service life  The overall aircraft's service life will be extended by 15 years 
The upgrade works are planned to be conducted in an aviation repair factory or in the MTA's aircraft maintenance facility  As a result, the Ulyanovsk-based Aviastar-SP plant, which is building the Il-76MD-90A, is not involved in the Il-76MD to Il-76MDM modernisation programme 
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Context 3: 

During her long legal career, and into her retirement, Born did much pro bono and other types of volunteer work  She was active in the American Bar Association, the largest professional organization of lawyers in the United States   Initially Born was named a member of the governing council of the ABA's Individual Rights Section, eventually becoming chairperson   Born and Tucker founded the ABA Women's Caucus, the first organization of female lawyers in the ABA   She held several other senior positions in the ABA, including being named the first woman member of the ABA's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary   As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Born provided testimony and opinion on persons nominated for federal judgeships  In 1980 she was named chair of the committee   As chair of the committee, Born was invited to address the U S  Congress regarding the nomination of Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to the U S  Supreme Court 

In 1993, Born's name was floated as a possible candidate for Attorney General of the United States, but Janet Reno was nominated 

In July 2009, Nancy Pelosi appointed Brooksley Born as a commissioner to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) 

Born and the OTC derivatives market
Born was appointed to the CFTC on April 15, 1994, by President Bill Clinton  Due to litigation against Bankers Trust Company by Procter and Gamble and other corporate clients, Born and her team at the CFTC sought comments on the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, a first step in the process of writing CFTC regulations to supplement the existing regulations of the Federal Reserve System,  the Options Clearing Corporation, and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners  Born was particularly concerned about swaps, financial instruments that are traded over the counter between banks, insurance companies or other funds or companies, and thus have no transparency except to the two counterparties and the counterparties' regulators, if any   CFTC regulation was strenuously opposed by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, and by Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers  On May 7, 1998, former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt joined Rubin and Greenspan in objecting to the issuance of the CFTC's concept release  Their response dismissed Born's analysis and focused on the hypothetical possibility that CFTC regulation of swaps and other OTC derivative instruments could create a "legal uncertainty" regarding such financial instruments,  hypothetically reducing the value of the instruments  They argued that the imposition of regulatory costs would "stifle financial innovation" and encourage financial capital to transfer its  transactions offshore  The disagreement between Born and the Executive Office's top economic policy advisors has been described not only as a classic Washington turf war, but also a war of ideologies,  insofar as it is possible to argue that Born's actions were consistent with Keynesian and neoclassical economics while Greenspan, Rubin, Levitt, and Summers consistently espoused neoliberal, and neoconservative policies 

In 1998, a trillion-dollar hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was near collapse   Using mathematical models to calculate debt risk, LTCM used derivatives to leverage $5 billion into more than $1 trillion, doing business with fifteen of Wall Street's largest financial institutions   The derivative transactions were not regulated, nor were investors able to evaluate LTCM's exposures   Born stated, "I thought that LTCM was exactly what I had been worried about"   In the last weekend of September 1998, the President's working group was told that the entire American economy hung in the balance   After intervention by the Federal Reserve, the crisis was averted   In congressional hearings into the crisis, Greenspan acknowledged that language had been introduced into an agriculture bill that would prevent CFTC from regulating the derivatives which were at the center of the crisis that threatened the US economy   U S  Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) asked "How many more failures do you think we'd have to have before some regulation in this area might be appropriate?"  In response, Greenspan brushed aside the substance of Born's warnings with the simple assertion that "the degree of supervision of regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives market is quite adequate to maintain a degree of stability in the system"  Born's warning was that there wasn't any regulation of them   Born's chief of staff, Michael Greenberger summed up Greenspan's position this way: "Greenspan didn't believe that fraud was something that needed to be enforced, and he assumed she probably did  And of course, she did "  Under heavy pressure from the financial lobby, legislation prohibiting regulation of derivatives by Born's agency was passed by the Congress



ground_truth: The IAF is considering the acquisition of the Airbus A330 MRTT (Multi-Role Tanker Transport) besides the Boeing C-17.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What hedge fund's collapse in 1998 highlighted the need for regulation of derivatives?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 3:   Born resigned on June 1, 1999 

The derivatives market continued to grow yearly throughout both terms of George W  Bush's administration  On September 15, 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers forced a broad recognition of a financial crisis in both the US and world capital markets   As Lehman Brothers' failure temporarily reduced financial capital's confidence, a number of newspaper articles and television programs suggested that the failure's possible causes included the conflict between the CFTC and the other regulators Faiola, Anthony, Nakashima, Ellen and Drew, Jill  The Crash: Risk and Regulation - What Went Wrong, The Washington Post, October 15, 2008 

Born declined to publicly comment on the unfolding 2008 crisis until March 2009, when she said: "The market grew so enormously, with so little oversight and regulation, that it made the financial crisis much deeper and more pervasive than it otherwise would have been " She also lamented the influence of Wall Street lobbyists on the process and the refusal of regulators to discuss even modest reforms 

An October 2009 Frontline documentary titled "The Warning"  described Born's thwarted efforts to regulate and bring transparency to the derivatives market, and the continuing opposition thereto  The program concluded with an excerpted interview with Born sounding another warning: "I think we will have continuing danger from these markets and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis -- may differ in details but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over, until we learn from experience "

In 2009 Born, along with Sheila Bair of the FDIC, was awarded the John F  Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award in recognition of the "political courage she demonstrated in sounding early warnings about conditions that contributed" to the 2007-08 financial crisis   According to Caroline Kennedy, "Brooksley Born recognized that the financial security of all Americans was being put at risk by the greed, negligence and opposition of  powerful and well connected interests     The catastrophic financial events of recent months have  proved them [Born and Sheila Bair] right "  One member of the President's working group had a change of heart about Brooksley Born   SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt stated "I've come to know her as one of the most capable, dedicated, intelligent and committed public servants that I have ever come to know", adding that "I could have done much better  I could have made a difference" in response to her warnings 

In 2010, a documentary film Inside Job further alleged that derivatives regulation was ineffective from the Clinton administration on  Along with fellow whistleblower, former IMF Chief Economist Raghuram Rajan, who was also scorned by the economic establishment, Brooksley Born was cited as one of the authorities arguing that financial derivatives increase economic risk 

 Personal life 
Born is married to Alexander E  Bennett (also retired from Arnold & Porter)   She has five adult children - two from a previous marriage to Jacob Landau and three stepchildren  Notably, Born was named a partner at Arnold & Porter while working part-time so she could raise her two young children   When both of her children were school-age, Born returned to practice full-time 

References

External links
Attorney profile at Arnold & Porter
Brooksley Born (2009 Winner) of the Profiles in Courage Award, with acceptance speech transcript and NECN video

Profile at MarketsWiki
Speeches and statements
"Testimony Of Brooksley Born Chairperson of the CFTC Concerning The Over-The-Counter Derivatives Market", before the House Committee On Banking And Financial Services, July 24, 1998 
"The Lessons of Long Term Capital Management L P ", Remarks of Brooksley Born, Chairperson of the CFTC, Chicago-Kent-IIT Commodities Law Institute, Chicago, Illinois, October 15, 1998 
 Interview: Brooksley Born for "PBS Frontline: The Warning", PBS, (streaming VIDEO 1 hour), October 20, 2009 
Articles
Manuel Roig-Franzia  "Credit Crisis Cassandra:Brooksley Born's Unheeded Warning Is a Rueful Echo 10 Years On", The Washington Post, May 26, 2009
 Taibbi, Matt  "The Great American Bubble Machine", Rolling Stone'', July 9–23, 2009

1940 births
American women lawyers
Arnold & Porter people
Clinton administration personnel
Columbus School of Law faculty
Commodity Futures Trading Commission personnel
Heads of United States federal agencies
Lawyers from San Francisco
Living people
Stanford Law School alumni
21st-century American women




ground_truth: Long Term Capital Management (LTCM).