Cotton Agriculture and the Function of Gravel Mulch in the Northern Rio Grande

The site of Poshu’Owingeh was one of several ancestral Tewa villages to experience rapid growth in the 14th and 15th centuries A.D. in northern New Mexico. Recent research has proposed that this growth was one aspect of a trend characterized by nonlinear socioeconomic change produced by increasing population size and connectivity. Agriculture, commodity production, and exchange are fundamental to this model, but direct evidence for intensification is limited and no empirical data exists for the function and mechanics of the technologies which are supposed to have supported surplus production. This research addresses the problem by examining paleobotanical and soil evidence for the function of gravel mulch, a unique agricultural technology hypothesized to have supported cotton agriculture in portions of the Northern Rio Grande. Physical soil properties and base cation ratios are used to reconstruct the irrigation effect of gravel mulch, and soil nutrient levels are measured to assess change in soil quality associated with cultivation. Fossil pollen assemblages recovered from agricultural soil layers are used to determine the mix of crops grown in gravel mulch fields. A spatial database of archaeological sites is used to reconstruct Puebloan population dynamics in the Tewa Basin. This is compared to published estimates of population growth, the timing of socioeconomic developments in the region, and climate reconstructions. Fossil pollen concentrations indicate that cotton was the main crop grown at Poshu’Owingeh. The substantial increase in the ratio of cotton to maize and a decrease in the diversity of economic wild plant taxa at Poshu’Owingeh suggest cotton cultivation was more intensive here than other documented sites in the region. Soil analysis revealed no evidence for degradation associated with gravel mulch. Cation ratios and particle size distribution in the A horizon suggest that gravel mulch continues to enhance subsurface water flux. I estimate that the runoff required to produce the sodium leaching observed in mulched profiles is generated by relatively intense precipitation generated by monsoon storms. Peak rates for the spatial expansion of farming populations responsible for the construction of the gravel mulch-cotton fields follows rapid population growth in the great Tewa Basin, is coincident with the intensification of regional exchange networks, and strengthening of the North American Monsoon. Given the mechanics of agricultural technology documented in this study, and hypotheses for the importance of cotton in the regional economy; it is concluded that population dynamics, climate change, and human niche construction interacted played a significant role in social change and economic expansion in the late precontact Northern Rio Grande

Falsification of Cyber-Physical Systems with Robustness-Guided Black-Box Checking

For exhaustive formal verification, industrial-scale cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are often too large and complex, and lightweight alternatives (e.g., monitoring and testing) have attracted the attention of both industrial practitioners and academic researchers. Falsification is one popular testing method of CPSs utilizing stochastic optimization. In state-of-the-art falsification methods, the result of the previous falsification trials is discarded, and we always try to falsify without any prior knowledge. To concisely memorize such prior information on the CPS model and exploit it, we employ Black-box checking (BBC), which is a combination of automata learning and model checking. Moreover, we enhance BBC using the robust semantics of STL formulas, which is the essential gadget in falsification. Our experiment results suggest that our robustness-guided BBC outperforms a state-of-the-art falsification tool.Comment: Accepted to HSCC 202

A Gentle Introduction to Epistemic Planning: The DEL Approach

Epistemic planning can be used for decision making in multi-agent situations with distributed knowledge and capabilities. Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) has been shown to provide a very natural and expressive framework for epistemic planning. In this paper, we aim to give an accessible introduction to DEL-based epistemic planning. The paper starts with the most classical framework for planning, STRIPS, and then moves towards epistemic planning in a number of smaller steps, where each step is motivated by the need to be able to model more complex planning scenarios.Comment: In Proceedings M4M9 2017, arXiv:1703.0173

How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program

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