28,125 research outputs found
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
Highly focused document retrieval in aerospace engineering : user interaction design and evaluation
Purpose ā This paper seeks to describe the preliminary studies (on both users and data), the design and evaluation of the K-Search system for searching legacy documents in aerospace engineering. Real-world reports of jet engine maintenance challenge the current indexing practice, while real usersā tasks require retrieving the information in the proper context. K-Search is currently in use in Rolls-Royce plc and has evolved to include other tools for knowledge capture and management.
Design/methodology/approach ā Semantic Web techniques have been used to automatically extract information from the reports while maintaining the original context, allowing a more focused retrieval than with more traditional techniques. The paper combines semantic search with classical information retrieval to increase search effectiveness. An innovative user interface has been designed to take advantage of this hybrid search technique. The interface is designed to allow a flexible and
personal approach to searching legacy data.
Findings ā The user evaluation showed that the system is effective and well received by users. It also shows that different people look at the same data in different ways and make different use of the same system depending on their individual needs, influenced by their job profile and personal attitude.
Research limitations/implications ā This study focuses on a specific case of an enterprise working in aerospace engineering. Although the findings are likely to be shared with other engineering domains (e.g. mechanical, electronic), the study does not expand the evaluation to different settings.
Originality/value ā The study shows how real context of use can provide new and unexpected challenges to researchers and how effective solutions can then be adopted and used in organizations.</p
Asynchronous Graph Pattern Matching on Multiprocessor Systems
Pattern matching on large graphs is the foundation for a variety of
application domains. Strict latency requirements and continuously increasing
graph sizes demand the usage of highly parallel in-memory graph processing
engines that need to consider non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and concurrency
issues to scale up on modern multiprocessor systems. To tackle these aspects,
graph partitioning becomes increasingly important. Hence, we present a
technique to process graph pattern matching on NUMA systems in this paper. As a
scalable pattern matching processing infrastructure, we leverage a
data-oriented architecture that preserves data locality and minimizes
concurrency-related bottlenecks on NUMA systems. We show in detail, how graph
pattern matching can be asynchronously processed on a multiprocessor system.Comment: 14 Pages, Extended version for ADBIS 201
A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures
This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverableās authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes
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Update of time-invalid information in Knowledge Bases through Mobile Agents
In this paper, we investigate the use of a mobile, autonomous agent to update knowledge bases containing statements that lose validity with time. This constitutes a key issue in terms of knowledge acquisition and representation, because dynamic data need to be constantly re-evaluated to allow reasoning. We focus on the way to represent the time- validity of statements in a knowledge base, and on the use of a mobile agent to update time-invalid statements while planning for āinformation freshnessā as the main objective. We propose to use Semantic Web standards, namely the RDF model and the SPARQL query language, to represent time-validity of information and decide how long this will be considered valid. Using such a representation, a plan is created for the agent to update the knowledge, focusing mostly on guaranteeing the time-validity of the information collected. To show the feasibility of our approach and discuss its limitations, we test its implementation on scenarios in the working environment of our research lab, where an autonomous robot is used to sense temperature, humidity, wifi signal and number of people on demand, updating the knowledge base with time- valid information
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