85,625 research outputs found
Narrative based Postdictive Reasoning for Cognitive Robotics
Making sense of incomplete and conflicting narrative knowledge in the
presence of abnormalities, unobservable processes, and other real world
considerations is a challenge and crucial requirement for cognitive robotics
systems. An added challenge, even when suitably specialised action languages
and reasoning systems exist, is practical integration and application within
large-scale robot control frameworks.
In the backdrop of an autonomous wheelchair robot control task, we report on
application-driven work to realise postdiction triggered abnormality detection
and re-planning for real-time robot control: (a) Narrative-based knowledge
about the environment is obtained via a larger smart environment framework; and
(b) abnormalities are postdicted from stable-models of an answer-set program
corresponding to the robot's epistemic model. The overall reasoning is
performed in the context of an approximate epistemic action theory based
planner implemented via a translation to answer-set programming.Comment: Commonsense Reasoning Symposium, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 201
Contingent support: exploring ontological politics/extending management
This paper is located within the critical management tradition of management education/development. The paper seeks to introduce the neglected area of Actor Network Theory and Molâs anti-foundationalist ontological politics and demonstrates their potential to developing alternative critical pedagogy and management practice. Following a discussion of problem-based learning, the paper goes on to introduce the emergent pedagogic practice termed contingent support. Through a series of vignettes drawn from fieldwork collected from a second year undergraduate decision making module, the paper discusses carefully how the practice termed contingent support is informed by Actor Network Theory and ontological politics in particular. The paper goes onto reveal the significance of contingent support sensibilities of materiality, situatedness and performance and shows how they can give a new vigour to educators interested in developing more responsible management. Finally, the paper considers contingent supportâs transformational potential and sets an agenda for future researc
From perception to action and vice versa: a new architecture showing how perception and action can modulate each other simultaneously
Presentado en: 6th European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR) Sep 25-27, 2013 Barcelona, SpainArtificial vision systems can not process all the
information that they receive from the world in real time
because it is highly expensive and inefficient in terms of
computational cost. However, inspired by biological perception
systems, it is possible to develop an artificial attention model
able to select only the relevant part of the scene, as human
vision does. From the Automated Planning point of view, a
relevant area can be seen as an area where the objects involved
in the execution of a plan are located. Thus, the planning system
should guide the attention model to track relevant objects. But,
at the same time, the perceived objects may constrain or provide
new information that could suggest the modification of a current
plan. Therefore, a plan that is being executed should be adapted
or recomputed taking into account actual information perceived
from the world. In this work, we introduce an architecture that
creates a symbiosis between the planning and the attention
modules of a robotic system, linking visual features with high
level behaviours. The architecture is based on the interaction of
an oversubscription planner, that produces plans constrained
by the information perceived from the vision system, and an
object-based attention system, able to focus on the relevant
objects of the plan being executed.Spanish MINECO projects TIN2008-06196, TIN2012-38079-C03-03 and TIN2012-38079-C03-02. Universidad de MĂĄlaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tec
Recommended from our members
Towards a People's Social Epidemiology: Envisioning a More Inclusive and Equitable Future for Social Epi Research and Practice in the 21st Century.
Social epidemiology has made critical contributions to understanding population health. However, translation of social epidemiology science into action remains a challenge, raising concerns about the impacts of the field beyond academia. With so much focus on issues related to social position, discrimination, racism, power, and privilege, there has been surprisingly little deliberation about the extent and value of social inclusion and equity within the field itself. Indeed, the challenge of translation/action might be more readily met through re-envisioning the role of the people within the research/practice enterprise-reimagining what "social" could, or even should, mean for the future of the field. A potential path forward rests at the nexus of social epidemiology, community-based participatory research (CBPR), and information and communication technology (ICT). Here, we draw from social epidemiology, CBPR, and ICT literatures to introduce A People's Social Epi-a multi-tiered framework for guiding social epidemiology in becoming more inclusive, equitable, and actionable for 21st century practice. In presenting this framework, we suggest the value of taking participatory, collaborative approaches anchored in CBPR and ICT principles and technological affordances-especially within the context of place-based and environmental research. We believe that such approaches present opportunities to create a social epidemiology that is of, with, and by the people-not simply about them. In this spirit, we suggest 10 ICT tools to "socialize" social epidemiology and outline 10 ways to move towards A People's Social Epi in practice
Recommended from our members
Poststructuralism against poststructuralism: Actor-network theory, organizations and economic markets
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 The Author.In recent years, actor-network theory (ANT) has become an increasingly influential theoretical framework through which to analyse economic markets and organizations. Indeed, with its emphasis on the power of social and natural concrete âthingsâ to become contingently enrolled in different networks, many argue that ANT successfully draws attention to the complex intermeshing of new technologies and social actors in organizations and markets across spatial divides from the local to the global. This article argues, however, that within its own method of abstraction and research methodology, ANT separates âconcreteâ and âcontingentâ economic markets and organizations from their abstract, necessary and virtual capitalist form. This means that ANT will tend to over-identify with how concrete-contingent actor-networks are performed in empirical economic markets and organizations at the expense of analysing how such empirical contexts are also internally mediated through abstract capitalist processes such as that of surplus value extraction. This, in turn, creates a number of difficulties in how ANT investigates economic markets and organizations. These critical points are made by recourse to the Marxist poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari as well as through conventional Marxist ideas
Recommended from our members
Languages at war: policies and practices of language contacts in conflict
'Alive after five' : constructing the neoliberal night in Newcastle upon Tyne.
The development of the ânight-time economyâ in the UK through the 1990s has been associated with neoliberal urban governance. Academics have, however, begun to question the use and the scope of the concept âneoliberalismâ. In this paper, I identify two common approaches to studying neoliberalism, one exploring neoliberalism as a series of policy networks, the other exploring neoliberalism as the governance of subjectivities. I argue that to understand the urban night, we need to explore both these senses of âneoliberalismâ.
As a case study, I take the âAlive After Fiveâ project, organised by the Business Improvement District in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which sought to extend shopping hours in order to encourage more people to use the city at night. Drawing from Actor-Network-Theory, I explore the planning, the translation, and the practice of this new project. In doing so, I explore the on-going nature and influence of neoliberal policy on the urban night in the UK
Constructing Conditional Plans by a Theorem-Prover
The research on conditional planning rejects the assumptions that there is no
uncertainty or incompleteness of knowledge with respect to the state and
changes of the system the plans operate on. Without these assumptions the
sequences of operations that achieve the goals depend on the initial state and
the outcomes of nondeterministic changes in the system. This setting raises the
questions of how to represent the plans and how to perform plan search. The
answers are quite different from those in the simpler classical framework. In
this paper, we approach conditional planning from a new viewpoint that is
motivated by the use of satisfiability algorithms in classical planning.
Translating conditional planning to formulae in the propositional logic is not
feasible because of inherent computational limitations. Instead, we translate
conditional planning to quantified Boolean formulae. We discuss three
formalizations of conditional planning as quantified Boolean formulae, and
present experimental results obtained with a theorem-prover
Evidence about the policy assumptions about lay behaviour
This deliverable provides an analysis of the early fieldwork reports that have been produced as part of WP3. Its focus is on identifying the assumptions that are evident in the approaches of the policy partners to human behaviour around sustainability. The themes of this early work will form one focus of subsequent interactions with the policy partners and will be used as the basis for developing a schedule for further investigations to be deployed with policy makers in each countr
Recommended from our members
Land re-use, complexity and actor-networks: a framework for research
This paper will present a conceptual framework for the examination of land redevelopment based on a complex systems/networks approach. As Alvin Toffler insightfully noted, modern scientific enquiry has become exceptionally good at splitting problems into pieces but has forgotten how to put the pieces back together. Twenty-five years after his remarks, governments and corporations faced with the requirements of sustainability are struggling to promote an âintegratedâ or âholisticâ approach to tackling problems. Despite the talk, both practice and research provide few platforms that allow for âjoined upâ thinking and action. With socio-economic phenomena, such as land redevelopment, promising prospects open up when we assume that their constituents can make up complex systems whose emergent properties are more than the sum of the parts and whose behaviour is inherently difficult to predict. A review of previous research shows that it has mainly focused on idealised, âmechanicalâ views of property development processes that fail to recognise in full the relationships between actors, the structures created and their emergent qualities. When reality failed to live up to the expectations of these theoretical constructs then somebody had to be blamed for it: planners, developers, politicians. However, from a âsyntheticâ point of view the agents and networks involved in property development can be seen as constituents of structures that perform complex processes. These structures interact, forming new more complex structures and networks. Redevelopment then can be conceptualised as a process of transformation: a complex system, a âdissipativeâ structure involving developers, planners, landowners, state agencies etc., unlocks the potential of previously used sites, transforms space towards a higher order of complexity and âconsumesâ but also âcreatesâ different forms of capital in the process. Analysis of network relations point toward the âdualismâ of structure and agency in these processes of system transformation and change. Insights from actor network theory can be conjoined with notions of complexity and chaos to build an understanding of the ways in which actors actively seek to shape these structures and systems, whilst at the same time are recursively shaped by them in their strategies and actions.
This approach transcends the blame game and allows for inter-disciplinary inputs to be placed within a broader explanatory framework that does away with many past dichotomies. Better understanding of the interactions between actors and the emergent qualities of the networks they form can improve our comprehension of the complex socio-spatial phenomena that redevelopment comprises. The insights that this framework provides when applied in UK institutional investment into redevelopment are considered to be significant
- âŠ