860,672 research outputs found

    Designing whole-systems commissioning: lessons from the English experience

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    The paucity of formal evidence, allied to the requirement for strategies that are sensitive to local history and context, means that a ‘blueprint’ for successful strategic commissioning is not currently available for adoption. We are therefore confined to proposing ‘design principles’ for those seeking to embark upon a transition towards a whole systems approach to strategic commissioning. People and relationships are of critical importance all the way through the chain from strategic commissioning to micro-commissioning. Most crucially, experience suggests that structural solutions alone cannot deliver effective relationships and will not be effective when relationships are neglected. The need to ensure staff, partner and political buy-in suggests that relationship management and consensus-building are an integral component of the leadership role in moving toward strategic commissioning. As with any major re-organisation, the move to strategic commissioning is essentially a change management initiative and therefore will stand or fall according to whether it adheres to good practice in the change management process. Central to this, and to achieving commissioning outcomes, is the requirement for meaningful service user and public engagement. Effective commissioning emphasizes individual capabilities as well as needs, and community assets as well as deficits and problems. Adoption of strategic commissioning approaches is still at the developmental and learning stage and arguably all structural arrangements should be regarded as transitional

    Research Opportunities in Contextualized Fusion Systems. The Harbor Surveillance Case

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    Proceedings of: International Workshop of Intelligent Systems for Context-Based Information Fusion (ISCIF 2011) associated to 11th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN, Torremolinos-MĂĄlaga, Spain, June 8-10, 2011.The design of modern Information Fusion (IF) systems involves a complex process to achieve the requirements in the selected applications, especially in domains with a high degree of customization. In general, an advanced fusion system is required to show robust, context-sensitive behavior and efficient performance in real time. It is necessary to exploit all potentially relevant sensor and contextual information in the most appropriate way. Among modern applications for IF technology is the case of surveillance of complex harbor environments that are comprised of large numbers of surface vessels, high-value and dangerous facilities, and many people. The particular conditions and open needs in the harbor scenario are reviewed in this paper, highlighting research opportunities to explore in the development of fusion systems in this area.This work was supported in part by Projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC and CAM CONTEXTS S2009/TIC-1485.Publicad

    Strategies for engagement on adaptation and mitigation with national and EU policy makers and with the agro-food chain sector

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    A process for the strategic mapping of national and EU policy makers to be engaged in an interactive and iterative process of learning was designed, based on literature review and specific experience of some participants. In this first intermediate version, we propose a stakeholder mapping process design which will ideally lead to setting the boundaries of context-sensitive systems of interest for pilot actions or interdisciplinary case studies. The mapping exercise will be tested by participant

    Cognitively Sensitive User Interface for Command and Control Applications

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    While there are broad guidelines for display or user interface design, creating effective human-computer interfaces for complex, dynamic systems control is challenging. Ad hoc approaches which consider the human as an afterthought are limiting. This research proposed a systematic approach to human / computer interface design that focuses on both the semantic and syntactic aspects of display design in the context of human-in-the-loop supervisory control of intelligent, autonomous multi-agent simulated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A systematic way to understand what needs to be displayed, how it should be displayed, and how the integrated system needs to be assessed is outlined through a combination of concepts from naturalistic decision making, semiotic analysis, and situational awareness literature. A new sprocket-based design was designed and evaluated in this research. For the practical designer, this research developed a systematic, iterative design process: design using cognitive sensitive principles, test the new interface in a laboratory situation; bring in subject matter experts to examine the interface in isolation; and finally, incorporate the resulting feedback into a full-size simulation. At each one of these steps, the operator, the engineer and the designer reexamined the results

    Aristotle on Epigenesis

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    It has become somewhat of a platitude to call Aristotle the first epigenesist insofar as he thought form and structure emerged gradually from an unorganized, amorphous embryo. But modern biology now recognizes two senses of “epigenesis”. The first is this more familiar idea about the gradual emergence of form and structure, which is traditionally opposed to the idea of preformationism. But modern biologists also use “epigenesis” to emphasize the context-dependency of the process itself. Used in this sense development is not simply the unfolding of a pre-determined sequence of changes specified in advance by the organism’s genotype. It is also sensitive to inputs from the internal and external environment, which help determine in real-time which of the many potential developmental pathways are actualized during the process. Within this paradigm developing embryos are viewed as dynamic and responsive systems that react to inputs from the internal and external environment ‘on the fly’. In this paper I argue that, while Aristotle was an epigenesist in the first sense, he would have rejected epigenesis in the more modern sense. First, Aristotle’s model of choice for a developing embryo is the automaton that executes a set of preset movements (GA 734b9-13, 741b7-15). The automatons he has in mind are not dynamic AI systems capable of modifying their behaviour on the fly in response to environmental cues but completely deterministic mechanisms whose movements are fixed by their original design. Second, given Aristotle’s views about the different kinds of causal powers there are, it looks like only intentional agents endowed with actual decision-making powers could be capable of the sort of plasticity at the core of a more dynamic epigenesis. For that kind of epigenesis requires powers for alternative outcomes, and Aristotle is explicit that such powers require rational desires (Ï€ÏÎżÎ±ÎŻÏÎ”ÏƒÎčς) that control which of those alternatives to bring about. If I am right, then he could not have made sense of the idea of a developing embryo (as a non-intentional system) making adjustments to its phenotype on the fly in response to emerging problems and opportunities, given the conceptual resources available to him

    INTELLIGENT AND ADAPTIVE FUZZY CONTROL SYSTEM FOR ENERGY EFFICIENT HOMES

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    “Smart houses” have widely established their position as a research field during the last decade. Nowadays the technical solutions related to energy resource management are being rapidly developed and integrated into the daily lives of people. The energy resource management systems use sensor networks for receiving and processing information during the realia time. Smart house adaptive and intelligent solutions has advanced towards common environment, which can take care of the inhabitants’ well-being in numerous ways. This paper propose to use a context sensitive and proactive fuzzy control system for controlling the automation processes in smart house environment. The designed monitoring system has adaptive and intelligent options, and it can operate using real time information received from sensors. The system is designed to operate fully in the background and can be installed to any exiting working system. This paper describes a central heating boiler control system implemented using the fuzzy control system designed. Author concentrates on the basic operation of such systems and present findings from the design process and initial tests

    Ambient intelligence: applications and privacy policies

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    Proceedings of: 12th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, University of Salamanca (Spain), 4th-6th June, 2014. Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Context-based Information Fusion (ISCIF 2014)In this paper, we present a complete overview of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) focused in its applications, considering the involved domain and technologies. The applications include AmI at home, care of elderly and people with disabilities, healthcare, education, business, public services, leisure and entertainment. The aim of this survey of AmI’s applications is to show its socials and ethical implications and specially privacy issues. Intelligent Environments (IE) collect and process a massive amount of person-related and sensitive data. These data must ensure privacy of the users. An important concern in AmI's applications is privacy. Addressing design by privacy, an important challenge to consider is the development of an architecture that includes the different privacy policies and how can we fusion them in a specific application domain. Ensuring privacy in Intelligent Environments is a difficult problem to solve, as there are different perceptions of privacy and its role in computing for each user. In the so called ‘design by privacy’ we have to identify the relevant design issues that should be addressed for its developing. Here we present an approach to the dimensions to consider, in order to provide privacy in the design of Ambient Intelligence’s applications.This work has been supported in part by the projects: CAM “Contexts” (S2009/TIC-1485), MINECO “Falcon” (TEC2011-28626-C02-02), MINECO “Tease” (TEC2012-37832-C02-01)

    A self-integration testbed for decentralized socio-technical systems

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    The Internet of Things (IoT) comes along with new challenges for experimenting, testing, and operating decentralized socio-technical systems at large-scale. In such systems, autonomous agents interact locally with their users, and remotely with other agents to make intelligent collective choices. Via these interactions they self-regulate the consumption and production of distributed (common) resources, e.g., self-management of traffic flows and power demand in Smart Cities. While such complex systems are often deployed and operated using centralized computing infrastructures, the socio-technical nature of these decentralized systems requires new value-sensitive design paradigms; empowering trust, transparency, and alignment with citizens’ social values, such as privacy preservation, autonomy, and fairness among citizens’ choices. Currently, instruments and tools to study such systems and guide the prototyping process from simulation, to live deployment, and ultimately to a robust operation of a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) are missing, or not practical in this distributed socio-technical context. This paper bridges this gap by introducing a novel testbed architecture for decentralized socio-technical systems running on IoT. This new architecture is designed for a seamless reusability of (i) application-independent decentralized services by an IoT application, and (ii) different IoT applications by the same decentralized service. This dual self-integration promises IoT applications that are simpler to prototype, and can interoperate with decentralized services during runtime to self-integrate more complex functionality, e.g., data analytics, distributed artificial intelligence. Additionally, such integration provides stronger validation of IoT applications, and improves resource utilization, as computational resources are shared, thus cutting down deployment and operational costs. Pressure and crash tests during continuous operations of several weeks, with more than 80K network joining and leaving of agents, 2.4M parameter changes, and 100M communicated messages, confirm the robustness and practicality of the testbed architecture. This work promises new pathways for managing the prototyping and deployment complexity of decentralized socio-technical systems running on IoT, whose complexity has so far hindered the adoption of value-sensitive self-management approaches in Smart Cities
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