잠재 임베딩을 통한 시각적 스토리로부터의 서사 텍스트 생성기 학습

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2019. 2. 장병탁.The ability to understand the story is essential to make humans unique from other primates as well as animals. The capability of story understanding is crucial for AI agents to live with people in everyday life and understand their context. However, most research on story AI focuses on automated story generation based on closed worlds designed manually, which are widely used for computation authoring. Machine learning techniques on story corpora face similar problems of natural language processing such as omitting details and commonsense knowledge. Since the remarkable success of deep learning on computer vision field, increasing our interest in research on bridging between vision and language, vision-grounded story data will potentially improve the performance of story understanding and narrative text generation. Let us assume that AI agents lie in the environment in which the sensing information is input by the camera. Those agents observe the surroundings, translate them into the story in natural language, and predict the following event or multiple ones sequentially. This dissertation study on the related problems: learning stories or generating the narrative text from image streams or videos. The first problem is to generate a narrative text from a sequence of ordered images. As a solution, we introduce a GLAC Net (Global-local Attention Cascading Network). It translates from image sequences to narrative paragraphs in text as a encoder-decoder framework with sequence-to-sequence setting. It has convolutional neural networks for extracting information from images, and recurrent neural networks for text generation. We introduce visual cue encoders with stacked bidirectional LSTMs, and all of the outputs of each layer are aggregated as contextualized image vectors to extract visual clues. The coherency of the generated text is further improved by conveying (cascading) the information of the previous sentence to the next sentence serially in the decoders. We evaluate the performance of it on the Visual storytelling (VIST) dataset. It outperforms other state-of-the-art results and shows the best scores in total score and all of 6 aspects in the visual storytelling challenge with evaluation of human judges. The second is to predict the following events or narrative texts with the former parts of stories. It should be possible to predict at any step with an arbitrary length. We propose recurrent event retrieval models as a solution. They train a context accumulation function and two embedding functions, where make close the distance between the cumulative context at current time and the next probable events on a latent space. They update the cumulative context with a new event as a input using bilinear operations, and we can find the next event candidates with the updated cumulative context. We evaluate them for Story Cloze Test, they show competitive performance and the best in open-ended generation setting. Also, it demonstrates the working examples in an interactive setting. The third deals with the study on composite representation learning for semantics and order for video stories. We embed each episode as a trajectory-like sequence of events on the latent space, and propose a ViStoryNet to regenerate video stories with them (tasks of story completion). We convert event sentences to thought vectors, and train functions to make successive event embed close each other to form episodes as trajectories. Bi-directional LSTMs are trained as sequence models, and decoders to generate event sentences with GRUs. We test them experimentally with PororoQA dataset, and observe that most of episodes show the form of trajectories. We use them to complete the blocked part of stories, and they show not perfect but overall similar result. Those results above can be applied to AI agents in the living area sensing with their cameras, explain the situation as stories, infer some unobserved parts, and predict the future story.스토리를 이해하는 능력은 동물들 뿐만 아니라 다른 유인원과 인류를 구별짓는 중요한 능력이다. 인공지능이 일상생활 속에서 사람들과 함께 지내면서 그들의 생활 속 맥락을 이해하기 위해서는 스토리를 이해하는 능력이 매우 중요하다. 하지만, 기존의 스토리에 관한 연구는 언어처리의 어려움으로 인해 사전에 정의된 세계 모델 하에서 좋은 품질의 저작물을 생성하려는 기술이 주로 연구되어 왔다. 기계학습 기법을 통해 스토리를 다루려는 시도들은 대체로 자연어로 표현된 데이터에 기반할 수 밖에 없어 자연어 처리에서 겪는 문제들을 동일하게 겪는다. 이를 극복하기 위해서는 시각적 정보가 함께 연동된 데이터가 도움이 될 수 있다. 최근 딥러닝의 눈부신 발전에 힘입어 시각과 언어 사이의 관계를 다루는 연구들이 늘어나고 있다. 연구의 비전으로서, 인공지능 에이전트가 주변 정보를 카메라로 입력받는 환경 속에 놓여있는 상황을 생각해 볼 수 있다. 이 안에서 인공지능 에이전트는 주변을 관찰하면서 그에 대한 스토리를 자연어 형태로 생성하고, 생성된 스토리를 바탕으로 다음에 일어날 스토리를 한 단계에서 여러 단계까지 예측할 수 있다. 본 학위 논문에서는 사진 및 비디오 속에 나타나는 스토리(visual story)를 학습하는 방법, 내러티브 텍스트로의 변환, 가려진 사건 및 다음 사건을 추론하는 연구들을 다룬다. 첫 번째로, 여러 장의 사진이 주어졌을 때 이를 바탕으로 스토리 텍스트를 생성하는 문제(비주얼 스토리텔링)를 다룬다. 이 문제 해결을 위해 글랙넷(GLAC Net)을 제안하였다. 먼저, 사진들로부터 정보를 추출하기 위한 컨볼루션 신경망, 문장을 생성하기 위해 순환신경망을 이용한다. 시퀀스-시퀀스 구조의 인코더로서, 전체적인 이야기 구조의 표현을 위해 다계층 양방향 순환신경망을 배치하되 각 사진 별 정보를 함께 이용하기 위해 전역적-국부적 주의집중 모델을 제안하였다. 또한, 여러 문장을 생성하는 동안 맥락정보와 국부정보를 잃지 않게 하기 위해 앞선 문장 정보를 전달하는 메커니즘을 제안하였다. 위 제안 방법으로 비스트(VIST) 데이터 집합을 학습하였고, 제 1 회 시각적 스토리텔링 대회(visual storytelling challenge)에서 사람 평가를 기준으로 전체 점수 및 6 항목 별로 모두 최고점을 받았다. 두 번째로, 스토리의 일부가 문장들로 주어졌을 때 이를 바탕으로 다음 문장을 예측하는 문제를 다룬다. 임의의 길이의 스토리에 대해 임의의 위치에서 예측이 가능해야 하고, 예측하려는 단계 수에 무관하게 작동해야 한다. 이를 위한 방법으로 순환 사건 인출 모델(Recurrent Event Retrieval Models)을 제안하였다. 이 방법은 은닉 공간 상에서 현재까지 누적된 맥락과 다음에 발생할 유력 사건 사이의 거리를 가깝게 하도록 맥락누적함수와 두 개의 임베딩 함수를 학습한다. 이를 통해 이미 입력되어 있던 스토리에 새로운 사건이 입력되면 쌍선형적 연산을 통해 기존의 맥락을 개선하여 다음에 발생할 유력한 사건들을 찾는다. 이 방법으로 락스토리(ROCStories) 데이터집합을 학습하였고, 스토리 클로즈 테스트(Story Cloze Test)를 통해 평가한 결과 경쟁력 있는 성능을 보였으며, 특히 임의의 길이로 추론할 수 있는 기법 중에 최고성능을 보였다. 세 번째로, 비디오 스토리에서 사건 시퀀스 중 일부가 가려졌을 때 이를 복구하는 문제를 다룬다. 특히, 각 사건의 의미 정보와 순서를 모델의 표현 학습에 반영하고자 하였다. 이를 위해 은닉 공간 상에 각 에피소드들을 궤적 형태로 임베딩하고, 이를 바탕으로 스토리를 재생성을 하여 스토리 완성을 할 수 있는 모델인 비스토리넷(ViStoryNet)을 제안하였다. 각 에피소드를 궤적 형태를 가지게 하기 위해 사건 문장을 사고벡터(thought vector)로 변환하고, 연속 이벤트 순서 임베딩을 통해 전후 사건들이 서로 가깝게 임베딩되도록 하여 하나의 에피소드가 궤적의 모양을 가지도록 학습하였다. 뽀로로QA 데이터집합을 통해 실험적으로 결과를 확인하였다. 임베딩 된 에피소드들은 궤적 형태로 잘 나타났으며, 에피소드들을 재생성 해본 결과 전체적인 측면에서 유사한 결과를 보였다. 위 결과물들은 카메라로 입력되는 주변 정보를 바탕으로 스토리를 이해하고 일부 관측되지 않은 부분을 추론하며, 향후 스토리를 예측하는 방법들에 대응된다.Abstract i Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Story of Everyday lives in Videos and Story Understanding . . . 1 1.2 Problems to be addressed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 Approach and Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4 Organization of Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Chapter 2 Background and Related Work 10 2.1 Why We Study Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.2 Latent Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.3 Order Embedding and Ordinal Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.4 Comparison to Story Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.5 Story Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2.5.1 Abstract Event Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.5.2 Seq-to-seq Attentional Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.5.3 Story Generation from Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Chapter 3 Visual Storytelling via Global-local Attention Cascading Networks 21 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.2 Evaluation for Visual Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3.3 Global-local Attention Cascading Networks (GLAC Net) . . . . . 27 3.3.1 Encoder: Contextualized Image Vector Extractor . . . . . 28 3.3.2 Decoder: Story Generator with Attention and Cascading Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.4 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.4.1 VIST Dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.4.2 Experiment Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.4.3 Network Training Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.4.4 Qualitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 3.4.5 Quantitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 3.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Chapter 4 Common Space Learning on Cumulative Contexts and the Next Events: Recurrent Event Retrieval Models 44 4.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 4.2 Problems of Context Accumulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.3 Recurrent Event Retrieval Models for Next Event Prediction . . 46 4.4 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.4.1 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.4.2 Story Cloze Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.4.3 Open-ended Story Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Chapter 5 ViStoryNet: Order Embedding of Successive Events and the Networks for Story Regeneration 58 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 5.2 Order Embedding with Triple Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 5.2.1 Embedding Ordered Objects in Sequences . . . . . . . . . 62 5.3 Problems and Contextual Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 5.3.1 Problem Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 5.3.2 Contextual Event Vectors from Kids Videos . . . . . . . . 64 5.4 Architectures for the Story Regeneration Task . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5.4.1 Two Sentence Generators as Decoders . . . . . . . . . . . 68 5.4.2 Successive Event Order Embedding (SEOE) . . . . . . . . 68 5.4.3 Sequence Models of the Event Space . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 5.5 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.5.1 Experimental setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.5.2 Quantitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.5.3 Qualitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 5.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Chapter 6 Concluding Remarks 80 6.1 Summary of Methods and Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 6.2 Limitation and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 6.3 Suggestions for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 초록 101Docto

HMC-Based Accelerator Design For Compressed Deep Neural Networks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) offer remarkable performance of classifications and regressions in many high dimensional problems and have been widely utilized in real-word cognitive applications. In DNN applications, high computational cost of DNNs greatly hinder their deployment in resource-constrained applications, real-time systems and edge computing platforms. Moreover, energy consumption and performance cost of moving data between memory hierarchy and computational units are higher than that of the computation itself. To overcome the memory bottleneck, data locality and temporal data reuse are improved in accelerator design. In an attempt to further improve data locality, memory manufacturers have invented 3D-stacked memory where multiple layers of memory arrays are stacked on top of each other. Inherited from the concept of Process-In-Memory (PIM), some 3D-stacked memory architectures also include a logic layer that can integrate general-purpose computational logic directly within main memory to take advantages of high internal bandwidth during computation. In this dissertation, we are going to investigate hardware/software co-design for neural network accelerator. Specifically, we introduce a two-phase filter pruning framework for model compression and an accelerator tailored for efficient DNN execution on HMC, which can dynamically offload the primitives and functions to PIM logic layer through a latency-aware scheduling controller. In our compression framework, we formulate filter pruning process as an optimization problem and propose a filter selection criterion measured by conditional entropy. The key idea of our proposed approach is to establish a quantitative connection between filters and model accuracy. We define the connection as conditional entropy over filters in a convolutional layer, i.e., distribution of entropy conditioned on network loss. Based on the definition, different pruning efficiencies of global and layer-wise pruning strategies are compared, and two-phase pruning method is proposed. The proposed pruning method can achieve a reduction of 88% filters and 46% inference time reduction on VGG16 within 2% accuracy degradation. In this dissertation, we are going to investigate hardware/software co-design for neural network accelerator. Specifically, we introduce a two-phase filter pruning framework for model compres- sion and an accelerator tailored for efficient DNN execution on HMC, which can dynamically offload the primitives and functions to PIM logic layer through a latency-aware scheduling con- troller. In our compression framework, we formulate filter pruning process as an optimization problem and propose a filter selection criterion measured by conditional entropy. The key idea of our proposed approach is to establish a quantitative connection between filters and model accuracy. We define the connection as conditional entropy over filters in a convolutional layer, i.e., distribution of entropy conditioned on network loss. Based on the definition, different pruning efficiencies of global and layer-wise pruning strategies are compared, and two-phase pruning method is proposed. The proposed pruning method can achieve a reduction of 88% filters and 46% inference time reduction on VGG16 within 2% accuracy degradation

Nitric Oxide and the Biological Cascades Underlying Increased Neurogenesis, Enhanced Learning Ability, and Academic Ability as an Effect of Increased Bouts of Physical Activity

International Journal of Exercise Science 5(3) : 245-275, 2012. The consummate principle underlying all physiological research is corporeal adaptation at every level of the organism observed. With respect to humans, the body learns to function based on the external stimuli from the environment, beginning in the womb, throughout the developmental stages of life. Nitric Oxide (NO) appears to be the governor of the plasticity of several systems in mammals implicit in their proper development. It is the purpose of this review to describe the physiological pathways that lead to plasticity of not only the vasculature but also of the brain and how physical activity plays a key role in those alterations by initiating the mechanism that triggers NO production. Further, this review hopes to show a connection between these changes and learning, comprising both motor learning and cognitive learning. This review will show how NO plays a significant role in vascularization and neurogenesis, necessary to enhance the mind-body connection and comprehensive physical performance and adaptation. It is our belief that this review effectively demonstrates, using a multidisciplinary approach, the causal mechanisms underlying the increases in neurogenesis as related to improved learning and academic performance as a result of adequate bouts of physical activity of a vigorous nature

Speech Enhancement Exploiting the Source-Filter Model

Imagining everyday life without mobile telephony is nowadays hardly possible. Calls are being made in every thinkable situation and environment. Hence, the microphone will not only pick up the user’s speech but also sound from the surroundings which is likely to impede the understanding of the conversational partner. Modern speech enhancement systems are able to mitigate such effects and most users are not even aware of their existence. In this thesis the development of a modern single-channel speech enhancement approach is presented, which uses the divide and conquer principle to combat environmental noise in microphone signals. Though initially motivated by mobile telephony applications, this approach can be applied whenever speech is to be retrieved from a corrupted signal. The approach uses the so-called source-filter model to divide the problem into two subproblems which are then subsequently conquered by enhancing the source (the excitation signal) and the filter (the spectral envelope) separately. Both enhanced signals are then used to denoise the corrupted signal. The estimation of spectral envelopes has quite some history and some approaches already exist for speech enhancement. However, they typically neglect the excitation signal which leads to the inability of enhancing the fine structure properly. Both individual enhancement approaches exploit benefits of the cepstral domain which offers, e.g., advantageous mathematical properties and straightforward synthesis of excitation-like signals. We investigate traditional model-based schemes like Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), classical signal processing-based, as well as modern deep neural network (DNN)-based approaches in this thesis. The enhanced signals are not used directly to enhance the corrupted signal (e.g., to synthesize a clean speech signal) but as so-called a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimate in a traditional statistical speech enhancement system. Such a traditional system consists of a noise power estimator, an a priori SNR estimator, and a spectral weighting rule that is usually driven by the results of the aforementioned estimators and subsequently employed to retrieve the clean speech estimate from the noisy observation. As a result the new approach obtains significantly higher noise attenuation compared to current state-of-the-art systems while maintaining a quite comparable speech component quality and speech intelligibility. In consequence, the overall quality of the enhanced speech signal turns out to be superior as compared to state-of-the-art speech ehnahcement approaches.Mobiltelefonie ist aus dem heutigen Leben nicht mehr wegzudenken. Telefonate werden in beliebigen Situationen an beliebigen Orten geführt und dabei nimmt das Mikrofon nicht nur die Sprache des Nutzers auf, sondern auch die Umgebungsgeräusche, welche das Verständnis des Gesprächspartners stark beeinflussen können. Moderne Systeme können durch Sprachverbesserungsalgorithmen solchen Effekten entgegenwirken, dabei ist vielen Nutzern nicht einmal bewusst, dass diese Algorithmen existieren. In dieser Arbeit wird die Entwicklung eines einkanaligen Sprachverbesserungssystems vorgestellt. Der Ansatz setzt auf das Teile-und-herrsche-Verfahren, um störende Umgebungsgeräusche aus Mikrofonsignalen herauszufiltern. Dieses Verfahren kann für sämtliche Fälle angewendet werden, in denen Sprache aus verrauschten Signalen extrahiert werden soll. Der Ansatz nutzt das Quelle-Filter-Modell, um das ursprüngliche Problem in zwei Unterprobleme aufzuteilen, die anschließend gelöst werden, indem die Quelle (das Anregungssignal) und das Filter (die spektrale Einhüllende) separat verbessert werden. Die verbesserten Signale werden gemeinsam genutzt, um das gestörte Mikrofonsignal zu entrauschen. Die Schätzung von spektralen Einhüllenden wurde bereits in der Vergangenheit erforscht und zum Teil auch für die Sprachverbesserung angewandt. Typischerweise wird dabei jedoch das Anregungssignal vernachlässigt, so dass die spektrale Feinstruktur des Mikrofonsignals nicht verbessert werden kann. Beide Ansätze nutzen jeweils die Eigenschaften der cepstralen Domäne, die unter anderem vorteilhafte mathematische Eigenschaften mit sich bringen, sowie die Möglichkeit, Prototypen eines Anregungssignals zu erzeugen. Wir untersuchen modellbasierte Ansätze, wie z.B. Gaußsche Mischmodelle, klassische signalverarbeitungsbasierte Lösungen und auch moderne tiefe neuronale Netzwerke in dieser Arbeit. Die so verbesserten Signale werden nicht direkt zur Sprachsignalverbesserung genutzt (z.B. Sprachsynthese), sondern als sogenannter A-priori-Signal-zu-Rauschleistungs-Schätzwert in einem traditionellen statistischen Sprachverbesserungssystem. Dieses besteht aus einem Störleistungs-Schätzer, einem A-priori-Signal-zu-Rauschleistungs-Schätzer und einer spektralen Gewichtungsregel, die üblicherweise mit Hilfe der Ergebnisse der beiden Schätzer berechnet wird. Schließlich wird eine Schätzung des sauberen Sprachsignals aus der Mikrofonaufnahme gewonnen. Der neue Ansatz bietet eine signifikant höhere Dämpfung des Störgeräuschs als der bisherige Stand der Technik. Dabei wird eine vergleichbare Qualität der Sprachkomponente und der Sprachverständlichkeit gewährleistet. Somit konnte die Gesamtqualität des verbesserten Sprachsignals gegenüber dem Stand der Technik erhöht werden

Novel linear and nonlinear optical signal processing for ultra-high bandwidth communications

The thesis is articulated around the theme of ultra-wide bandwidth single channel signals. It focuses on the two main topics of transmission and processing of information by techniques compatible with high baudrates. The processing schemes introduced combine new linear and nonlinear optical platforms such as Fourier-domain programmable optical processors and chalcogenide chip waveguides, as well as the concept of neural network. Transmission of data is considered in the context of medium distance links of Optical Time Division Multiplexed (OTDM) data subject to environmental fluctuations. We experimentally demonstrate simultaneous compensation of differential group delay and multiple orders of dispersion at symbol rates of 640 Gbaud and 1.28 Tbaud. Signal processing at high bandwidth is envisaged both in the case of elementary post-transmission analog error mitigation and in the broader field of optical computing for high level operations (“optical processor”). A key innovation is the introduction of a novel four-wave mixing scheme implementing a dot-product operation between wavelength multiplexed channels. In particular, it is demonstrated for low-latency hash-key based all-optical error detection in links encoded with advanced modulation formats. Finally, the work presents groundbreaking concepts for compact implementation of an optical neural network as a programmable multi-purpose processor. The experimental architecture can implement neural networks with several nodes on a single optical nonlinear transfer function implementing functions such as analog-to-digital conversion. The particularity of the thesis is the new approaches to optical signal processing that potentially enable high level operations using simple optical hardware and limited cascading of components

An Open Logic Approach to EPM

open2noEPM is a high operative and didactic versatile tool and new application areas are envisaged continuously. In turn, this new awareness has allowed to enlarge our panorama for neurocognitive system EPM is a high operative and didactic versatile tool and new application areas are envisaged continuosly. In turn, this new awareness has allowed to enlarge our panorama for neurocognitive system behavior understanding, and to develop information conservation and regeneration systems in a numeric self-reflexive/reflective evolutive reference framework. Unfortunately, a logically closed model cannot cope with ontological uncertainty by itself; it needs a complementary logical aperture operational support extension. To achieve this goal, it is possible to use two coupled irreducible information management subsystems, based on the following ideal coupled irreducible asymptotic dichotomy: "Information Reliable Predictability" and "Information Reliable Unpredictability" subsystems. To behave realistically, overall system must guarantee both Logical Closure and Logical Aperture, both fed by environmental "noise" (better… from what human beings call "noise"). So, a natural operating point can emerge as a new Trans-disciplinary Reality Level, out of the Interaction of Two Complementary Irreducible Information Management Subsystems within their environment. In this way, it is possible to extend the traditional EPM approach in order to profit by both classic EPM intrinsic Self-Reflexive Functional Logical Closure and new numeric CICT Self-Reflective Functional Logical Aperture. EPM can be thought as a reliable starting subsystem to initialize a process of continuous self-organizing and self-logic learning refinement. understanding, and to develop information conservation and regeneration systems in a numeric self-reflexive/reflective evolutive reference framework. Unfortunately, a logically closed model cannot cope with ontological uncertainty by itself; it needs a complementary logical aperture operational support extension. To achieve this goal, it is possible to use two coupled irreducible information management subsystems, based on the following ideal coupled irreducible asymptotic dichotomy: "Information Reliable Predictability" and "Information Reliable Unpredictability" subsystems. To behave realistically, overall system must guarantee both Logical Closure and Logical Aperture, both fed by environmental "noise" (better… from what human beings call "noise"). So, a natural operating point can emerge as a new Trans-disciplinary Reality Level, out of the Interaction of Two Complementary Irreducible Information Management Subsystems within their environment. In this way, it is possible to extend the traditional EPM approach in order to profit by both classic EPM intrinsic Self-Reflexive Functional Logical Closure and new numeric CICT Self-Reflective Functional Logical Aperture. EPM can be thought as a reliable starting subsystem to initialize a process of continuous self-organizing and self-logic learning refinement.Fiorini, Rodolfo; Degiacomo, PieroFiorini, Rodolfo; Degiacomo, Pier

FrAmework for Multi-Agency Environments (FAME) : Final Report of the Learning & Evaluation Strand

Framework for Multi-agency Environments (FAME) was one of the Local Government On-Line funded National Projects sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). Within FAME there were six local projects (known as strands) led by English local authorities in partnership with service providers. Each strand aimed to improve a particular set of services (for example, to vulnerable older people or disabled children) through effective and appropriate exchange of information. These local projects worked with IT suppliers (known as technology partners) to produce a technical system to facilitate the exchange and management of client / patient information across agency boundaries. Not all the outputs of FAME were in the form of IT systems. Improvements to business processes and information sharing practices were also expected. Newcastle University led two further strands, the Generic Framework and Learning & Evaluation. The Generic Framework identifies and describes nine building blocks that are essential to effective multi-agency working. The FAME website http://www.fame-uk.org contains details of these building blocks, together with a ‘how to’ guide and a toolkit to support local authorities and their partners in assessing their ‘readiness’ for multi-agency working. This is the report of the Learning & Evaluation strand. The Learning & Evaluation team worked closely with the local FAME project teams, who were supportive of our work and generous with their time. Throughout the project we reported back to the local teams both individually and collectively. Evaluation was thoroughgoing and critical, not an exercise in public relations or advocacy. It is important to stress that learning is likely to be gained from what did not work as well as from what did. Problems and setbacks, as well as successes, are therefore documented and analysed in the report