Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 338)

This bibliography lists 139 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during June 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance

Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements. Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle. The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks. A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 300)

This bibliography lists 232 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in July 1987

Aerospace medicine and biology: A cumulative index to a continuing bibliography (supplement 358)

This publication is a cumulative index to the abstracts contained in Supplements 346 through 357 of Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A Continuing Bibliography. It includes seven indexes: subject, personal author, corporate source, foreign technology, contract number, report number and accession number

Self-organisation of internal models in autonomous robots

Internal Models (IMs) play a significant role in autonomous robotics. They are mechanisms able to represent the input-output characteristics of the sensorimotor loop. In developmental robotics, open-ended learning of skills and knowledge serves the purpose of reaction to unexpected inputs, to explore the environment and to acquire new behaviours. The development of the robot includes self-exploration of the state-action space and learning of the environmental dynamics. In this dissertation, we explore the properties and benefits of the self-organisation of robot behaviour based on the homeokinetic learning paradigm. A homeokinetic robot explores the environment in a coherent way without prior knowledge of its configuration or the environment itself. First, we propose a novel approach to self-organisation of behaviour by artificial curiosity in the sensorimotor loop. Second, we study how different forward models settings alter the behaviour of both exploratory and goal-oriented robots. Diverse complexity, size and learning rules are compared to assess the importance in the robot’s exploratory behaviour. We define the self-organised behaviour performance in terms of simultaneous environment coverage and best prediction of future sensori inputs. Among the findings, we have encountered that models with a fast response and a minimisation of the prediction error by local gradients achieve the best performance. Third, we study how self-organisation of behaviour can be exploited to learn IMs for goal-oriented tasks. An IM acquires coherent self-organised behaviours that are then used to achieve high-level goals by reinforcement learning (RL). Our results demonstrate that learning of an inverse model in this context yields faster reward maximisation and a higher final reward. We show that an initial exploration of the environment in a goal-less yet coherent way improves learning. In the same context, we analyse the self-organisation of central pattern generators (CPG) by reward maximisation. Our results show that CPGs can learn favourable reward behaviour on high-dimensional robots using the self-organised interaction between degrees of freedom. Finally, we examine an on-line dual control architecture where we combine an Actor-Critic RL and the homeokinetic controller. With this configuration, the probing signal is generated by the exertion of the embodied robot experience with the environment. This set-up solves the problem of designing task-dependant probing signals by the emergence of intrinsically motivated comprehensible behaviour. Faster improvement of the reward signal compared to classic RL is achievable with this configuration

Aerospace medicine and biology: A cumulative index to the 1986 issues (supplement 293)

This publication is a cumulative index to the abstracts contained in the Supplements 281 through 292 of Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A Continuing Bibliography. It includes seven indexes - subject, personal author, corporate source, foreign technology, contract number, report number, and accession number

Aeronautical engineering. A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 127, October 1980

A bibliography containing 431 abstracts addressing various topics in aeronautical engineering is given. The coverage includes engineering and theoretical aspects of design. construction, evaluation, testing, operation, and performance of aircraft (including aircraft engines) and associated components, equipment, and systems. It also includes research and development in aerodynamics, aeronautics, and ground support equipment for aeronautical vehicles

Building Better Interfaces for Remote Autonomous Systems

This 'Open Access' SpringerBrief provides foundational knowledge for designing autonomous, asynchronous systems and explains aspects of users relevant to designing for these systems, introduces principles for user-centered design, and prepares readers for more advanced and specific readings. It provides context and the implications for design choices made during the design and development of the complex systems that are part of operation centers. As such, each chapter includes principles to summarize the design implication that engineers can use to inform their own design of interfaces for operation centers and similar systems. It includes example materials for the design of a fictitious system, which are referenced in the book and can be duplicated and extended for real systems. The design materials include a system overview, the system architecture, an example scenario, a stakeholder analysis, a task analysis, a description of the system and interface technology, and contextualized design guidelines. The guidelines can be specified because the user, the task, and the technology are well specified as an example. Building Better Interfaces for Remote Autonomous Systems is for working system engineers who are designing interfaces used in high throughput, high stake, operation centers (op centers) or control rooms, such as network operation centers (NOCs). Intended users will have a technical undergraduate degree (e.g., computer science) with little or no training in design, human sciences, or with human-centered iterative design methods and practices. Background research for the book was supplemented by interaction with the intended audience through a related project with L3Harris Technologies (formerly Harris Corporation)

Exploring Predictors of Older Adults\u27 Performance on a Novel Driving Simulator Task

On a per-mile driven basis, older adults are at increased risk of being involved in an automobile accident. The development and implementation of driving assessment tools is necessary to inform decisions about driving reduction and cessation. Driving simulators are one method of assessing driving performance and safety, however many simulators are cost-prohibitive for most researchers and clinicians. Additionally, while driving performance has been previously explored with respect to clinical populations (e.g., Alzheimer’s Disease), less work has evaluated this topic in a cognitively healthy sample. The present study sought to determine whether a novel, cost-effective driving simulator (Assetto Corsa (AC)) might be useful in the evaluation of driving performance in a sample of cognitively healthy older adults. A total of 53 participants completed a battery of paper-and-pencil and computerized cognitive performance measures and self-reports regarding their driving safety and behaviors, and a subset of participants (n = 35) completed the driving simulator task. Hierarchical regressions revealed that paper-and-pencil measures of simple attention and executive functioning and a computerized measure of processing speed were associated with aspects of driving simulator performance. Pearson correlation coefficients revealed that lower self-rated driving was associated with slower completion of the simulator task, and decrements in several cognitive domains were associated with greater self-reported difficulty driving in various conditions, greater aberrant driving behaviors, and higher likelihood of having legal difficulties as a result of driving (e.g., traffic tickets). Implications for future work are discussed