Spotlight Abstraction of Agents and Areas

We present "spotlight abstraction" as a generic abstraction technique for the analysis of systems comprising an unbounded number of communicating agents. The abstraction principle is heterogeneous in the sense that the behaviour of a finite number of agents is preserved while the others are only abstractly represented. The precision of the abstraction can be tuned by an iterative procedure based on the analysis of counterexamples. Going beyond existing work, we show how to use the spotlight principle for analysing systems where the physical position of agents is relevant. To this end, we put the spotlight on areas rather than on fixed sets of agents

Consciosusness in Cognitive Architectures. A Principled Analysis of RCS, Soar and ACT-R

This report analyses the aplicability of the principles of consciousness developed in the ASys project to three of the most relevant cognitive architectures. This is done in relation to their aplicability to build integrated control systems and studying their support for general mechanisms of real-time consciousness.\ud To analyse these architectures the ASys Framework is employed. This is a conceptual framework based on an extension for cognitive autonomous systems of the General Systems Theory (GST).\ud A general qualitative evaluation criteria for cognitive architectures is established based upon: a) requirements for a cognitive architecture, b) the theoretical framework based on the GST and c) core design principles for integrated cognitive conscious control systems

Engineering simulations for cancer systems biology

Computer simulation can be used to inform in vivo and in vitro experimentation, enabling rapid, low-cost hypothesis generation and directing experimental design in order to test those hypotheses. In this way, in silico models become a scientific instrument for investigation, and so should be developed to high standards, be carefully calibrated and their findings presented in such that they may be reproduced. Here, we outline a framework that supports developing simulations as scientific instruments, and we select cancer systems biology as an exemplar domain, with a particular focus on cellular signalling models. We consider the challenges of lack of data, incomplete knowledge and modelling in the context of a rapidly changing knowledge base. Our framework comprises a process to clearly separate scientific and engineering concerns in model and simulation development, and an argumentation approach to documenting models for rigorous way of recording assumptions and knowledge gaps. We propose interactive, dynamic visualisation tools to enable the biological community to interact with cellular signalling models directly for experimental design. There is a mismatch in scale between these cellular models and tissue structures that are affected by tumours, and bridging this gap requires substantial computational resource. We present concurrent programming as a technology to link scales without losing important details through model simplification. We discuss the value of combining this technology, interactive visualisation, argumentation and model separation to support development of multi-scale models that represent biologically plausible cells arranged in biologically plausible structures that model cell behaviour, interactions and response to therapeutic interventions

Unifying context with labeled property graph: A pipeline-based system for comprehensive text representation in NLP

Extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured digital text presents significant challenges across diverse domains. This research addresses this challenge by proposing a novel pipeline-based system that generates domain-agnostic and task-agnostic text representations. The proposed approach leverages labeled property graphs (LPG) to encode contextual information, facilitating the integration of diverse linguistic elements into a unified representation. The proposed system enables efficient graph-based querying and manipulation by addressing the crucial aspect of comprehensive context modeling and fine-grained semantics. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through the implementation of NLP components that operate on LPG-based representations. Additionally, the proposed approach introduces specialized patterns and algorithms to enhance specific NLP tasks, including nominal mention detection, named entity disambiguation, event enrichments, event participant detection, and temporal link detection. The evaluation of the proposed approach, using the MEANTIME corpus comprising manually annotated documents, provides encouraging results and valuable insights into the system\u27s strengths. The proposed pipeline-based framework serves as a solid foundation for future research, aiming to refine and optimize LPG-based graph structures to generate comprehensive and semantically rich text representations, addressing the challenges associated with efficient information extraction and analysis in NLP

Tacit knowledge elicitation process for industry 4.0

Manufacturers migrate their processes to Industry 4.0, which includes new technologies for improving productivity and efficiency of operations. One of the issues is capturing, recreating, and documenting the tacit knowledge of the aging workers. However, there are no systematic procedures to incorporate this knowledge into Enterprise Resource Planning systems and maintain a competitive advantage. This paper describes a solution proposal for a tacit knowledge elicitation process for capturing operational best practices of experienced workers in industrial domains based on a mix of algorithmic techniques and a cooperative game. We use domain ontologies for Industry 4.0 and reasoning techniques to discover and integrate new facts from textual sources into an Operational Knowledge Graph. We describe a concepts formation iterative process in a role game played by human and virtual agents through socialization and externalization for knowledge graph refinement. Ethical and societal concerns are discussed as well

Dynamic visualization of sensor measurements: Context based approach

An amount of data measured with sensors is increasing year to year. Every sensor has a location and sensor data are mostly measured for long time period, so visualization of location and regular updating of visualized value is necessary. Various characteristics (e.g. meteorological conditions) can be automatically read at frequent intervals and those readings can be aggregated into the interactive map visualization. This map must be not only legible but also understandable also for readers that are experts in their specialisation, however, not in cartography. This paper presents possibilities of using and implementation of adaptive cartography and visual seeking principles for interactive visualization and analysis of sensor based data measured in real time. Our solution is described on experimental application for precise farming that we developed during research project Agrisensor

Virtual software in reality

Software visualisation is an important weapon in the program comprehension armoury. It is a technique that can, when designed and used effectively, aid in understanding existing program code. It can achieve this by displaying information in new and different forms, which may make obvious something missed in reading the code. It can also be used to present many aspects of the data at once. Software, despite many software engineering advances in requirements, design and implementation techniques, continues to be complex and large and if anything seems to be growing in these respects. This means that techniques that failed to aid comprehension and maintenance are certainly not going to be able to deal with the current software. Therefore this area requires research to be able to suggest solutions to deal with the information overload that is sure to occur. There are several issues that this thesis addresses; all of them related to the creation of software visualisation systems that are capable of being used and useful well into the next generation of software systems. The scale and complexity of software are pressing issues, as is the associated information overload problem that this brings. In an attempt to address this problem the following are considered to be important: abstractions, representations, mappings, metaphors, and visualisations. These areas are interrelated and the first four enable the final one, visualisations. These problems are not the only ones that face software visualisation systems. There are many that are based on the general theory of the applicability of the technique to such tasks as program comprehension, rather than the detail of how a particular code fragment is shown. These problems are also related to the enabling technology of three- dimensional visualisations; virtual reality. In summary the areas of interest are: automation, evolution, scalability, navigation and interaction, correlation, and visual complexity. This thesis provides an exploration of these identified areas in the context of software visualisation. Relationships that describe, and distinguish between, existing and future software visualisations are presented, with examples based on recent software visualisation research. Two real world metaphors (and their associated mappings and representations) are defined for the purpose of visualising software as an aid to program comprehension. These metaphors also provide a vehicle for the exploration of the areas identified above. Finally, an evaluation of the visualisations is presented using a framework developed for the comparative evaluation of three-dimensional, comprehension oriented, software visualisations. This thesis has shown the viability of using three-dimensional software visualisations. The important issues of automation, evolution, scalability, and navigation have been presented and discussed, and their relationship to real world metaphors examined. This has been done in conjunction with an investigation into the use of such real world metaphors for software visualisation. The thesis as a whole has provided an important examination of many of the issues related to these types of visualisation in the context of software and is therefore a valuable basis for future work in this area

Towards Dynamic Composition of Question Answering Pipelines

Question answering (QA) over knowledge graphs has gained significant momentum over the past five years due to the increasing availability of large knowledge graphs and the rising importance of question answering for user interaction. DBpedia has been the most prominently used knowledge graph in this setting. QA systems implement a pipeline connecting a sequence of QA components for translating an input question into its corresponding formal query (e.g. SPARQL); this query will be executed over a knowledge graph in order to produce the answer of the question. Recent empirical studies have revealed that albeit overall effective, the performance of QA systems and QA components depends heavily on the features of input questions, and not even the combination of the best performing QA systems or individual QA components retrieves complete and correct answers. Furthermore, these QA systems cannot be easily reused, extended, and results cannot be easily reproduced since the systems are mostly implemented in a monolithic fashion, lack standardised interfaces and are often not open source or available as Web services. All these drawbacks of the state of the art that prevents many of these approaches to be employed in real-world applications. In this thesis, we tackle the problem of QA over knowledge graph and propose a generic approach to promote reusability and build question answering systems in a collaborative effort. Firstly, we define qa vocabulary and Qanary methodology to develop an abstraction level on existing QA systems and components. Qanary relies on qa vocabulary to establish guidelines for semantically describing the knowledge exchange between the components of a QA system. We implement a component-based modular framework called "Qanary Ecosystem" utilising the Qanary methodology to integrate several heterogeneous QA components in a single platform. We further present Qaestro framework that provides an approach to semantically describing question answering components and effectively enumerates QA pipelines based on a QA developer requirements. Qaestro provides all valid combinations of available QA components respecting the input-output requirement of each component to build QA pipelines. Finally, we address the scalability of QA components within a framework and propose a novel approach that chooses the best component per task to automatically build QA pipeline for each input question. We implement this model within FRANKENSTEIN, a framework able to select QA components and compose pipelines. FRANKENSTEIN extends Qanary ecosystem and utilises qa vocabulary for data exchange. It has 29 independent QA components implementing five QA tasks resulting 360 unique QA pipelines. Each approach proposed in this thesis (Qanary methodology, Qaestro, and FRANKENSTEIN) is supported by extensive evaluation to demonstrate their effectiveness. Our contributions target a broader research agenda of offering the QA community an efficient way of applying their research to a research field which is driven by many different fields, consequently requiring a collaborative approach to achieve significant progress in the domain of question answering

Uma abordagem de consciência de máquina ao controle de semáforos de tráfego urbano

Orientador: Ricardo Ribeiro GudwinTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma arquitetura cognitiva distribuída usada para o controle de tráfego em uma rede urbana. Essa arquitetura se baseia em uma abordagem de consciência de máquina - Teoria do Workspace Global - de forma a usar competição e difusão em broadcast, permitindo que um grupo de controladores de tráfego locais interajam, resultando em melhor desempenho do grupo. A ideia principal é que controladores locais geralmente realizam um comportamento reativo, definindo os tempos de verde e vermelho do semáforo, de acordo com informações locais. Esses controladores locais competem de forma a definir qual deles está experienciando a situação mais crítica. O controlador nas piores condições ganha acesso ao workspace global, e depois realiza uma difusão em broadcast de sua condição (e sua localização) para todos os outros controladores, pedindo sua ajuda para lidar com sua situação. Essa chamada do controlador que acessa o workspace global causará uma interferência no comportamento local reativo, para aqueles controladores locais com alguma chance de ajudar o controlador na situação crítica, contendo o tráfego na sua direção. Esse comportamento do grupo, coordenado pela estratégia do workspace global, transforma o comportamento reativo anterior em uma forma de comportamento deliberativo. Nós mostramos que essa estratégia é capaz de melhorar a média do tempo de viagem de todos os veículos que fluem na rede urbana. Um ganho consistente no desempenho foi conseguido com o controlador "Consciência de Máquina" durante todo o tempo da simulação, em diferentes cenários, indo de 10% até maisde 20%, quando comparado ao controlador "Reativo Paralelo" sem o mecanismo de consciência artificial, produzindo evidência para suportar a hipótese de que um mecanismo de consciência artificial, que difunde serialmente em broadcast conteúdo para processos automáticos, pode trazer vantagens para uma tarefa global realizada por uma sociedade de agentes paralelos que operam juntos por uma meta comumAbstract: In this work, we present a distributed cognitive architecture used to control the traffic in an urban network. This architecture relies on a machine consciousness approach - Global Workspace Theory - in order to use competition and broadcast, allowing a group of local traffic controllers to interact, resulting in a better group performance.The main idea is that the local controllers usually perform a purely reactive behavior, defining the times of red and green lights, according just to local information. These local controllers compete in order to define which of them is experiencing the most critical traffic situation. The controller in the worst condition gains access to the global workspace, further broadcasting its condition (and its location) to all other controllers, asking for their help in dealing with its situation. This call from the controller accessing the global workspace will cause an interference in the reactive local behavior, for those local controllers with some chance in helping the controller in a critical condition, by containing traffic in its direction. This group behavior, coordinated by the global workspace strategy, turns the once reactive behavior into a kind of deliberative one. We show that this strategy is capable of improving the overall mean travel time of vehicles flowing through the urban network. A consistent gain in performance with the "Machine Consciousness" traffic signal controller during all simulation time, throughout different simulated scenarios, could be observed, ranging from around 10% to more than 20%, when compared to the "Parallel Reactive" controller without the artificial consciousness mechanism, producing evidence to support the hypothesis that an artificial consciousness mechanism, which serially broadcasts content to automatic processes, can bring advantages to the global task performed by a society of parallel agents working together for a common goalDoutoradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoDoutor em Engenharia Elétrica153206/2010-1CNPQCAPESFAPES

Rights through making : skills for pervasive ethics

This thesis starts with a Manifesto, bold, passionate and ambitious. Goals are set high, as to commit to a major endeavour: how can design contribute to a new civilisation. The first version was written in 2006 in Bertinoro, Italy, where Caroline Hummels, Kees Overbeeke and I were giving a workshop on Aesthetics of Interaction for the University of Bologna. In this Manifesto, we declared our belief and proposed a vision, concerning how design can change Western thinking towards pervasive ethics. By pervasive ethics I mean a social praxis aimed at justice and freedom, which pervades society in a capillary way, becoming a Universal attitude that makes people aware of their own rights, able and willing to contribute to seeing their own rights and those of all people fulfilled. I called this approach Rights though Making. The manifesto stated a mission1, which was later applied and validated. The main lines of thoughts of the manifesto have been respected and enforced through several actions. This thesis will describe these actions, the underlying theory and the related reflection both on the approach and on the outcomes. The Manifesto integrated the points of view of the writers, united by a common drive, in a world riddled with all sorts of social uncertainties. In the Manifesto we declared our intention of preparing and doing workshops with students of different nationalities, stimulating the integration of skilful points of view among future designers. When the Manifesto was written, there was not yet a concrete strategy on how to empower people towards pervasive ethics. The only anchor point was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We wanted the values contained in this document materialised, embodied in (intelligent) products or systems. Both the outcome of what we were envisioning (intelligent products or systems empowering towards the realisation of human rights) and the process of realising it (workshop) had to work towards ethics. This was all I knew at that point. Later I designed the way to do it, based on this solid and enthusiastic shared vision. Throughout the years, the underlying theoretical framework started to acquire its own body. Only after the realisation of the first 5 workshops (out of 7 in total), was I able to explicitly structure and describe the platform of theory that was supporting my endeavour. These actions (the workshops), contributed to the formation of a body of knowledge, of which the potential strength and soundness until then had exclusively been perceived through intuition. This tacit knowledge was dredged out, reflected upon and refined, through iterations of reflection-on-action, in which the "active" parts were the individual workshops. Thus the forming of this theoretical platform, the refinement of the research quest or design challenge and giving the workshops were overlapping in time and closely intertwined. For clarity, in this thesis I chose to position them in the following order: • Part 1: defining the design challenge / research quest and the Rights through Making Approach; • Part 2: illustrating the theoretical framework underlying the whole work. This theoretical framework is formed by three elements: (1) Ethics (2) Making and (3) their integration, i.e. how Making empowers towards Ethics: the core of the RtM approach. • Part 3: describing how this theory is applied in design workshops and how the Rights through Making (RtM) approach evolved; • Part 4: reflecting on the overall research experience and the underlying personal motivations. Before this central body I placed and introductory part, containing acknowledgments, rights of the readers, synopsis (this chapter) and tables of contents. After the fourth part, I positioned a part called "Annexes", which is composed of two main sections: • In the first section I present the RtM workshops in detail, in regard to both the process of each RtM workshop and their evolution; • In the second section, I illustrate the direction in which I envision the diffusion of RtM in the future, through the realisation of an Internet platform. I now summarize the content of the central body of this thesis, parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. Part 1 – Design challenge / Research quest The first part of this thesis focuses on defining the challenge that I proposed and the general actions, taken to face this challenge. In the chapter "Skills for an ethical society: a new civilisation", I start by defining "pervasive ethics" through design, of which the achievement is the goal of the present work. I envision a social transformation, towards a new civilisation, in which the praxis2 of ethics is embedded in society. The creation of a new civilisation, starts, as stated in the Manifesto, from an attempt of embodying values expressed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the lowest common denominator on ethics. My ambition is to approach this matter from a designerly perspective; I therefore motivate how I believe the discipline of design is able to contribute in this social transformation. I start to do so, by defining my perspective on transformation. To introduce the three actions that I consider necessary for my aim to be reached, I describe the case of an excellent craftsman: Chiara Vigo. Although she embodies all the characteristics that are necessary to transform society towards an ethical direction, I point out why I believe that craftsmanship alone, cannot be the key for pervasive ethics. It is necessary, but it has to be associated with other elements. The three actions that I state as indispensible for my toil are the following: (1) levelling the social importance of Making, with respect to Thinking; (2) educating people’s skills, not only manual skills, but also towards autonomy; (3) creating opportunities for skilful points of view to be integrated, so that the skill of empathy is trained as well. People making together, combining their own sensitivities, experiences and values form the third action to contribute to the revolution towards universal ethics. I later introduce my approach, Rights through Making (RtM), describing point by point how it intervenes on these three elements. The approach will be later documented by means of examples in part 3. Yet before this, I expand on the theoretical background. Part 2 - Theoretical background This part presents the theoretical background on which this thesis is based. The first chapter of the second part (1 Towards Universal Human Rights) summarizes the historical and social foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, going through the three steps of consolidation of Human Rights in history: naturalisation, generalisation and internationalisation. This chapter explains why it was chosen to adopt the UN charter as the authority on ethics and as a tool to empower people towards the respect of Human Rights. The second chapter (2 Making), together with the third chapter (3 Ethics through Making), constitutes the theoretical core of this thesis. In the second chapter (2 Making) I face (2.3) "The phenomenology of Making". I take a phenomenological perspective, where experience, the naive contact with the world, is inherently meaningful: acting in the world and perceiving/conceiving transformations is what we (humans) do. Starting from the preferred interface with which people operate transformations, i.e., the hand, I describe how the evolution of (fine) manipulation permitted our species to evolve the ability to abstract thinking. The designerly way towards transformation is sketching (two- and three-dimensional), as a way to embody knowledge. It is a way to make sense of the world and to make new sense of the world, directing our human intentionality towards what we (humans) can transform. Another fundamental aspect in Making is culture. The unbreakable link between Making and places is therefore illustrated. Every artefact is permeated with cultural elements and values: the way artefacts appear, behave and function, reflects the presence of their designers and of the environment in which they are brought into functioning. These values give body to an artefact, tell its story and attribute a personality to it. The third chapter (3 Ethics through Making) presents the main proposition I aim to demonstrate with this research: there are three reasons why I believe that Making and especially Making together are praxis that lead to the realisation of pervasive ethics. The three reasons are: (1) a enomenological argument, which implies that a shared Making process empowers towards a constructive integration of points of view; (2) limitation of expressivity imposed by language; (3) historical grounding, i.e. showing that in history, the periods in which Thinking and Making were considered of the same importance, were actually enlightened periods for humanity. On this grounding, the RtM approach is rooted and proposes a way for design to actively and consciously contribute to pervasive ethics, both in the action of design and in its outcomes. In the next part, the theory is applied through workshops. Part 3 – Theory’s application through workshops and RtM approach development In this part, I describe 3 of the 8 workshops I organized and taught, applying the RtM approach: WS 8 - Designing for Points of View, WS 5 – Urban Lights and WS 7 – Online Collaborative Design Space. These workshops materialised the theory illustrated in the first part and formed the enabling tool of such theory. In Chapter 1, I describe the workshop "1 Designing for Points of View, a metaworkshop". Although this was the last workshop that was done, I start this part by illustrating it, because its findings were the key to enrich and soundly consolidate the initial propositions of the Manifesto, and therefore ground the RtM approach. I designed the workshop WS 8 - Designing for Points of View, to tackle the difficulty of conceptualising through making. Students had found it very hard to actually make together. Defeating the habit of relying upon linear Cartesian processes, where Thinking is prior to Making, is a main challenge within my endeavour, which was only partly achieved by means of the workshops described in the second part of this thesis. I therefore designed a refinement of the RtM approach in which students were induced to translate their skills into a design, integrating different points of view and trusting intuition. This did lead to the expected enrichment of the designing phase: because students had to actually transfer their skilful points of view into a design, they were forced to act within a concrete, first person perspective. This steered them clear from the cloud of abstraction they were used to move about in, where a concept was defined through the discussion of a given assignment. In the chapter "2 RtM workshops’ overview", I give a general overview of all 8 workshops, with factsheets, and I present the workshops’ outcomes. The detailed description of all these workshops, how they were prepared and how they evolved in time, can be found in "Part 5 – Annexes". In chapter "3 WS 5 – Urban Lights" I explain, step by step, how this particular workshop was first prepared and then taught/realised. Concerning its preparation, I report on how the location was chosen; how contributors were involved and for what purpose; how the assignment of the workshop was designed, in concord with the location, the institutions and the contributors participating; I explain what creative techniques, together with the other lecturers, I provided the students with; I report on how the schedule was defined and what was the logic of this preparation. Concerning conducting the workshop, I report on how students were chosen and teams were made. How the inspirational material was proposed to the students and how they worked with the creative techniques that they were supplied with. Then I describe the focal phase of conceptualising by making, when students built low-fidelity experienceable prototypes and designed concepts. I conclude this chapter with the description of the model of the first 6 workshops, grounded on the experience matured during these years of research. I highlight two critical aspects that remained un-tackled. The first relates to the core activity of these workshops: conceptualising through making. This step has never worked as I had thought. Strategies to make it possible had to be designed and this is why WS 8 – Designing for Points of View was later made. The second critical aspect has to do with the "universality" in space and time of this approach. Workshops are spot activities, reserved for few students, few contributors, few people and have a limited visibility. If the aim is a massive change in societal praxis and thinking, the impact of workshops is not sufficient. This is why the Internet Platform was conceived. In chapter "5 Internet Platform: collaborative design space" I face this aspect. Contributing with design to pervasive ethics is my aim. I work towards the formation and spreading of new skills, which can create a new praxis, based on respect of Human Rights. On the basis of this new praxis, a new way of Thinking can then rise. Short multicultural workshops are a good attempt to test the approach, its effectiveness and its results. But in order to really have an impact on society, the approach needs to be communicated, disseminated, and used by as many people as possible. This part faces the issue of disseminating the RtM approach. At the moment of writing this thesis, the project is spread through an Internet showcase. It contains a description of the workshops’ outcomes and of the people and partners participating. Its design process is illustrated in part 5, "Annexes". Within this Internet Showcase, I additionally envisioned a section as a collaborative design space that will be a sort of permanent online RtM workshop. This section is not yet realised. In this section, designers will be able to contribute, respecting the underlying theory of RtM. They will contribute in a constructive, additive way – through Making – to realise a shared design assignment. In this chapter I describe an online trial workshop that gave me elements of motivation to plan such further developments. Part 4 – Make Tomorrow In this part, I reflect on what I learned in facing the design challenge / research quest. The evaluation of the outcomes of the different experiences I did, shapes new directions, and shows the dynamic character of the RtM approach. The main two actions arising from this reflection are the following: (1) the necessity of implementing in the "traditional" RtM workshops, the technique developed during the workshop "designing for points of view" to foster the integration of skilful points of view in a design process; (2) and the realisation of the "Collaborative Design Space", finding ways to create a permanent online space, embodying the RtM approach, where designers can actually integrate their skilful points of view. Afterward, I define several points of improvement of the RtM approach, such as adding sources for competencies on human rights and societal issues, introducing working sessions together with craftsmen/local saper fare3 and refining the approach allowing more iterations of reflection-on-action on interim mock-ups, to strengthen the integration between conceptualising and Making. This work aims at creating an approach that empowers pervasive ethics through design. This thesis ends with an example of a design, realised by a student within one of my workshops, which reconnects to my personal motivation and is a shining example of the effectiveness of the RtM approach. It provides points of reflections for the discipline of design. Yet, it is a temporary research conclusion, which still has many open ends and fascinating opportunities for further explorations. Now, without further ado, let the travel towards pervasive ethics through design start