Warren McCulloch and the British cyberneticians

Warren McCulloch was a significant influence on a number of British cyberneticians, as some British pioneers in this area were on him. He interacted regularly with most of the main figures on the British cybernetics scene, forming close friendships and collaborations with several, as well as mentoring others. Many of these interactions stemmed from a 1949 visit to London during which he gave the opening talk at the inaugural meeting of the Ratio Club, a gathering of brilliant, mainly young, British scientists working in areas related to cybernetics. This paper traces some of these relationships and interaction

Математические модели развития и компенсации гипоксических состояний при ишемической болезни сердца у лиц летного состава

The increase of pilots’ labor intensity caused by rapid development of flight technologies and increasing of complexity of combat missions faced by flight crew members increases the loads on organisms of flight personnel in general and in particular on their cardiovascular system. Domestic and foreign sources contain statistics indicating an increase in the number of flight accidents caused by cardiovascular pathologies in pilots, an increase in the number of flight personnel unsuitable for flight work due to the same reasons, a decrease in the age of flight crew members with cardiovascular pathologies. Therefore, issues of early detection and optimization of treatment processes of cardiovascular diseases in flight crew members are really necessary.Збільшення інтенсивності праці льотчиків, викликане швидкими темпами розвитку льотної техніки і ускладненням бойових завдань, що стоять перед членами льотних екіпажів, збільшує навантаження на організм осіб льотного складу в цілому, і зокрема на серцево-судинну систему. Вітчизняні та зарубіжні джерела містять статистику, яка свідчить про збільшення кількості льотних пригод, викликаних серцево-судинними патологіями у льотчиків, зростанні кількості осіб льотного складу, визнаними непридатними до льотної роботи з тих же причин, зниженням віку членів льотних екіпажів, що мають патології серцево-судинної системи. Тому актуальними є питання своєчасного виявлення та оптимізації процесу лікування серцево-судинних захворюваньу членів льотних екіпажів.Увеличение интенсивности труда летчиков, вызванное быстрыми темпами развития летной техники и усложнением боевых задач, стоящих перед членами летных экипажей увеличивает нагрузку на организм лиц летного состава в целом и а частности на сердечно-сосудистую систему. Отечественные и зарубежные источники содержат статистику, свидетельствующую об увеличении числа летных происшествий, вызванных сердечно-сосудистыми патологиями у летчиков, росте числа лиц летного состава, признанными непригодными к летной работе по тем же причинам, снижением возраста членов летных экипажей, имеющих патологии сердечно-сосудистой системы. Поэтому актуальными являются вопросы своевременного выявления и оптимизации процесса лечения сердечно-сосудистых заболеваний у членов летных экипажей

Artificial Immune Systems - Models, algorithms and applications

Copyright © 2010 Academic Research Publishing Agency.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are computational paradigms that belong to the computational intelligence family and are inspired by the biological immune system. During the past decade, they have attracted a lot of interest from researchers aiming to develop immune-based models and techniques to solve complex computational or engineering problems. This work presents a survey of existing AIS models and algorithms with a focus on the last five years.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fun

Recent advances on filtering and control for nonlinear stochastic complex systems with incomplete information: A survey

This Article is provided by the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2012 Hindawi PublishingSome recent advances on the filtering and control problems for nonlinear stochastic complex systems with incomplete information are surveyed. The incomplete information under consideration mainly includes missing measurements, randomly varying sensor delays, signal quantization, sensor saturations, and signal sampling. With such incomplete information, the developments on various filtering and control issues are reviewed in great detail. In particular, the addressed nonlinear stochastic complex systems are so comprehensive that they include conventional nonlinear stochastic systems, different kinds of complex networks, and a large class of sensor networks. The corresponding filtering and control technologies for such nonlinear stochastic complex systems are then discussed. Subsequently, some latest results on the filtering and control problems for the complex systems with incomplete information are given. Finally, conclusions are drawn and several possible future research directions are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 61134009, 61104125, 61028008, 61174136, 60974030, and 61074129, the Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province of China, the Project sponsored by SRF for ROCS of SEM of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

USSR Space Life Sciences Digest. Index to issues 1-4

This document is an index to issues 1 to 4 of the USSR Space Life Sciences Digest and is arranged in three sections. In section 1, abstracts from the first four issues are grouped according to subject; please note the four letter codes in the upper right hand corner of the pages. Section 2 lists the categories according to which digest entries are grouped and cites additional entries relevant to that category by four letter code and entry number in section 1. Refer to section 1 for titles and other pertinent information. Key words are indexed in section 3

Predictive feedback control and Fitts' law

Fitts’ law is a well established empirical formula, known for encapsulating the “speed-accuracy trade-off”. For discrete, manual movements from a starting location to a target, Fitts’ law relates movement duration to the distance moved and target size. The widespread empirical success of the formula is suggestive of underlying principles of human movement control. There have been previous attempts to relate Fitts’ law to engineering-type control hypotheses and it has been shown that the law is exactly consistent with the closed-loop step-response of a time-delayed, first-order system. Assuming only the operation of closed-loop feedback, either continuous or intermittent, this paper asks whether such feedback should be predictive or not predictive to be consistent with Fitts law. Since Fitts’ law is equivalent to a time delay separated from a first-order system, known control theory implies that the controller must be predictive. A predictive controller moves the time-delay outside the feedback loop such that the closed-loop response can be separated into a time delay and rational function whereas a non- predictive controller retains a state delay within feedback loop which is not consistent with Fitts’ law. Using sufficient parameters, a high-order non-predictive controller could approximately reproduce Fitts’ law. However, such high-order, “non-parametric” controllers are essentially empirical in nature, without physical meaning, and therefore are conceptually inferior to the predictive controller. It is a new insight that using closed-loop feedback, prediction is required to physically explain Fitts’ law. The implication is that prediction is an inherent part of the “speed-accuracy trade-off”

The Contribution of Society to the Construction of Individual Intelligence

It is argued that society is a crucial factor in the construction of individual intelligence. In other words that it is important that intelligence is socially situated in an analogous way to the physical situation of robots. Evidence that this may be the case is taken from developmental linguistics, the social intelligence hypothesis, the complexity of society, the need for self-reflection and autism. The consequences for the development of artificial social agents is briefly considered. Finally some challenges for research into socially situated intelligence are highlighted

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)