7 research outputs found
Radical Technology Inquirer: a methodology for holistic, transparent and participatory technology foresight
This paper introduces and motivates the Radical Technology Inquirer (RTI) methodology for anticipation of technological breakthroughs and their combined cross-sectoral and social impacts. The primary use of the methodology is long-term policy evaluation and design. The first version of the methodology was published in 2013. This paper reports the current RTI 2018 version, which is based on systematic collection of scientific and technological news and grounded on theory. It combines societal functions with technological opportunities by conceptualising 20 "global value-producing networks" GVNs and 100 "anticipated radical technologies" ARTs. The RTI methodology is participatory, using continuous crowdsourcing and stakeholder evaluations. Each GVN is characterised by a need and an existing and a novel way of satisfying that need and organising the societal function. The methodology combines existing and new foresight methods and concepts to achieve a holistic and transparent approach for anticipating technology-enabled transformative socio-technical developments of the next 20 years. In this anticipation effort, the focus is more on recent weak signals of emerging technological capabilities than on past strong signals, e.g. the diffusion of various technologies
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How to Make the Most Productive Intervention in a Complex Economic System
Information about supply and demand propagates through supply chains in a queueing network with people and computers as batch information processors. As each batch processor delays propagation of information whilst pursuing optimal local decisions, the effect is delay and distortion of the information that is used to commit resources to actions in the supply chain. This thesis investigates the effect of delay and imperfect information as a source of error, to establish the case for change in research focus from optimal exploitation of physical constraints to optimal exploitation of information. In the context of real world supply chains, the thesis asks "How does one make the most productive intervention in a complex economic system?" and pursues a meta-intervention which perpetually minimises the discovered error-term. Evidence from literature indicates that agent-based modelling permits real-time peer-to-peer communication and distributed optimisation. Based on the literature the research project designs and develops an agent-based model which operates in real-time without batch-processes and can perform incremental multi-objective optimisation under realistic (chronologically progressive) conditions for decision making. The agent based model is then used to investigate two real-world supply chains, as case studies, which reveals a significant improvement of profitability and order-fulfilment. The thesis concludes that agent-based modelling is a very promising direction for "making the most productive intervention" as it reduces delay to a minimum. Finally it recommends that continuous improvement of decision making methods is a role better suited for humans, rather than operational decision making where computers cope much better with the high amount of detailed information
Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Account of the Bayesian Brain
This dissertation reports some first steps towards a compositional account of
active inference and the Bayesian brain. Specifically, we use the tools of
contemporary applied category theory to supply functorial semantics for
approximate inference. To do so, we define on the `syntactic' side the new
notion of Bayesian lens and show that Bayesian updating composes according to
the compositional lens pattern. Using Bayesian lenses, and inspired by
compositional game theory, we define fibrations of statistical games and
classify various problems of statistical inference as corresponding sections:
the chain rule of the relative entropy is formalized as a strict section, while
maximum likelihood estimation and the free energy give lax sections. In the
process, we introduce a new notion of `copy-composition'.
On the `semantic' side, we present a new formalization of general open
dynamical systems (particularly: deterministic, stochastic, and random; and
discrete- and continuous-time) as certain coalgebras of polynomial functors,
which we show collect into monoidal opindexed categories (or, alternatively,
into algebras for multicategories of generalized polynomial functors). We use
these opindexed categories to define monoidal bicategories of cilia: dynamical
systems which control lenses, and which supply the target for our functorial
semantics. Accordingly, we construct functors which explain the bidirectional
compositional structure of predictive coding neural circuits under the free
energy principle, thereby giving a formal mathematical underpinning to the
bidirectionality observed in the cortex. Along the way, we explain how to
compose rate-coded neural circuits using an algebra for a multicategory of
linear circuit diagrams, showing subsequently that this is subsumed by lenses
and polynomial functors.Comment: DPhil thesis; as submitted. Main change from v1: improved treatment
of statistical games. A number of errors also fixed, and some presentation
improved. Comments most welcom
Generalized averaged Gaussian quadrature and applications
A simple numerical method for constructing the optimal generalized averaged Gaussian quadrature formulas will be presented. These formulas exist in many cases in which real positive GaussKronrod formulas do not exist, and can be used as an adequate alternative in order to estimate the error of a Gaussian rule. We also investigate the conditions under which the optimal averaged Gaussian quadrature formulas and their truncated variants are internal
MS FT-2-2 7 Orthogonal polynomials and quadrature: Theory, computation, and applications
Quadrature rules find many applications in science and engineering. Their analysis is a classical area of applied mathematics and continues to attract considerable attention. This seminar brings together speakers with expertise in a large variety of quadrature rules. It is the aim of the seminar to provide an overview of recent developments in the analysis of quadrature rules. The computation of error estimates and novel applications also are described