Environment classification in multiagent systems inspired by the adaptive immune system

The adaptive immune system in vertebrates is a complex, distributed, adaptive system capable of effecting collective mul-ticellular responses. Our study introduces many of the desirable properties of this biological system to decentralized multiagent systems. We adopt the crossregulation model of the adaptive immune system involving interactions between effector and regulatory cells. Effector cells can mount beneficial immune responses to microbial antigens as well as pathologic autoimmune responses to self-antigens. Deleterious autoimmunity is prevented by regulatory cells that suppress the effectors to tolerate the self-antigens. We redeploy the crossregulation model within a multiagent system by letting each agent run an ODE-based instance of the model. Results of extensive simulation-based experiments demonstrate that a distributed multiagent system can mount different responses to distinct objects in their environment. These responses are solely a result of the dynamics between virtual cells in each agent and interactions between neighboring agents. The collective dynamics gives rise to a meaningful "self"- "nonself" classification of the environment by individual agent, even if these categories were not prescribed a priori in the agents.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Security and health: Biopolitical health surveillance in China’s digital response to COVID-19

Why is health a security issue now? An emerging paradigm that links epidemics and security concerns has influenced how we think about health and the preparedness of health surveillance. As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has swept the world with its tremendous threats to public health and societies, innovative digital health surveillance technologies have been (and continue to be) developed for pandemic surveillance. With a special focus on China’s Health Code system and its implementation in Wuhan since the Wuhan lockdown, this thesis aims to examine the surveillance dynamics of such technological artefacts. In doing so, this thesis applies institutional ethnography (IE) to illustrate how the ruling relations embedded in such assemblages coordinate and organize citizens’ everyday lives. The primary findings of this thesis suggest that Health Code as a health security practice is a flexible and dynamic surveillance assemblage embedded with political classifications and decisions to define and mediate risk in everyday settings, located in a larger network of power relations. The insecurities and anxieties brought by the normalized use of Health Code exacerbate the fear of being classified as sick, as the threat of illness leads people to embrace the current situation and cooperate with the existing surveillance system through the rationalization of collective norms and the valorization and stabilization of data-driven knowledge

Specialised Languages and Multimedia. Linguistic and Cross-cultural Issues

none2noThis book collects academic works focusing on scientific and technical discourse and on the ways in which this type of discourse appears in or is shaped by multimedia products. The originality of this book is to be seen in the variety of approaches used and of the specialised languages investigated in relation to multimodal and multimedia genres. Contributions will particularly focus on new multimodal or multimedia forms of specialised discourse (in institutional, academic, technical, scientific, social or popular settings), linguistic features of specialised discourse in multimodal or multimedia genres, the popularisation of specialised knowledge in multimodal or multimedia genres, the impact of multimodality and multimediality on the construction of scientific and technical discourse, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of language, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of translation, new multimedia modes of knowledge dissemination, the translation/adaptation of scientific discourse in multimedia products. This volume contributes to the theory and practice of multimodal studies and translation, with a specific focus on specialized discourse.Rivista di Classe A - Volume specialeopenManca E., Bianchi F.Manca, E.; Bianchi, F

Studying literacy as situated social practice : the application and development of a research orientation for purposes of addressing educational and social issues in South African contexts

This is a study of the application in South Africa of a social practices approach to the study of literacy. A social practices approach conceptualizes literacy practices as variable practices which link people, linguistic resources, media objects, and strategies for meaning-making in contextualized ways. These literacy practices are seen as varying across broad social contexts, and across social domains within these contexts, and they can be studied ethnographically. I examine how this approach is applied across four critical themes of study in South Africa, namely: the uses and valuations of reading and writing by adults without schooling; the historical circumstances whereby literacy comes to be identified as a resource of European culture in colonial South Africa; children's early engagement with literacy informal and informal contexts; and reading and writing in relation to electronic and digital media. I review examples of ethnographic research in each case, in which I have participated as a researcher, and examine how the approach has been applied, tested and modified in each case of its application. The research in each case showed literacy's incorporation in complex and variable ways in situated, located human activities. Whereas the first application of the social practices approach, that of the SoUL project detailed how literacy operated as everyday practice amongst people with little or no schooling, the research lacked a theoretical perspective to explain how these practices came to take the form and status that they did, as regards the influences upon them from outside the immediate settings that were studied. Over the subsequent studies I developed a revised approach to the study of literacy which detailed the explanatory usefulness of studying how literacy practices that network across larger domains than the local have effect on the construction of local practices, in both historical as well as contemporary examples. Literacy practices were not simply the products of local activity but involved rather the particular local application of communication technologies, language and artefacts that originated from outside the immediate social space. However, local applications involved original, indeterminate and varied uses of those resources. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-223)

Integrative Levels of Knowing

Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit einer systematischen Organisation der epistemologischen Dimension des menschlichen Wissens in Bezug auf Perspektiven und Methoden. Insbesondere wird untersucht inwieweit das bekannte Organisationsprinzip der integrativen Ebenen, das eine Hierarchie zunehmender Komplexität und Integration beschreibt, geeignet ist für eine grundlegende Klassifikation von Perspektiven bzw. epistemischen Bezugsrahmen. Die zentrale These dieser Dissertation geht davon aus, dass eine angemessene Analyse solcher epistemischen Kontexte in der Lage sein sollte, unterschiedliche oder gar konfligierende Bezugsrahmen anhand von kontextübergreifenden Standards und Kriterien vergleichen und bewerten zu können. Diese Aufgabe erfordert theoretische und methodologische Grundlagen, welche die Beschränkungen eines radikalen Kontextualismus vermeiden, insbesondere die ihm innewohnende Gefahr einer Fragmentierung des Wissens aufgrund der angeblichen Inkommensurabilität epistemischer Kontexte. Basierend auf Jürgen Habermas‘ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns und seiner Methodologie des hermeneutischen Rekonstruktionismus, wird argumentiert, dass epistemischer Pluralismus nicht zwangsläufig zu epistemischem Relativismus führen muss und dass eine systematische Organisation der Perspektivenvielfalt von bereits existierenden Modellen zur kognitiven Entwicklung profitieren kann, wie sie etwa in der Psychologie oder den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften rekonstruiert werden. Der vorgestellte Ansatz versteht sich als ein Beitrag zur multi-perspektivischen Wissensorganisation, der sowohl neue analytische Werkzeuge für kulturvergleichende Betrachtungen von Wissensorganisationssystemen bereitstellt als auch neue Organisationsprinzipien vorstellt für eine Kontexterschließung, die dazu beitragen kann die Ausdrucksstärke bereits vorhandener Dokumentationssprachen zu erhöhen. Zudem enthält der Anhang eine umfangreiche Zusammenstellung von Modellen integrativer Wissensebenen.This dissertation is concerned with a systematic organization of the epistemological dimension of human knowledge in terms of viewpoints and methods. In particular, it will be explored to what extent the well-known organizing principle of integrative levels that presents a developmental hierarchy of complexity and integration can be applied for a basic classification of viewpoints or epistemic outlooks. The central thesis pursued in this investigation is that an adequate analysis of such epistemic contexts requires tools that allow to compare and evaluate divergent or even conflicting frames of reference according to context-transcending standards and criteria. This task demands a theoretical and methodological foundation that avoids the limitation of radical contextualism and its inherent threat of a fragmentation of knowledge due to the alleged incommensurability of the underlying frames of reference. Based on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and his methodology of hermeneutic reconstructionism, it will be argued that epistemic pluralism does not necessarily imply epistemic relativism and that a systematic organization of the multiplicity of perspectives can benefit from already existing models of cognitive development as reconstructed in research fields like psychology, social sciences, and humanities. The proposed cognitive-developmental approach to knowledge organization aims to contribute to a multi-perspective knowledge organization by offering both analytical tools for cross-cultural comparisons of knowledge organization systems (e.g., Seven Epitomes and Dewey Decimal Classification) and organizing principles for context representation that help to improve the expressiveness of existing documentary languages (e.g., Integrative Levels Classification). Additionally, the appendix includes an extensive compilation of conceptions and models of Integrative Levels of Knowing from a broad multidisciplinary field