The view from elsewhere: perspectives on ALife Modeling

Many artificial life researchers stress the interdisciplinary character of the field. Against such a backdrop, this report reviews and discusses artificial life, as it is depicted in, and as it interfaces with, adjacent disciplines (in particular, philosophy, biology, and linguistics), and in the light of a specific historical example of interdisciplinary research (namely cybernetics) with which artificial life shares many features. This report grew out of a workshop held at the Sixth European Conference on Artificial Life in Prague and features individual contributions from the workshop's eight speakers, plus a section designed to reflect the debates that took place during the workshop's discussion sessions. The major theme that emerged during these sessions was the identity and status of artificial life as a scientific endeavor

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

On the Selection of Tuning Methodology of FOPID Controllers for the Control of Higher Order Processes

In this paper, a comparative study is done on the time and frequency domain tuning strategies for fractional order (FO) PID controllers to handle higher order processes. A new fractional order template for reduced parameter modeling of stable minimum/non-minimum phase higher order processes is introduced and its advantage in frequency domain tuning of FOPID controllers is also presented. The time domain optimal tuning of FOPID controllers have also been carried out to handle these higher order processes by performing optimization with various integral performance indices. The paper highlights on the practical control system implementation issues like flexibility of online autotuning, reduced control signal and actuator size, capability of measurement noise filtration, load disturbance suppression, robustness against parameter uncertainties etc. in light of the above tuning methodologies.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

A review on analysis and synthesis of nonlinear stochastic systems with randomly occurring incomplete information

Copyright q 2012 Hongli Dong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In the context of systems and control, incomplete information refers to a dynamical system in which knowledge about the system states is limited due to the difficulties in modeling complexity in a quantitative way. The well-known types of incomplete information include parameter uncertainties and norm-bounded nonlinearities. Recently, in response to the development of network technologies, the phenomenon of randomly occurring incomplete information has become more and more prevalent. Such a phenomenon typically appears in a networked environment. Examples include, but are not limited to, randomly occurring uncertainties, randomly occurring nonlinearities, randomly occurring saturation, randomly missing measurements and randomly occurring quantization. Randomly occurring incomplete information, if not properly handled, would seriously deteriorate the performance of a control system. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the analysis and synthesis problems for nonlinear stochastic systems with randomly occurring incomplete information. The developments of the filtering, control and fault detection problems are systematically reviewed. Latest results on analysis and synthesis of nonlinear stochastic systems are discussed in great detail. In addition, various distributed filtering technologies over sensor networks are highlighted. Finally, some concluding remarks are given and some possible future research directions are pointed out. © 2012 Hongli Dong et al.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61273156, 61134009, 61273201, 61021002, and 61004067, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, the National Science Foundation of the USA under Grant No. HRD-1137732, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of German

Bounded Rationality and Heuristics in Humans and in Artificial Cognitive Systems

In this paper I will present an analysis of the impact that the notion of “bounded rationality”, introduced by Herbert Simon in his book “Administrative Behavior”, produced in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, by focusing on the field of Automated Decision Making (ADM), I will show how the introduction of the cognitive dimension into the study of choice of a rational (natural) agent, indirectly determined - in the AI field - the development of a line of research aiming at the realisation of artificial systems whose decisions are based on the adoption of powerful shortcut strategies (known as heuristics) based on “satisficing” - i.e. non optimal - solutions to problem solving. I will show how the “heuristic approach” to problem solving allowed, in AI, to face problems of combinatorial complexity in real-life situations and still represents an important strategy for the design and implementation of intelligent systems

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

A Survey on Multisensor Fusion and Consensus Filtering for Sensor Networks

Multisensor fusion and consensus filtering are two fascinating subjects in the research of sensor networks. In this survey, we will cover both classic results and recent advances developed in these two topics. First, we recall some important results in the development ofmultisensor fusion technology. Particularly, we pay great attention to the fusion with unknown correlations, which ubiquitously exist in most of distributed filtering problems. Next, we give a systematic review on several widely used consensus filtering approaches. Furthermore, some latest progress on multisensor fusion and consensus filtering is also presented. Finally, conclusions are drawn and several potential future research directions are outlined.the Royal Society of the UK, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61374039, 61304010, 11301118, and 61573246, the Hujiang Foundation of China under Grants C14002 and D15009, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, and the Innovation Fund Project for Graduate Student of Shanghai under Grant JWCXSL140