Preliminary Design of the APIARY for VLSI Support of Knowledge-Based Systems

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Office of Naval Research of the Department of Defense under Contract N00014-75-C-0522.Knowledge-based applications will require vastly increased computational resources to achieve their goals. We are working on the development of a VLSI Message Passing Architecture to meet this need. As a first step we present the preliminary design of the APIARY system in this paper. The APIARY is currently in an early stage of implementation at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Office of Naval Researc

Tradeoffs in Designing a Parallel Architecture for the Apiary

The Apiary is an abstract computer architecture designed for performing computation based on the idea of message passing between dynamic computational objects called actors. An apiary connotes a community of worker bees busily working together; similarily, the Apiary architecture is made of many workers (processing elements) computing together. The Apiary architecture is designed to exploit the concurrency inherent in the actor model of computation by processing the messages to many different actors in parallel. This paper explores the nature of actor computations and how the Apiary performs computation with actors to give the render some background before looking at some of the tradeoffs which must be made to design special purpose hardware for the Apiary.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Identifying bottlenecks and gateways for agroforestry development in Poland

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Quest for economic development in agrarian localities

This paper describes and analyzes the operational strategy of West Nile region, a typical low local capability community, in pursuit of local economic development. Special emphasis has been placed on the development of groups of survival beekeeping-enterprises and their integration in the local economy. The region provides an interesting example of what public-private partnerships can offer for local economic development. Secondly, it is an attempt to document, in a coherent manner, the activities and contributions of the key actors in the honey and beeswax value chain, including support from complementary institutions. Finally, it conceptualizes and theorizes the practice of beekeeping, honey extraction, processing and marketing in West Nile. Possible lessons that can be learnt from the experience are also identified and discussed

Guardians for Concurrent Systems

In this paper we survey the current state of the art on fundamental aspects of concurrent systems. We discuss the notion of concurrency and discuss a model of computation which unifies the lambda calculus model and the sequential stored program model. We develop the notion of a guardian as a module that regulates the use of shared resources by scheduling their access, providing protection, and implementing recovery from hardware failures. A shared checking account is an example of the kind of resource that needs a guardian. We introduce the notions of a customer and a transaction manager for a request and illustrate how to use them to implement arbitrary scheduling policies for a guardian. A proof methodology is presented for proving properties of guardians, such as a guarantee of service for all requests received.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Report on the Workshop on Distributed AI

On June 9-11, 22 people gathered at Endicott House for the first workshop on the newly emerging topic of Distributed AI. They came with a wide range of views on the topic, and indeed a wide range of views of what precisely the topic was. In keeping with the spirit of the workshop, this report describing it was prepared in a distributed fashion. Each of the speakers contributed a summary of his comments. Sessions during the workshop included both descriptions of work done or in progress, and group discussions focused on a range of topics. The report reflects the organization, with nine short articles describing research efforts, and four summarizing the informal comments used as the foci for the group discussions.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Secure services integration and edge computing for effective beekeeping

Many of the issues that require resolution are not easy to mitigate just from the technology perspective. The ancestral learned logic of processes, the people traditions, and many other variants define inner contexts that make the adhesion and efficient use of information technologies a delicate process. The enormous geographical dispersion of the beekeeping economic activity, the mostly amateur profile of beekeepers, and the specificity in the traditional way as the activity is managed, compromises the applicability of integrative measures based on ICTE. Efficient and integrated management of a no-professionalized economic activity depends on two basic principles: i) the existence of effective tools capable of managing that activity and its synergies with other related activities, and ii) an infrastructure (technological, procedural, legal) that supports services properly profiled for any actor in that activity. This paper describes the work-in-process sBee - Smart Beekeeping, an applied research project that sought to integrate emerging technologies on the innovative management of critical issues that beekeeping needs to overcome. Electronic devices, Internet-of-things, advanced management algorithms, and innovative visualization services were explored. The global system architecture, its supporting services, and the communication infrastructure are here described. The integration of both internet-of-things and communications services, with the common beekeeping?s management tasks, levered a proposal for improving this activity to become more effective. Furthermore, an advanced technological supporting platform was created and experimented, prepared for further developments, on mitigating emergent challenges that the digitization promotes, namely the security and traceability on food and related agriculture value-chains, as well as on the predictive and intelligent perception of current and future scenarios.911A-2C18-106F | Carlos Jorge Enes Capit?o de AbreuN/

Adopting improved box hive in Atsbi Wemberta District of eastern zone, Tigray region: determinants and financial benefits

Though beekeeping is a common farming enterprise and income generating activity in Atsbi Wemberta Woreda, and promotional efforts have been made to improve it, no systematic study has been undertaken to evaluate the promotional efforts and people's response to it. The objectives of this study were to identify determinants of improved box hive adoption by the beekeepers; and to analyse financial benefits from adopting improved box hive technology in Atsbi Wemberta district of Eastern Zone, Tigray Region of Ethiopia. Stratified sampling technique was employed to identify the sample respondents, who were categorized into adopters and non-adopters of improved box hive. Based on probability proportional to size, 45 adopters and 85 non-adopters were selected. The data were collected using structured interview schedule, group discussion, key informant discussion and observation; and were analysed using descriptive statistics, partial budgeting, and logit model. Partial budgeting revealed that the net benefit from improved box hives was more than double that obtained from traditional hive. The logit model revealed that credit, knowledge, education level of household head, perception and visits to demonstrations positively and significantly influenced adoption of improved box hive. Major problems for promoting improved beekeeping practices were identified in the study area. Ranking showed that drought, honeybee pests and diseases, lack of beekeeping materials, death of colony, lack of adequate extension support, marketing problem, shortage of bee forage, lack of adequate beekeeping skill and reduction of honeybee colonies were the major constraints in the beekeeping development in their order of importance. There is a need for actors to come together for concerted and coordinated action to address the constraints and problems, as the solutions are not in the domain of any one actor. Women and landless youths can be encouraged to take up this income generating enterprise. Developing the skills of beekeepers and extension agents on bee management and utilization of beeswax through intensive training, enhancing bee forage production and utilization, integrating beekeeping with water harvesting, modifying the improved box hive to include only one super to reduce initial cost, linking honey producers to stable and reliable markets and following a participatory value chain based approach, promoting private entrepreneurs to provide additional services for value addition, promoting farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing, and encouraging farmer groups to enhance bargaining power and create a learning environment are some initiatives that could go a long way in the sustainable development of this important economic subsector

Farming bees in a dynamic social-ecology: An ethnographic exploration of knowledge practices among commercial bee farmers in the Western Cape, South Africa

In recent years theorists have challenged the certainty that there is one universally 'right' system of knowledge, arguing that there exists a diversity or plurality of ways of knowing the world (Turnbull 1997; Green 2008). Western scientific research has been reframed by these 'relational ontologists' as a set of knowledge practices that tend to produce and reinforce a dualistic view of the world. In particular, 'scientific', positivist accounts of nature have historically positioned mind and body, human beings and nature, humans and non-humans as essentially different or separate from each other (Thrift 2004; Haraway 2008). The methodological recommendation is that, as social theorists, we carefully observe knowledge practices and allow ourselves to be surprised or challenged by what we find rather than constantly performing these preconceived ways of knowing the world through our research (Law 2004; Lien & Law 2010). Farming bees commercially in the Western Cape, South Africa involves a high degree of skill and intimate daily engagements with plants, animals, landscapes and weather-worlds. As such it is an ideal case study for interrogating dualistic framings of human-environment relations through an ethnographic exploration of environmental knowledge practices. Commercial bee farmers that participated in this study raised a range of concerns about complex dynamics influencing their businesses, including challenges accessing viable land for bee sites and accessibility and security of the flowering plants upon which bees depend for food. I argue that, in practice, these challenges involved relational entanglements of farmers and other 'more-than-human' actors (Whatmore 2006) in what I refer to as a dynamic social-ecology (Ingold 2000; Berkes & Jolly 2001; Ommer et al. 2012). I argue that pollination and honey were co-produced by meshworks of more-than-human actors (Ingold 2011; Cohen 2013) and that knowledges were grounded in farmer's physical bodies and performed through practical skills. Farmers embodied multiple roles (such as farmer-businessman and farmer-researcher) and were able to move fluidly between different assemblages of skilled practices and ways of knowing in their engagements with plants, bees and other people (Turnbull 2000; Mol 2002). These insights are used to interrogate dualistic framings of inter-species relationality as well as to critically develop a relational understanding of environmental knowledge practices