Bio-techno-practice. Personal and social responsibility in the academic work

The new challenges posed by biomedicine and biotechnologies ask for a deeper consideration on the relationship among science, knowledge and social responsibility. On one hand, in fact, technologies seem to shape our idea of human progress and scientific understanding of the natural world and of life in particular. On the other hand, a thoughtful consideration on the philosophical foundations of science as human enterprise is required. This also opens important questions about the new emerging paradigms of ‘excellence’ in the academic, social and market fields and on the role that universities play in training the future leaders and professionals of our society. After a short review of the contemporary philosophical reflections on the unity of knowledge, which is the origin and the goal of academic work, we argue that adherence to our current challenges through the bio-techno-practice prism is a fecund driving force of the academic activities. Moving from the experience of an international project, we also discuss the impact that such interdisciplinary activities have on what we call hidden curriculum, i.e. the embodied style of (skills that allow) people in taking care of each other in their physical, social, professional and scientific needs

Engineering environment-mediated coordination via nature-inspired laws

SAPERE is a general multiagent framework to support the development of self-organizing pervasive computing services. One of the key aspects of the SAPERE approach is to have all interactions between agents take place in an indirect way, via a shared spatial environment. In such environment, a set of nature-inspired coordination laws have been defined to rule the coordination activities of the application agents and promote the provisioning of adaptive and self-organizing services

Engineering Pervasive Service Ecosystems: The SAPERE approach

Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases

Engineering self-organizing urban superorganisms

Progresses in ubiquitous, embedded, and social networking and computing make possible for people in urban areas to dynamically interact with each other and with ICT devices around. This can result in a system with a very large number of agents working together in an orchestrated and self-organizing way to achieve specific urban-level goals, i.e., as if they were a “superorganism”. In this paper, we sketch the future vision of urban superorganisms and overview some emerging application areas heading towards the vision. Following, we identify the key challenges in engineering self-organizing multi-agent systems that can work as a superorganism, i.e., seamlessly involving ICT agents and human agents so to achieve some required urban level goals. Finally, we introduce the reference architecture for an infrastructure to support our future vision of self-organizing urban superorganisms

Swimming against the tide : the implementation of philosophy for children in the primary classroom

Philosophy for Children is a cognitive enhancement programme that utilises Socratic questioning and a dialogic pedagogy to develop the reasoning, creativity, social skills and ethical understanding of children. An abundance of research has established P4C’s efficacy in achieving these aims (Trickey & Topping, 2004). However, Leat (1999) asserts that despite evidence of the effectiveness of thinking skills programmes, embedding innovative programmes like P4C into school practice is analogous to “rolling a stone uphill” (p389) and anecdotal evidence of the researcher’s own experience as a SAPERE level 1 trainer substantiates this claim.Exploration of the implementation of P4C in the classroom is a neglected area in the large body of research literature pertaining to P4C; research efforts until recently have tended to focus on the cognitive, affective, methodological and theoretical aspects of this approach. This research set out to test the veracity of Leat’s (1999) claim that teacher efficacy is “…a measure of the chances of implementing change” (p399) and employed qualitative interviewing to examine the factors which primary teachers perceived to determine the implementation of P4C in the classroom.The research findings identified three distinct groups of P4C implementers: regular, intermittent and ceased. Analysis of the factors that teachers perceived to determine the implementation of P4C in the classroom revealed differing levels of teacher efficacy amongst these three groups and substantiated Leat’s (1999) claim. Furthermore, analysis facilitated the formulation of fuzzy predictions about the likely consequences of decision making on the P4C implementation process. The research findings also highlighted tensions, which were not exclusive to any particular group, between the values and practice of P4C and the values and requirements of the prevailing educational policy context. Further analysis gave credence to the view of many experienced SAPERE P4C trainers that P4C in the current climate represents counter-cultural practice