An investigation of machine learning based prediction systems

Traditionally, researchers have used either o�f-the-shelf models such as COCOMO, or developed local models using statistical techniques such as stepwise regression, to obtain software eff�ort estimates. More recently, attention has turned to a variety of machine learning methods such as artifcial neural networks (ANNs), case-based reasoning (CBR) and rule induction (RI). This paper outlines some comparative research into the use of these three machine learning methods to build software e�ort prediction systems. We briefly describe each method and then apply the techniques to a dataset of 81 software projects derived from a Canadian software house in the late 1980s. We compare the prediction systems in terms of three factors: accuracy, explanatory value and configurability. We show that ANN methods have superior accuracy and that RI methods are least accurate. However, this view is somewhat counteracted by problems with explanatory value and configurability. For example, we found that considerable eff�ort was required to configure the ANN and that this compared very unfavourably with the other techniques, particularly CBR and least squares regression (LSR). We suggest that further work be carried out, both to further explore interaction between the enduser and the prediction system, and also to facilitate configuration, particularly of ANNs

Designing Playful Systems

Play is a common, yet elusive phenomenon. Many definitions of play and explanations for its existence have been brought forward in various disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, ethology and in the humanities. As an activity apparently serving no other purpose than itself, play can be simply considered a pleasant pastime. Yet its equation with fun has been challenged by artists and scholars alike. Being in a playful state does not warrant extrinsic motivation or being conscious of an external purpose. However, play creates meaning, and scientists are pursuing functional explanations for it. These conflicting observations are contributing to the ambiguity of play and they raise questions about the limits of complexity that present discourses are able to reflect. This thesis presents a comprehensive, transdisciplinary approach to describe and understand play, based on systems-theory, constructivism, cybernetics and practical exploration. Observing play in this way involves theoretical analysis, reflection and critique as well as the practice of design, development and artistic exposition. By constructing, re-contextualising and discussing eight of my own projects, I explore the distinction between theory and practice through which playful systems emerge. Central to my methodology is the concept of distinctions as a fundamental method of observation. It is introduced itself as a distinction and then applied throughout, in order to describe and discuss phenomena of play from a wide range of different perspectives. This includes paradoxical, first-person and conflicting accounts and it enables discourses that cross disciplinary boundaries. In summary, the three interrelated contributions to knowledge in my research project are: I contribute to the emerging field of game studies through a comprehensive systems-theoretical description on play. I also provide a methodology in which theory and practice inform each other through mutual observation, construction, reflection and critical evaluation. Finally, I present eight projects, including a playful system developed in a speculative approach that I call anthroponeutral design. These results represent a novel transdisciplinary perspective on play that offers new opportunities for further research

Term-End Exam Scheduling at United States Military Academy/West Point

Scheduling term-end exams (TEE) at the United States Military Academy in West Point is unlike any other exam timetabling problem we know of. Exam timetabling normally produces a conflict-free timetable covering a reasonably long exam period, where every exam is scheduled exactly once for all the students enrolled in the corresponding class. The situation is quite different at West Point. There are hundreds of exams to schedule over such a short time period that there is simply no feasible solution. The challenge is then to allow something that is not even considered elsewhere, that is, creating multiple sessions of some exams, scheduled at different times within the exam period, to allow each student to take all exams he/she must take. The overall objective is to find a feasible exam schedule with a minimum number of such duplicate exams. The paper describes a system that has been developed at GAMS Development Corp. in close cooperation with the scheduling staff at West Point, and that has been used successfully since 2001. It uses mathematical optimization in several modules, and some of the techniques proposed are new. It is fast and flexible, and allows for human interaction, such as adding initially unexpected constraints, coming for instance from instructors’ preferences and dislikes, as well as their hierarchical rankings. It is robust and can be used by people familiar with the organization at West Point, without the need for them to be technically-trained. Overall, using the course and student information databases, it is an effective decision support system that calls optimization tools in an unobtrusive way

Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy:A Perspective from the Organisers of AREA 2020

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-05-13, pub-electronic 2021-05-14Publication status: PublishedFunder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Grant(s): EP/R026092, EP/R026173, EP/R026084, 694277Multi-agent systems, robotics and software engineering are large and active research areas with many applications in academia and industry. The First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA), organised the first time in 2020, aims at encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborations and exchange of ideas among researchers working in these research areas. This paper presents a perspective of the organisers that aims at highlighting the latest research trends, future directions, challenges, and open problems. It also includes feedback from the discussions held during the AREA workshop. The goal of this perspective is to provide a high-level view of current research trends for researchers that aim at working in the intersection of these research areas

Logic-based Technologies for Multi-agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Precisely when the success of artificial intelligence (AI) sub-symbolic techniques makes them be identified with the whole AI by many non-computerscientists and non-technical media, symbolic approaches are getting more and more attention as those that could make AI amenable to human understanding. Given the recurring cycles in the AI history, we expect that a revamp of technologies often tagged as “classical AI” – in particular, logic-based ones will take place in the next few years. On the other hand, agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term connection with logic-based technologies, which characterised their early days, might open new ways to engineer explainable intelligent systems. This is why understanding the current status of logic-based technologies for MAS is nowadays of paramount importance. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of those technologies by making them the subject of a systematic literature review (SLR). The resulting technologies are discussed and evaluated from two different perspectives: the MAS and the logic-based ones

Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots

In this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research, focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies, are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical, and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations. Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research, robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human. The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries. In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body. In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the ‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as ‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised, historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between people and objects. In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries. Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational and embodied. This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation, Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested. The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy. Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the human in anthropology without dissolving it all together

Social and epistemological bases of technology transfer: The case of artificial intelligence

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis addresses a problem in the literature on technology transfer of understanding the local appropriation of knowledge. Based on interpretive and analytic traditions developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and ethnomethodology, I conceptualise technology transfer as involving communication between discursive communities. I develop the idea of 'performance of community' to argue that explanations of research and technology, and readings of those explanations, are sites for the elaboration of the identity of a discursive community. I explore this approach through a case study in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). I focus on what I call 'explanatory practices', that is practices of describing, identifying and explaining Al, and trace the differences in these practices, according to location, context and audience. The novelty of my thesis is to show the pervasiveness of performance of community within these explanatory practices, through showing the differences in the claimed identity and significance of Al, associated with different locations, contexts and audiences. I draw out some of the implications of my approach by counterposing it to a theory of technology transfer as the passing of neutral units of information, which I argue is implicit in a complaint made by Al vendors that the Al marketplace had been damaged by overselling or hype. In particular, I show that disclaimers of hype (more than the perpetration of it) had always been associated with the marketing of Al. More generally, my claim is that it is politically important to understand that neutral information is not available even as an ultimate standard, and that the local appropriation of knowledge is not an aberration to be controlled, but a component of both successful and unsuccessful communication between discursive communities

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A HOLISTIC EXPERT SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATED COASTAL ZONE MANAGEMENT

Coastal data and information comprise a massive and complex resource, which is vital to the practice of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), an increasingly important application. ICZM is just as complex, but uses the holistic paradigm to deal with the sophistication. The application domain and its resource require a tool of matching characteristics, which is facilitated by the current wide availability of high performance computing. An object-oriented expert system, COAMES, has been constructed to prove this concept. The application of expert systems to ICZM in particular has been flagged as a viable challenge and yet very few have taken it up. COAMES uses the Dempster- Shafer theory of evidence to reason with uncertainty and importantly introduces the power of ignorance and integration to model the holistic approach. In addition, object orientation enables a modular approach, embodied in the inference engine - knowledge base separation. Two case studies have been developed to test COAMES. In both case studies, knowledge has been successfully used to drive data and actions using metadata. Thus a holism of data, information and knowledge has been achieved. Also, a technological holism has been proved through the effective classification of landforms on the rapidly eroding Holderness coast. A holism across disciplines and CZM institutions has been effected by intelligent metadata management of a Fal Estuary dataset. Finally, the differing spatial and temporal scales that the two case studies operate at implicitly demonstrate a holism of scale, though explicit means of managing scale were suggested. In all cases the same knowledge structure was used to effectively manage and disseminate coastal data, information and knowledge