2,537 research outputs found
The Origins of Computational Mechanics: A Brief Intellectual History and Several Clarifications
The principle goal of computational mechanics is to define pattern and
structure so that the organization of complex systems can be detected and
quantified. Computational mechanics developed from efforts in the 1970s and
early 1980s to identify strange attractors as the mechanism driving weak fluid
turbulence via the method of reconstructing attractor geometry from measurement
time series and in the mid-1980s to estimate equations of motion directly from
complex time series. In providing a mathematical and operational definition of
structure it addressed weaknesses of these early approaches to discovering
patterns in natural systems.
Since then, computational mechanics has led to a range of results from
theoretical physics and nonlinear mathematics to diverse applications---from
closed-form analysis of Markov and non-Markov stochastic processes that are
ergodic or nonergodic and their measures of information and intrinsic
computation to complex materials and deterministic chaos and intelligence in
Maxwellian demons to quantum compression of classical processes and the
evolution of computation and language.
This brief review clarifies several misunderstandings and addresses concerns
recently raised regarding early works in the field (1980s). We show that
misguided evaluations of the contributions of computational mechanics are
groundless and stem from a lack of familiarity with its basic goals and from a
failure to consider its historical context. For all practical purposes, its
modern methods and results largely supersede the early works. This not only
renders recent criticism moot and shows the solid ground on which computational
mechanics stands but, most importantly, shows the significant progress achieved
over three decades and points to the many intriguing and outstanding challenges
in understanding the computational nature of complex dynamic systems.Comment: 11 pages, 123 citations;
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/cmr.ht
Natural Language Processing in-and-for Design Research
We review the scholarly contributions that utilise Natural Language
Processing (NLP) methods to support the design process. Using a heuristic
approach, we collected 223 articles published in 32 journals and within the
period 1991-present. We present state-of-the-art NLP in-and-for design research
by reviewing these articles according to the type of natural language text
sources: internal reports, design concepts, discourse transcripts, technical
publications, consumer opinions, and others. Upon summarizing and identifying
the gaps in these contributions, we utilise an existing design innovation
framework to identify the applications that are currently being supported by
NLP. We then propose a few methodological and theoretical directions for future
NLP in-and-for design research
Extracting Hierarchy of Coherent User-Concerns to Discover Intricate User Behavior from User Reviews
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Extracting Computational Representations of Place with Social Sensing
Place-based GIS are at the forefront of GIScience research and characterized by textual descriptions, human conceptualizations as well as the spatial-semantic relationships among places. The concepts of places are difficult to handle in geographic information science and systems because of their intrinsic vagueness. They arise from the complex interaction of individuals, society, and the environment. The exact delineation of vague regions is challenging as their borders are vague and the membership within a region varies non-monotonically and as a function of context. Consequently, vague regions are difficult to handle computationally, e.g., in spatial analysis, cartography, geographic information retrieval, and GIS workflows in general. The emergence of big data brings new opportunities for us to understand the place semantics from large-scale volunteered geographic information and data streams, such as geotags, texts, activity streams, and GPS trajectories. The term "social sensing" describes such individual-level big geospatial data and the associated analysis methods. In this dissertation, I present a generalizable, data-driven framework that complements classical top-down approaches by extracting the representations of vague cognitive regions and function regions from bottom-up approaches using spatial statistics and machine learning techniques with various social sensing sources. I demonstrate how to derive crisp boundaries for cognitive and functional regions from points of interest data, and show how natural language processing techniques can enrich our understanding of places and form a foundation for the semantic characterization of place types and the generalization of regions. This work makes contributions to the development of computational methodologies for extracting vague cognitive regions and functional regions using data-driven approaches as well as the novel semantic generalization processing technique
ESD Symposium Comittee Overview: Engineering Systems Research and Practice
This paper briefly introduces the field of Engineering Systems, and highlights its emergence from engineering practice and academic engineering. This paper was prepared by the ESD Symposium Committee based upon its own discussions, by an analysis of the other Internal Symposium papers, and by interactions with their authors. This paper discusses:
a framework for describing the field of engineering systems, and emphasizes a three-dimensional view
the challenges emerging in engineering practice that are associated with the design of complex systems
the methods that address research and practice problems (most of these methods currently exist, some must be developed)
principles and fundamentals of engineering systems
"Engineering systems are increasing in size, scope, and complexity as a result of globalization, new technological capabilities, rising consumer expectations, and increasing social requirements. Engineering systems present difficult design problems and require different problem solving frameworks than those of the traditional engineering science paradigm: in particular, a more integrative approach in which engineering systems professionals view technological systems as part of a larger whole. Though engineering systems are very varied, they often display similar behavior. New approaches, frameworks, and theories need to be developed to understand better engineering systems behavior and design.
Understanding the bi-directional relationship between analytical processes and interactive visualization systems
Interactive visualizations leverage the human visual and reasoning systems to increase the scale of information with which we can effectively work, therefore improving our ability to explore and analyze large amounts of data. Interactive visualizations are often designed with target domains in mind, such as analyzing unstructured textual information, which is a main thrust in this dissertation.
Since each domain has its own existing procedures of analyzing data, a good start to a well-designed interactive visualization system is to understand the domain experts' workflow and analysis processes. This dissertation recasts the importance of understanding domain users' analysis processes and incorporating such understanding into the design of interactive visualization systems.
To meet this aim, I first introduce considerations guiding the gathering of general and domain-specific analysis processes in text analytics. Two interactive visualization systems are designed by following the considerations. The first system is Parallel-Topics, a visual analytics system supporting analysis of large collections of documents by extracting semantically meaningful topics. Based on lessons learned from Parallel-Topics, this dissertation further presents a general visual text analysis framework, I-Si, to present meaningful topical summaries and temporal patterns, with the capability to handle large-scale textual information. Both systems have been evaluated by expert users and deemed successful in addressing domain analysis needs.
The second contribution lies in preserving domain users' analysis process while using interactive visualizations. Our research suggests the preservation could serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, it could further improve the current system. On the other hand, users often need help in recalling and revisiting their complex and sometimes iterative analysis process with an interactive visualization system. This dissertation introduces multiple types of evidences available for capturing a user's analysis process within an interactive visualization and analyzes cost/benefit ratios of the capturing methods. It concludes that tracking interaction sequences is the most un-intrusive and feasible way to capture part of a user's analysis process. To validate this claim, a user study is presented to theoretically analyze the relationship between interactions and problem-solving processes. The results indicate that constraining the way a user interacts with a mathematical puzzle does have an effect on the problemsolving process. As later evidenced in an evaluative study, a fair amount of high-level analysis can be recovered through merely analyzing interaction logs
Cognitive Activity Support Tools: Design of the Visual Interface
This dissertation is broadly concerned with interactive computational tools that support the performance of complex cognitive activities, examples of which are analytical reasoning, decision making, problem solving, sense making, forecasting, and learning. Examples of tools that support such activities are visualization-based tools in the areas of: education, information visualization, personal information management, statistics, and health informatics. Such tools enable access to information and data and, through interaction, enable a human-information discourse. In a more specific sense, this dissertation is concerned with the design of the visual interface of these tools. This dissertation presents a large and comprehensive theoretical framework to support research and design. Issues treated herein include interaction design and patterns of interaction for cognitive and epistemic support; analysis of the essential properties of interactive visual representations and their influences on cognitive and perceptual processes; an analysis of the structural components of interaction and how different operational forms of interaction components affect the performance of cognitive activities; an examination of how the information-processing load should be distributed between humans and tools during the performance of complex cognitive activities; and a categorization of common visualizations according to their structure and function, and a discussion of the cognitive utility of each category. This dissertation also includes a chapter that describes the design of a cognitive activity support tool, as guided by the theoretical contributions that comprise the rest of the dissertation. Those that may find this dissertation useful include researchers and practitioners in the areas of data and information visualization, visual analytics, medical and health informatics, data science, journalism, educational technology, and digital games
Business rules based legacy system evolution towards service-oriented architecture.
Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile and real-time. Service orientation is emerging from the amalgamation of a number of key business, technology and cultural developments. Three essential trends in particular are coming together to create a new revolutionary breed of enterprise, the service-oriented enterprise (SOE): (1) the continuous performance management of the enterprise; (2) the emergence of business process management; and (3) advances in the standards-based service-oriented infrastructures.
This thesis focuses on this emerging three-layered architecture that builds on a service-oriented architecture framework, with a process layer that brings technology and business together, and a corporate performance layer that continually monitors and improves the performance indicators of global enterprises provides a novel framework for the business context in which to apply the important technical idea of service orientation and moves it from being an interesting tool for engineers to a vehicle for business managers to fundamentally improve their businesses
Introduction to the second international symposium of platial information science
People ‘live’ and constitute places every day through recurrent practices and experience. Our everyday lives, however, are complex, and so are places. In contrast to abstract space, the way people experience places includes a range of aspects like physical setting, meaning, and emotional attachment. This inherent complexity requires researchers to investigate the concept of place from a variety of viewpoints. The formal representation of place – a major goal in GIScience related to place – is no exception and can only be successfully addressed if we consider geographical, psychological, anthropological, sociological, cognitive, and other perspectives. This year’s symposium brings together place-based researchers from different disciplines to discuss the current state of platial research. Therefore, this volume contains contributions from a range of fields including geography, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and cartography
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