An Integrated Approach for Characterizing Aerosol Climate Impacts and Environmental Interactions

Aerosols exert myriad influences on the earth's environment and climate, and on human health. The complexity of aerosol-related processes requires that information gathered to improve our understanding of climate change must originate from multiple sources, and that effective strategies for data integration need to be established. While a vast array of observed and modeled data are becoming available, the aerosol research community currently lacks the necessary tools and infrastructure to reap maximum scientific benefit from these data. Spatial and temporal sampling differences among a diverse set of sensors, nonuniform data qualities, aerosol mesoscale variabilities, and difficulties in separating cloud effects are some of the challenges that need to be addressed. Maximizing the long-term benefit from these data also requires maintaining consistently well-understood accuracies as measurement approaches evolve and improve. Achieving a comprehensive understanding of how aerosol physical, chemical, and radiative processes impact the earth system can be achieved only through a multidisciplinary, inter-agency, and international initiative capable of dealing with these issues. A systematic approach, capitalizing on modern measurement and modeling techniques, geospatial statistics methodologies, and high-performance information technologies, can provide the necessary machinery to support this objective. We outline a framework for integrating and interpreting observations and models, and establishing an accurate, consistent, and cohesive long-term record, following a strategy whereby information and tools of progressively greater sophistication are incorporated as problems of increasing complexity are tackled. This concept is named the Progressive Aerosol Retrieval and Assimilation Global Observing Network (PARAGON). To encompass the breadth of the effort required, we present a set of recommendations dealing with data interoperability; measurement and model integration; multisensor synergy; data summarization and mining; model evaluation; calibration and validation; augmentation of surface and in situ measurements; advances in passive and active remote sensing; and design of satellite missions. Without an initiative of this nature, the scientific and policy communities will continue to struggle with understanding the quantitative impact of complex aerosol processes on regional and global climate change and air quality

Foundations of cumulative culture in apes: improved foraging efficiency through relinquishing and combining witnessed behaviours in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

This research was funded by the John Templeton Foundation (Grant ID: 40128, to K. Laland and A. Whiten).A vital prerequisite for cumulative culture, a phenomenon often asserted to be unique to humans, is the ability to modify behaviour and flexibly switch to more productive or efficient alternatives. Here, we first established an inefficient solution to a foraging task in five captive chimpanzee groups (N = 19). Three groups subsequently witnessed a conspecific using an alternative, more efficient, solution. When participants could successfully forage with their established behaviours, most individuals did not switch to this more efficient technique; however, when their foraging method became substantially less efficient, nine chimpanzees with socially-acquired information (four of whom witnessed additional human demonstrations) relinquished their old behaviour in favour of the more efficient one. Only a single chimpanzee in control groups, who had not witnessed a knowledgeable model, discovered this. Individuals who switched were later able to combine components of their two learned techniques to produce a more efficient solution than their extensively used, original foraging method. These results suggest that, although chimpanzees show a considerable degree of conservatism, they also have an ability to combine independent behaviours to produce efficient compound action sequences; one of the foundational abilities (or candidate mechanisms) for human cumulative culture.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Childhood Innovation: Development, Facilitators, and Individual Variation

This thesis investigated the development, consistency and facilitators of children’s innovation in the physical, tool-use domain. Despite gaining increasing interest in developmental psychology, understanding of the ontogeny of innovation remains in its infancy. Following the formulation of an operational definition of innovation and associated criteria in Chapter 2, the innovatory ability of 4- to 9-year-old children was examined using the Multiple-Methods Box (MMB): a novel puzzle box from which a reward can be extracted using different tools, access points and exits. Findings reported in Chapter 3 demonstrated that few children innovated in the aftermath of social demonstrations of tool use (akin to innovation by modification); rather, they largely relied on the observed task solution. However, instances and rates of children’s innovation were seen to increase in response to inefficacious social information (Chapter 3) and when provided with additional time and explicit instructions/prompts to explore the MMB (Chapter 6). Individual differences in children’s innovative or imitative behaviour appeared largely independent of their performance on a battery of tasks assessing constructs related to innovation, as explored in Chapter 4. However, this study revealed some behavioural consistency in puzzle-box contexts, suggestive of consistent individual differences in children’s propensity, or preference, to engage in asocial/individual learning. Finally, in the intervention study of Chapter 5, individual achievement goals appeared of greater salience than cues to conventionality of innovative behaviour, which did not differentially enhance 8- to 9-year-olds’ innovation when presented with the MMB task in the absence of social demonstrations. Together, the thesis findings highlight the value of the dual study of imitation and innovation, in discovering adaptive trade-offs between the two, and the need to consider innovation in its various forms, owing to likely disparities in developmental trajectories, cognitive requirements, and primary difficulties. The educational applications and cultural implications are discussed

Applications of ISES for vegetation and land use

Remote sensing relative to applications involving vegetation cover and land use is reviewed to consider the potential benefits to the Earth Observing System (Eos) of a proposed Information Sciences Experiment System (ISES). The ISES concept has been proposed as an onboard experiment and computational resource to support advanced experiments and demonstrations in the information and earth sciences. Embedded in the concept is potential for relieving the data glut problem, enhancing capabilities to meet real-time needs of data users and in-situ researchers, and introducing emerging technology to Eos as the technology matures. These potential benefits are examined in the context of state-of-the-art research activities in image/data processing and management

Using Computational Agents to Design Participatory Social Simulations

In social science, the role of stakeholders is increasing in the development and use of simulation models. Their participation in the design of agent-based models (ABMs) has widely been considered as an efficient solution to the validation of this particular type of model. Traditionally, "agents" (as basic model elements) have not been concerned with stakeholders directly but via designers or role-playing games (RPGs). In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap by introducing computational or software agents, implemented from an initial ABM, into a new kind of RPG, mediated by computers, so that these agents can interact with stakeholders. This interaction can help not only to elicit stakeholders' informal knowledge or unpredicted behaviours, but also to control stakeholders' focus during the games. We therefore formalize a general participatory design method using software agents, and illustrate it by describing our experience in a project aimed at developing agent-based social simulations in the field of air traffic management.Participatory Social Simulations, Agent-Based Social Simulations, Computational Agents, Role-Playing Games, Artificial Maieutics, User-Centered Design

Gesture Recognition in Robotic Surgery: a Review

OBJECTIVE: Surgical activity recognition is a fundamental step in computer-assisted interventions. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in methods for automatic recognition of fine-grained gestures in robotic surgery focusing on recent data-driven approaches and outlines the open questions and future research directions. METHODS: An article search was performed on 5 bibliographic databases with combinations of the following search terms: robotic, robot-assisted, JIGSAWS, surgery, surgical, gesture, fine-grained, surgeme, action, trajectory, segmentation, recognition, parsing. Selected articles were classified based on the level of supervision required for training and divided into different groups representing major frameworks for time series analysis and data modelling. RESULTS: A total of 52 articles were reviewed. The research field is showing rapid expansion, with the majority of articles published in the last 4 years. Deep-learning-based temporal models with discriminative feature extraction and multi-modal data integration have demonstrated promising results on small surgical datasets. Currently, unsupervised methods perform significantly less well than the supervised approaches. CONCLUSION: The development of large and diverse open-source datasets of annotated demonstrations is essential for development and validation of robust solutions for surgical gesture recognition. While new strategies for discriminative feature extraction and knowledge transfer, or unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, can mitigate the need for data and labels, they have not yet been demonstrated to achieve comparable performance. Important future research directions include detection and forecast of gesture-specific errors and anomalies. SIGNIFICANCE: This paper is a comprehensive and structured analysis of surgical gesture recognition methods aiming to summarize the status of this rapidly evolving field