Towards human-centered cyber-physical systems: a modeling approach

In this paper we present a new CPS model that considers humans as holistic beings, where mind and body operate as a whole and characteristics like creativity and empathy emerge. These characteristics influence the way humans interact and collaborate with technical systems. Our vision is to integrate humans as holistic beings within CPS in order to move towards a human-machine symbiosis. This paper outlines a model for human-centered cyber-physical systems (HCPSs) that is based on our holistic system model URANOS. The model integrates human skills and values to make them accessible to the technical system, similarly to the way they are accessible to humans in human-to-human interaction. The goal is to reinforce the human being in his feeling of being in control of his life experience in a world of smart technologies. It could also help to reduce human bio-costs like stress, job fears, etc. The proposed model is illustrated by the case study of smart industrial machines, dedicated machines for smart factories, where we test the human integration through conversation

Personal Cyber-Data Literacy Plurality in Routinized-Prescriptive and Relational-Holistic Cyber-Regimes

Ursula Franklin encouraged all who would listen to act in ways that are socially useful and personally satisfying. Over two decades ago, in her Massey Lectures on The Real World of Technology, she warned about the unsustainability of prescriptive bitsphere technology regimes determined by precisely routinized compliance. She advocated for alternative holistic regimes determined by care-full relational consideration. Cyber-data literacies are defined as allowing individuals to use and benefit from data associated with their digital practices. Routinized literacies are being mis-afforded by behaviour manipulation through learning systems built on cyber-surveillance and broken personal data markets. This critical essay calls for a re-imagining of cyber-data literacies as socially useful and personally satisfying relational digital practices rather than merely routinized digital media utilization skills. A meta-synthesis of neuro-cognitive and hermeneutic theory is used to frame a comparison of cyber-data literacies afforded by cyber-regimes of exclusive compliance and inclusive consideration. Inspired by Hanah Arendt’s concept of human plurality, the essay analyses how personal cyber-data literacies are constrained and afforded by human diversity. Personal cyber-data are conceptualized as lifeworld givens, entangled with personal knowledge and experience, oriented and determined by data cognitive artifact constraints and affordances, and filtered through individuated foresight and insight. Despite foresight plurality, a capacity for distributed cognition and intelligence arises from shared mind/brain architectures and bio-psycho-social-relational determinants of a shared human biology. The essay examines opportunities and benefits of promoting cyber-data literacy plurality, grounded in personal data made meaningful to both people and machines through meta-narratives constructed using personal cyber-data by people the data are about

Exploring the integration of the human as a flexibility factor in CPS enabled manufacturing environments: methodology and results

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are expected to shape the evolution of production towards the fourth industrial revolution named Industry 4.0. The increasing integration of manufacturing processes and the strengthening of the autonomous capabilities of manufacturing systems make investigating the role of humans a primary research objective in view of emerging social and demographic megatrends. Understanding how the employees can be better integrated to enable increased flexibility in manufacturing systems is a prerequisite to allow technological solutions, as well as humans, to harness their full potential. Humans can supervise and adjust the settings, be a source of knowledge and competences, can diagnose situations, take decisions and several other activities influencing manufacturing performances, overall providing additional degrees of freedom to the systems. This paper, studies two different integration models: Human-in-the-Loop and Human-in-the-Mesh. They are both analysed in the context of four industrial cases of deployment of cyber physical systems in production

Immersive Participation:Futuring, Training Simulation and Dance and Virtual Reality

Dance knowledge can inform the development of scenario design in immersive digital simulation environments by strengthening a participant’s capacity to learn through the body. This study engages with processes of participatory practice that question how the transmission and transfer of dance knowledge/embodied knowledge in immersive digital environments is activated and applied in new contexts. These questions are relevant in both arts and industry and have the potential to add value and knowledge through crossdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. This thesis consists of three different research projects all focused on observation, participation, and interviews with experts on embodiment in digital simulation. The projects were chosen to provide a range of perspectives across dance, industry and futures studies. Theories of embodied cognition, in particular the notions of the extended body, distributed cognition, enactment and mindfulness, offer critical lenses through which to explore the relationship of embodied integration and participation within immersive digital environments. These areas of inquiry lead to the consideration of how language from the field of computer science can assist in describing somatic experience in digital worlds through a discussion of the emerging concepts of mindfulness, wayfinding, guided movement and digital kinship. These terms serve as an example of how the mutability of language became part of the process as terms applied in disparate disciplines were understood within varying contexts. The analytic tools focus on applying a posthuman view, speculation through a futures ethnography, and a cognitive ethnographical approach to my research project. These approaches allowed me to examine an ecology of practices in order to identify methods and processes that can facilitate the transmission and transfer of embodied knowledge within a community of practice. The ecological components include dance, healthcare, transport, education and human/computer interaction. These fields drove the data collection from a range of sources including academic papers, texts, specialists’ reports, scientific papers, interviews and conversations with experts and artists.The aim of my research is to contribute both a theoretical and a speculative understanding of processes, as well as tools applicable in the transmission of embodied knowledge in virtual dance and arts environments as well as digital simulation across industry. Processes were understood theoretically through established studies in embodied cognition applied to workbased training, reinterpreted through my own movement study. Futures methodologies paved the way for speculative processes and analysis. Tools to choreograph scenario design in immersive digital environments were identified through the recognition of cross purpose language such as mindfulness, wayfinding, guided movement and digital kinship. Put together, the major contribution of this research is a greater understanding of the value of dance knowledge applied to simulation developed through theoretical and transformational processes and creative tools

A critical review of symbiosis approaches in the context of Industry 4.0☆

Abstract The implementation of symbiosis approaches is recognized as an effective industrial strategy towards the optimization of resource exploitation and the improvement of collaboration in the context of Industry 4.0. An industrial system can be considered as a complex environment in which material, energy, machine, and human resources should cooperate towards the improvement of efficiency and the creation of value. According to this vision, the paper presents a detailed literature review about the existing symbiosis approaches: (i) industrial symbiosis models, which mainly aim at the sharing of resources among different companies, and (ii) human symbiosis, which focuses on how to effectively strengthen the synergy among humans and machines. Strengths, weaknesses and correlations among the most common symbiosis approaches are analysed and classified. Finally, the existing symbiosis models are related with the pillars of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, in order to understand what should be the future directions of research in the context of collaborative manufacturing

Toward an Ontology for Third Generation Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a way of making sense about the world in terms of multilevel, nested, interacting systems, their environment, and the boundaries between the systems and the environment. In this paper we discuss the evolution of systems thinking and discuss what is needed for an ontology of the current generation of systems thinking

Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense

The dissertation at hand explores the very grounds, within which the phenomenon of cinema emerges. It is a study of the intrinsic dynamics of cinema author’s mind in the process of creating moving image. Alas, it is not a historical, cultural, or ideological study into the handicraft, the narrative genres, or technological developments of cinema. Instead, it discusses possible foundations of cinema in the human nature, as seems viable in the light of the contemporary biological and psychological constraints. The dissertation is set to define a kind of cinema, which reflects the recent scientific knowledge about neural underpinnings of human activity, and which draws its emotional power from one’s experimental resources of understanding and interacting with others within the everyday world. While attribute of ‘enactive’ carries the explicit sense of pragmatic doing and meaningful acting in the world, it is the embodied simulation of the world, which will provide the cognitive environment for creative enactment. Emotions, in addition to determining unconscious, involuntary understanding about the state of things, also determine all conscious, intentional, and imaginative aspects of cognition. Faithful to the spirit of Eisenstein the dissertation deliberately deviates from other mainstream cinema research: instead of the spectator, the focus here is on the author’s cognitive processes