Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Advanced transport operating system software upgrade: Flight management/flight controls software description

The Flight Management/Flight Controls (FM/FC) software for the Norden 2 (PDP-11/70M) computer installed on the NASA 737 aircraft is described. The software computes the navigation position estimates, guidance commands, those commands to be issued to the control surfaces to direct the aircraft in flight based on the modes selected on the Advanced Guidance Control System (AGSC) mode panel, and the flight path selected via the Navigation Control/Display Unit (NCDU)

A framework for knowledge-based team training

Teamwork is crucial to many disciplines, from activities such as organized sports to economic and military organizations. Team training is difficult and as yet there are few automated tools to assist in the training task. As with the training of individuals, effective training depends upon practice and proper training protocols. In this research, we defined a team training framework for constructing team training systems in domains involving command and control teams. This team training framework provides an underlying model of teamwork and programming interfaces to provide services that ease the construction of team training systems. Also, the framework enables experimentation with training protocols and coaching to be conducted more readily, as team training systems incorporating new protocols or coaching capabilities can be more easily built. For this framework (called CAST-ITT) we developed an underlying intelligent agent architecture known as CAST (Collaborative Agents Simulating Teamwork). CAST provides the underlying model of teamwork and agents to simulate virtual team members. CAST-ITT (Intelligent Team Trainer) uses CAST to also monitor trainees, and support performance assessment and coaching for the purposes of evaluating the performance of a trainee as a member of a team. CAST includes a language for describing teamwork called MALLET (Multi-Agent Logic Language for Encoding Teamwork). MALLET allows us to codify the behaviors of team members (both as virtual agents and as trainees) for use by CAST. In demonstrating CAST-ITT through an implemented team training system called TWP-DDD we have shown that a team training system can be built that uses the framework (CAST-ITT) and has good performance and can be used for achieving real world training objectives

Report on the Second Workshop on Distributed AI

On June 24, 1981 twenty-five participants from organizations around the country gathered in MIT's Endicott House for the Second Annual Workshop on Distributed AI. The three-day workshop was designed as an informal meeting, centered mainly around brief research reports presented by each group, along with an invited talk. In keeping with the spirit of the meeting, this report was prepared as a distributed document, with each speaker contributing a summary of his remarks.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Incidence of surgical site infections in multicenter study : implications for surveillance practice and organization

Introduction: WHO core components of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) prevention and control include their surveillance system. In Poland, there are no widespread multi-center infection surveillance networks based on continuous, targeted, active methodology. One of the most important form of HAIs are surgical site infections (SSIs). The aim of this study was to analyze the incidence of SSIs, in the context of seasonal differentiation. Seasonal differentiation could be connected with weather conditions, but it also can be affected by personnel absence due to holidays and furlough. The second aspect may influence organization of work and increased absenteeism may contribute to lowering the quality of patient care. Healthcare associated infections are the phenomenon which can be especially affected by such factors. Methods: The data used originate from the targeted, active surveillance reports obtained from the six years period, based on the ECDC recommendations. Results: Highest incidence rates of SSIs were found after operations performed in June and August, equal to 1.8% and 1.5% respectively and the lowest in October was 0.8%. These differences were statistically significant: for June incidence: OR 1.6, 95% CI 1.03–2.5, p = 0.015. Another approach showed a significant difference between the level of incidence in the period from November to January together with from June to August (1.35%), comparing to the rest of the year (1.05%). Also the rates of enterococcal and Enterobacterales infections were significantly higher for the period comprising months from November till January and from June to August. In Poland these are periods of increased number of absences associated with summer, national and religious holidays. Conclusions: Our results show that the short-term surveillance data limited to several days or months are not sufficient to obtain a valuable description of the epidemiological situation due to HAI. Efforts should be undertaken in order to implement wide net of hospital acquired infections, including SSI on the country level

Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics