Eliciting expert knowledge to inform training design

To determine the elicitation methodologies best placed to uncover and capture the expert operator’s reflective cognitive judgements in complex and dynamic military operating environments (e.g., explosive ordinance disposal) in order to develop the specification for a reflective eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) agent to support the training of domain novices. Approach: A bounded literature review of the latest developments in expert knowledge elicitation was undertaken to determine the ’art-of-the-possible’ in respects to uncovering an expert’s cognitive judgements in complex and dynamic environments. Candidate methodologies were systematically and critically reviewed in order to identify the most promising methodologies for uncovering expert situational awareness and metacognitive evaluations in pursuit of actionable threat mitigation strategies in high-risk contexts. Research outputs are synthesized into an interview protocol for eliciting and understanding the in-situ actions and decisions of experts in high-risk, complex operating environments. Practical implications: Trainees entering high-risk operating environments can benefit from exposure to expert reflective strategies whilst learning the trade. Typical operator training focuses on technical aspects of threat mitigation but often overlooks reflective self-evaluation. The present study represents an initial step towards determining the feasibility of designing a reflective XAI agent to augment the performance of trainees entering high-risk operations. Outputs of the expert knowledge elicitation protocol documented here shall be used to refine a theoretical framework of expert operator judgement, in order to determine decision support strategies of benefit to domain novices

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

Defining next-generation additive manufacturing applications for the Ministry of Defence (MoD)

“Additive Manufacturing” (AM) is an emerging, highly promising and disruptive technology which is catching the attention of the Defence sector due to the versatility it is offering. Through the combination of design freedom, technology compactness and high deposition rates, technology stakeholders can potentially exploit rapid, delocalized and flexible production. Having the capability to produce highly tailored, fully dense, potentially optimized products, on demand and next to the point of use makes this emerging and immature technology a game changer in the “Defence Support Service” (DS2) sector. Furthermore, if the technology is exploited for the Royal Navy, featured with extended and disrupted supply chains, the benefits are very promising. While most of the AM research and efforts are focusing on the manufacturing/process and design opportunities/topology optimization, this paper aims to provide a creative but educated and validated forecast on what AM can do for the Royal Navy in the future. This paper aims to define the most promising next generation Additive Manufacturing applications for the Royal Navy in the 2025 – 2035 decade. A multidisciplinary methodology has been developed to structure this exploratory applied research study. Moreover, different experts of the UK Defence Value Chain have been involved for primary research and for verification/validation purposes. While major concerns have been raised on process/product qualification and current AM capabilities, the results show that there is a strong confidence on the disruptive potential of AM to be applied in front-end of DS2 systems to support “Complex Engineering Systems” in the future. While this paper provides only next-generation AM applications for RN, substantial conceptual development work has to be carried out to define an AM based system which is able to, firstly satisfy the “spares demands” of a platform and secondly is able to perform in critical environments such as at sea

Towards a reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets: Engineers and the Papyrologist

We introduce a collaborative project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford regarding the analysis and reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets. We sketch the imaging and image processing techniques used to digitally capture and analyse the tablets, the development of the image analysis tools to aid papyrologists in the transcription of the texts, and lessons that can be learned so far from such an inter-disciplinary project

People, place and fish: Exploring the Cultural Ecosystem Services of Inshore Fishing through Photography

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) set out a framework for understanding the benefits that humans derive from the environment in order to inform decision making. It categorized these benefits as: provisioning services, such as food, water, timber; regulating services, such as climate control, waste, water quality; supporting services, such as soil formation, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling; and cultural services, such as recreational, spiritual and aesthetic benefits. Since then there has been a plethora of research and wider interest in devising ways of assessing and measuring those services (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2009; Sagoff, 2011; Shan and Swinton, 2011), often involving economic valuation techniques devised by economists and ecologists. While these can be useful for assessing the provisioning, supporting and regulating services, measuring or assessing the cultural services that humans receive from ecosystems has proved to be more problematic. However, there is increasing recognition of the role of multiple disciplines in understanding the complex and multi-faceted ways that ecosystems shape culture and cultural value

Hybridisation for versatile decision-making in game opponent AI

Hybridisation for versatile decision-making in game opponent A

Eliciting Expertise

Since the last edition of this book there have been rapid developments in the use and exploitation of formally elicited knowledge. Previously, (Shadbolt and Burton, 1995) the emphasis was on eliciting knowledge for the purpose of building expert or knowledge-based systems. These systems are computer programs intended to solve real-world problems, achieving the same level of accuracy as human experts. Knowledge engineering is the discipline that has evolved to support the whole process of specifying, developing and deploying knowledge-based systems (Schreiber et al., 2000) This chapter will discuss the problem of knowledge elicitation for knowledge intensive systems in general