53,084 research outputs found

    New Generation of Educators Initiative: Reform Focus at Comprehensive Grant Sites

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    This first analysis of the early NGEI work at comprehensive grant campuses shows that collectively campuses are working across points on the pipeline to address the need for teachers who are better prepared to effectively teach to the new standards. While the bulk of the NGEI reform efforts are targeted at teacher preparation program reform, we see NGEI campuses reaching as far back as high school to cultivate early interest in, and preparedness for, teaching in response to local conditions such as limited candidate pools.Within teacher preparation, the early NGEI work of campuses is primarily clustered around the reform of the teacher preparation program coursework and clinical work (reflecting the first and third Key Transformation Elements). Partnerships with districts are at various stages of development and, in several cases, are focused primarily at the school level. A few campuses are reforming the formative feedback process for candidates through their NGEI work (Element 4). Work with district partners on the identification of the key skills, knowledge, and dispositions of well-prepared new teachers (Element 2) and work on continuous improvement based on data on candidates and program completers (Element 5) are less prominent in the NGEI work to date.As campuses clear the hurdle of launching their reforms in the summer and fall and look toward the next phase of NGEI funding, the evaluation (WestEd/SRI) and the facilitation (ConnectEd) teams are poised to provide support to grantees on the Key Transformation Elements that are not yet fully developed across all comprehensive sites, that is:* Partnerships with Kā€“12 district partners to align programming as much as possible.* Shared understandings with Kā€“12 district partners about the key knowledge, skills, and dispositions of a well-prepared new teacher that are used to inform teacher preparation program elements.* Feedback to candidates on their mastery of prioritized skills during preparation.* Data on candidate progress toward mastery of identified knowledge and practices during their training and after program completion.Specifically, ConnectEd is available to assist with implementation coaching and support for comprehensive campus teams and can support the work with Kā€“12 partners.In addition to providing ongoing formative evaluation work across the comprehensive grant sites, the WestEd/SRI team can provide technical support for grantees to assist with the development of high-quality data on candidate progress toward mastery of identified knowledge and practices during their training and after program completion. The data inventories that the evaluation team developed for each campus show that there are opportunities to: a) enhance the quality of existing data, b) improve access to those data, and c) develop new data sources targeted toward the measurement of prioritized skills and knowledge for formative feedback to candidates. In the coming months, the evaluation team will also be seeking opportunities to bridge the system-level work described above in Box 1 with campus efforts to strengthen systems for continuous improvement.

    Artificial intelligence for multi-mission planetary operations

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    A brief introduction is given to an automated system called the Spacecraft Health Automated Reasoning Prototype (SHARP). SHARP is designed to demonstrate automated health and status analysis for multi-mission spacecraft and ground data systems operations. The SHARP system combines conventional computer science methodologies with artificial intelligence techniques to produce an effective method for detecting and analyzing potential spacecraft and ground systems problems. The system performs real-time analysis of spacecraft and other related telemetry, and is also capable of examining data in historical context. Telecommunications link analysis of the Voyager II spacecraft is the initial focus for evaluation of the prototype in a real-time operations setting during the Voyager spacecraft encounter with Neptune in August, 1989. The preliminary results of the SHARP project and plans for future application of the technology are discussed

    Kinds of conversational cooperation

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    The Cooperative Principle was the organizing principle in Griceā€™s pragmatics. More recently, cooperation has played a reduced role in pragmatic theory. The principle has been attacked on the grounds that people are not always or generally cooperative. One response to that objection is to say that there are two kinds of cooperation and Griceā€™s principle only applies to the narrower kind, which concerns linguistic or formal cooperation. I argue that such a distinction is only defensible if it is accepted that linguistic cooperation can be determined by an extra-linguistic goal. To make distinctions among types of cooperation is helpful but this strategy does not remove all concerns about speakers who are not fully cooperative and in particular the operation of the principle needs to be qualified in situations of conflict of interest. I propose that the principle, once qualified, can have a significant continuing role in pragmatic theory

    Modelling and Verification of Multiple UAV Mission Using SMV

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    Model checking has been used to verify the correctness of digital circuits, security protocols, communication protocols, as they can be modelled by means of finite state transition model. However, modelling the behaviour of hybrid systems like UAVs in a Kripke model is challenging. This work is aimed at capturing the behaviour of an UAV performing cooperative search mission into a Kripke model, so as to verify it against the temporal properties expressed in Computation Tree Logic (CTL). SMV model checker is used for the purpose of model checking

    Expert system decision support for low-cost launch vehicle operations

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    Progress in assessing the feasibility, benefits, and risks associated with AI expert systems applied to low cost expendable launch vehicle systems is described. Part one identified potential application areas in vehicle operations and on-board functions, assessed measures of cost benefit, and identified key technologies to aid in the implementation of decision support systems in this environment. Part two of the program began the development of prototypes to demonstrate real-time vehicle checkout with controller and diagnostic/analysis intelligent systems and to gather true measures of cost savings vs. conventional software, verification and validation requirements, and maintainability improvement. The main objective of the expert advanced development projects was to provide a robust intelligent system for control/analysis that must be performed within a specified real-time window in order to meet the demands of the given application. The efforts to develop the two prototypes are described. Prime emphasis was on a controller expert system to show real-time performance in a cryogenic propellant loading application and safety validation implementation of this system experimentally, using commercial-off-the-shelf software tools and object oriented programming techniques. This smart ground support equipment prototype is based in C with imbedded expert system rules written in the CLIPS protocol. The relational database, ORACLE, provides non-real-time data support. The second demonstration develops the vehicle/ground intelligent automation concept, from phase one, to show cooperation between multiple expert systems. This automated test conductor (ATC) prototype utilizes a knowledge-bus approach for intelligent information processing by use of virtual sensors and blackboards to solve complex problems. It incorporates distributed processing of real-time data and object-oriented techniques for command, configuration control, and auto-code generation

    A distributed knowledge-based approach to flexible automation : the contract-net framework

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    Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-29)

    CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

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    As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. Ā© 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

    Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

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    Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin
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