On environments as systemic exoskeletons: Crosscutting optimizers and antifragility enablers

Classic approaches to General Systems Theory often adopt an individual perspective and a limited number of systemic classes. As a result, those classes include a wide number and variety of systems that result equivalent to each other. This paper introduces a different approach: First, systems belonging to a same class are further differentiated according to five major general characteristics. This introduces a "horizontal dimension" to system classification. A second component of our approach considers systems as nested compositional hierarchies of other sub-systems. The resulting "vertical dimension" further specializes the systemic classes and makes it easier to assess similarities and differences regarding properties such as resilience, performance, and quality-of-experience. Our approach is exemplified by considering a telemonitoring system designed in the framework of Flemish project "Little Sister". We show how our approach makes it possible to design intelligent environments able to closely follow a system's horizontal and vertical organization and to artificially augment its features by serving as crosscutting optimizers and as enablers of antifragile behaviors.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments. Extends conference papers [10,12,15]. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40860-015-0006-

Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1: Beyond the Turing Test

Since the Turing test was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, the primary goal of artificial intelligence has been predicated on the ability for computers to imitate human behavior. However, the majority of uses for the computer can be said to fall outside the domain of human abilities and it is exactly outside of this domain where computers have demonstrated their greatest contribution to intelligence. Another goal for artificial intelligence is one that is not predicated on human mimicry, but instead, on human amplification. This article surveys various systems that contribute to the advancement of human and social intelligence

An Agent-based approach to modelling integrated product teams undertaking a design activity.

The interactions between individual designers, within integrated product teams, and the nature of design tasks, all have a significant impact upon how well a design task can be performed, and hence the quality of the resultant product and the time in which it can be delivered. In this paper we describe an ongoing research project which aims to model integrated product teams through the use of multi-agent systems. We first describe the background and rationale for our work, and then present our initial computational model and results from the simulation of an integrated product team. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the model will evolve to improve the accuracy of the simulation

S+Net: extending functional coordination with extra-functional semantics

This technical report introduces S+Net, a compositional coordination language for streaming networks with extra-functional semantics. Compositionality simplifies the specification of complex parallel and distributed applications; extra-functional semantics allow the application designer to reason about and control resource usage, performance and fault handling. The key feature of S+Net is that functional and extra-functional semantics are defined orthogonally from each other. S+Net can be seen as a simultaneous simplification and extension of the existing coordination language S-Net, that gives control of extra-functional behavior to the S-Net programmer. S+Net can also be seen as a transitional research step between S-Net and AstraKahn, another coordination language currently being designed at the University of Hertfordshire. In contrast with AstraKahn which constitutes a re-design from the ground up, S+Net preserves the basic operational semantics of S-Net and thus provides an incremental introduction of extra-functional control in an existing language.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, 3 table