Enough Fluff: Returning to Meaningful Perspectives on Automation

This manuscript, produced by a Department of Transportation employee, was submitted for publication to the 41st Digital Avionics Systems Conference, September 18-22, 2022, Portsmouth, VA.As society progresses towards increased automation in aviation\u2014such as with Advanced Air Mobility and Unmanned Aircraft Systems\u2014it is important to have a common understanding and perspective about automation among the many stakeholders, including aviation system designers, operators, maintainers, and regulatory authorities. Unfortunately, the discourse is hindered by misleading perspectives, assumptions, claims, and terminology

Real-Time Monitoring of High-Level States in Smart Environments

Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of devices and sensors aimed at intelligent services. The presence of these diverse devices has raised a major problem of managing complex environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the respective smart environments using user defined goals. Generally, the solution advocates that the user goal(s) can be represented by combining devices (smart appliances and sensor/actuators) in particular states. `Domotic Effects' is a high level modeling approach, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with a high level abstract layer that enables the definition of user goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. This paper describes an approach for the automatic evaluation of domotic effects combined through Boolean expressions, that can provide efficient and intelligent monitoring of the domotic structure of the environment. ``Effects Evaluation'' addresses the problem of finding the new values of all the domotic effects defined for the environment when one or more devices change their state or one or more sensor value is recorded in the environment, hence determining a new overall state of the environment. The paper also presents an architecture to implement the evaluation of domotic effects. Results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the approach and highlight responsiveness of the implemented effect evaluation

Operations Management

Global competition has caused fundamental changes in the competitive environment of the manufacturing and service industries. Firms should develop strategic objectives that, upon achievement, result in a competitive advantage in the market place. The forces of globalization on one hand and rapidly growing marketing opportunities overseas, especially in emerging economies on the other, have led to the expansion of operations on a global scale. The book aims to cover the main topics characterizing operations management including both strategic issues and practical applications. A global environmental business including both manufacturing and services is analyzed. The book contains original research and application chapters from different perspectives. It is enriched through the analyses of case studies

Beyond Quantity: Research with Subsymbolic AI

How do artificial neural networks and other forms of artificial intelligence interfere with methods and practices in the sciences? Which interdisciplinary epistemological challenges arise when we think about the use of AI beyond its dependency on big data? Not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and the humanities seem to be increasingly affected by current approaches of subsymbolic AI, which master problems of quality (fuzziness, uncertainty) in a hitherto unknown way. But what are the conditions, implications, and effects of these (potential) epistemic transformations and how must research on AI be configured to address them adequately

Final Report: National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence

Final report presenting the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI)'s recommendations for winning the AI era. It includes a 16 chapter Main Report and "Blueprints for Action that outline the concrete steps departments and agencies can take to implement NSCAI's recommendations." - Introduction