4 research outputs found
Third International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space 1994
The Third International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space (i-SAIRAS 94), held October 18-20, 1994, in Pasadena, California, was jointly sponsored by NASA, ESA, and Japan's National Space Development Agency, and was hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. i-SAIRAS 94 featured presentations covering a variety of technical and programmatic topics, ranging from underlying basic technology to specific applications of artificial intelligence and robotics to space missions. i-SAIRAS 94 featured a special workshop on planning and scheduling and provided scientists, engineers, and managers with the opportunity to exchange theoretical ideas, practical results, and program plans in such areas as space mission control, space vehicle processing, data analysis, autonomous spacecraft, space robots and rovers, satellite servicing, and intelligent instruments
The case of travel guidebook production
This thesis focuses on the production of travel guidebooks. Its aim is to explore the mutual coconstruction
and entanglement of genres, producers and institutions in cultural production and
cultural work. It also examines how authorial and institutional, professional and industrial selfreflexivity
exists in and through ambiguous and shifting interrelations with genres and their
poetics. To this end, it develops a preliminary theoretical framework for a comprehensive
exploration of the complex dynamics of cultural production that is attentive to the cultural objects
themselves: here, a down-market, ‘uninventive’ and ‘heteronomous’ genre known as the travel
guide(book). The thesis argues that the specificity of the genre is continually contextualized and
re-contextualized, qualified and re-qualified, commodified and rendered autonomous, in the daily,
local, and intimate practices of guide-making.
The argument presented is that the genre is not merely a backdrop for creative agency or a predetermined
set of rules, but a complex entity – spatially and temporally dispersed – that affords
autonomous opportunities for various modes of action, self-definition, and self-interpretation.
Thus, genres are active elements or animating forces of cultural production, rather than merely
outcomes of industrial dynamics. What arises from the empirical material is that cultural
producers experience ‘autonomy’ in and through the notion of genre which itself is fuzzy, vague,
tacit, implicit and often non-formalized. Nonetheless, it is obdurately present in a spectrum of
strategies, rhetoric, a sense of responsibility, expertise and professionalism applied by such
producers in order to explain, define and justify their practical decisions and evaluations.
The first three chapters explore perceived limitations of sociological, anthropological and sociocultural
paradigms of cultural production. They also indicate some potential areas for crossfertilization
with genre theory, which has conceptualized the notion of genre as social action,
cognitive action-schemata, and institutions that mediate between industry, producers, and
audiences. The last four chapters follow and trace interpenetrating and interlocking relations
between genres and institutions firstly, as they mutually and historically co-produce each other in
industrial practice; secondly, as entangled in individual and professional auto-biographies with
reference to the genre and its adjacent markets; and third, as embedded in actual production
practices - how guidebook producers make use of and interact with the editorial brief (or
institutionalized and contractually binding genre specificity) and independent genre trajectories
(autonomous logic), while making daily evaluations of their work and their own professional selfreflexivity
On elasticity and constrainedness of business services provisioning
In service-oriented enterprise architecture, provisioning business services is made on top of IT processes, which should be elastic amid the availability of computing resources and the variation of user demand. In addition, the provisioning depends on human resources utilized and is constrained by the business objectives (e.g. a goal) plus coarse-grained constraints (e.g. an order in which business services take place). This elasticity and constrainedness can best be witnessed on nonfunctional properties of the business services being provisioned. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for modeling and reasoning about them. The framework features a methodology for formally expressing the aforementioned factors in services provisioning, an engine to find solutions and a simulation. 2012 IEEE