Practical undoability checking via contingent planning

We consider a general concept of undoability, asking whether a given action can always be undone, no matter which state it is applied to. This generalizes previous concepts of invertibility, and is relevant for search as well as applications. Naïve undoability checking requires to enumerate all states an action is applicable to. Extending and operationalizing prior work in this direction, we introduce a compilation into contingent planning, replacing such enumeration by standard techniques handling large belief states. We furthermore introduce compilations for checking whether one can always get back to an at-least-as-good state, as well as for determining partial undoability, i. e., undoability on a subset of states an action is applicable to. Our experiments on IPC benchmarks and in a cloud management application show that contingent planners are often effective at solving this kind of problem, hence providing a practical means for undoability checking

Flexible Views for View-based Model-driven Development

Modern software development faces the problem of fragmentation of information across heterogeneous artefacts in different modelling and programming languages. In this dissertation, the Vitruvius approach for view-based engineering is presented. Flexible views offer a compact definition of user-specific views on software systems, and can be defined the novel ModelJoin language. The process is supported by a change metamodel for metamodel evolution and change impact analysis

Adaptive search techniques in AI planning and heuristic search

State-space search is a common approach to solve problems appearing in artificial intelligence and other subfields of computer science. In such problems, an agent must find a sequence of actions leading from an initial state to a goal state. However, the state spaces of practical applications are often too large to explore exhaustively. Hence, heuristic functions that estimate the distance to a goal state (such as straight-line distance for navigation tasks) are used to guide the search more effectively. Heuristic search is typically viewed as a static process. The heuristic function is assumed to be unchanged throughout the search, and its resulting values are directly used for guidance without applying any further reasoning to them. Yet critical aspects of the task may only be discovered during the search, e.g., regions of the state space where the heuristic does not yield reliable values. Our work here aims to make this process more dynamic, allowing the search to adapt to such observations. One form of adaptation that we consider is online refinement of the heuristic function. We design search algorithms that detect weaknesses in the heuristic, and address them with targeted refinement operations. If the heuristic converges to perfect estimates, this results in a secondary method of progress, causing search algorithms that are otherwise incomplete to eventually find a solution. We also consider settings that inherently require adaptation: In online replanning, a plan that is being executed must be amended for changes in the environment. Similarly, in real-time search, an agent must act under strict time constraints with limited information. The search algorithms we introduce in this work share a common pattern of online adaptation, allowing them to effectively react to challenges encountered during the search. We evaluate our contributions on a wide range of standard benchmarks. Our results show that the flexibility of these algorithms makes them more robust than traditional approaches, and they often yield substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art planners.Die Zustandsraumsuche ist ein oft verwendeter Ansatz um verschiedene Probleme zu lösen, die in der Künstlichen Intelligenz und anderen Bereichen der Informatik auftreten. Dabei muss ein Akteur eine Folge von Aktionen finden, die einen Pfad von einem Startzustand zu einem Zielzustand bilden. Die Zustandsräume von praktischen Anwendungen sind häufig zu groß um sie vollständig zu durchsuchen. Aus diesem Grund leitet man die Suche mit Heuristiken, die die Distanz zu einem Zielzustand abschätzen; zum Beispiel lässt sich die Luftliniendistanz als Heuristik für Navigationsprobleme einsetzen. Heuristische Suche wird typischerweise als statischer Prozess angesehen. Man nimmt an, dass die Heuristik während der Suche eine unveränderte Funktion ist, und die resultierenden Werte werden direkt zur Leitung der Suche benutzt ohne weitere Logik darauf anzuwenden. Jedoch könnten kritische Aspekte des Problems erst im Laufe der Suche erkannt werden, wie zum Beispiel Bereiche des Zustandsraums in denen die Heuristik keine verlässlichen Abschätzungen liefert. In dieser Arbeit wird der Suchprozess dynamischer gestaltet und der Suche ermöglicht sich solchen Beobachtungen anzupassen. Eine Art dieser Anpassung ist die Onlineverbesserung der Heuristik. Es werden Suchalgorithmen entwickelt, die Schwächen in der Heuristik erkennen und mit gezielten Verbesserungsoperationen beheben. Wenn die Heuristik zu perfekten Werten konvergiert ergibt sich daraus eine zusätzliche Form von Fortschritt, wodurch auch Suchalgorithmen, die sonst unvollständig sind, garantiert irgendwann eine Lösung finden werden. Es werden auch Szenarien betrachtet, die schon von sich aus Anpassung erfordern: In der Onlineumplanung muss ein Plan, der gerade ausgeführt wird, auf Änderungen in der Umgebung angepasst werden. Ähnlich dazu muss sich ein Akteur in der Echtzeitsuche unter strengen Zeitauflagen und mit eingeschränkten Informationen bewegen. Die Suchalgorithmen, die in dieser Arbeit eingeführt werden, folgen einem gemeinsamen Muster von Onlineanpassung, was ihnen ermöglicht effektiv auf Herausforderungen zu reagieren die im Verlauf der Suche aufkommen. Diese Ansätze werden auf einer breiten Reihe von Benchmarks ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Flexibilität dieser Algorithmen zu erhöhter Zuverlässigkeit im Vergleich zu traditionellen Ansätzen führt, und es werden oft deutliche Verbesserungen gegenüber modernen Planungssystemen erzielt.DFG grant 389792660 as part of TRR 248 – CPEC (see https://perspicuous-computing.science), and DFG grant HO 2169/5-1, "Critically Constrained Planning via Partial Delete Relaxation

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

Spectacles of Development: The Materiality of Success at the Barefoot College, Rajasthan

Through an ethnographic study of the 'Barefoot College', an internationally renowned non¬ governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this thesis investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success. In this conceptualisation, success is not an output of good development practice, but is rather a socially and materially generated construction sustained via robust interpretations, mobilised meanings, and strong networks of support. This thesis pays particular attention to the material processes by which success is achieved and the different meanings and discourses that they act to perform. Attending to the different ways in which success is produced in development, from locally produced assemblages, to regional and global deployments of application, reminds us that knowledge forms are never fixed, but are rather contingent upon the materials, locations, and persons that conceive and comprise them. How the Barefoot College achieves its success over time and circumstance is the subject of this thesis. Drawing upon Debord's (1967) notion of'spectacle', I argue that the College, as a prolific producer of various forms of development media, achieves its success firstly through materially mediated heterotopic spectacles-, enacted and imperfect Utopias that constitute the desires, imaginings and Otherness of its society; and secondly through the ignorance that these spectacles generate: constructed spaces of silence and invisibility that serve to reify this theatre of dreams. With a particular focus on its community-managed, solar photovoltaic development programme, one that trains illiterate women from countries across Africa and beyond as 'Barefoot Solar Engineers' (BSEs), this thesis analyses firstly how heterotopic spectacles are produced, the machinations, strategies, persons and materialities involved in development work (e.g. material props, stage sets,' rehearsals, and embodied training); and secondly, what makes it successful, what kinds of ideas, visions, and discourses do these persons and materialities draw upon (and help augment) to account for its growth from small-scale, rural experiment in skills-training to celebrated, globalised development model. The chapters that follow consider different scenarios through which success was realised at the College. They embrace diverse yet interconnected themes relating to the temporality of development success over decades of societal change; constructions, concealments, and silences of knowledge claims as they are enacted through an architectural awards controversy; the performance of notions of development, enlightenment and the formation of the state via technology and energy; a discussion of how donors and supporters are enrolled in a development programme through material acts of 'witnessing'; an exploration and critique of technologically mediated 'empowerment'-related agendas; and finally, an examination of how success was generated via processes of'replication

Practical Undoability Checking via Contingent Planning

We consider a general concept of undoability, asking whether a given action can always be undone, no matter which state it is applied to. This generalizes previous concepts of invertibility, and is relevant for search as well as applications. Naïve undoability checking requires to enumerate all states an action is applicable to. Extending and operationalizing prior work in this direction, we introduce a compilation into contingent planning, replacing such enumeration by standard techniques handling large belief states. We furthermore introduce compilations for checking whether one can always get back to an at-least-as-good state, as well as for determining partial undoability, i.e., undoability on a subset of states an action is applicable to. Our experiments on IPC benchmarks and in a cloud management application show that contingent planners are often effective at solving this kind of problem, hence providing a practical means for undoability checking

The landscape of consumer credit default : tracing technologies of market attachment

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Inside the sequence universe: the amazing life of data and the people who look after them

This thesis provides an ethnographic exploration of two large nucleotide sequence databases, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Bank, UK and GenBank, US. It describes and analyses their complex bioinformatic environments as well as their material-discursive environments – the objects, narratives and practices that recursively constitute these databases. In doing so, it unravels a rich bioinformational ecology – the “sequence universe”. Here, mosquitoes have mumps, the louse is “huge” and self-styled information plumbers patch-up high-throughput data pipelines while data curators battle the indiscriminate coming-to-life caused by metagenomics. Given the intensification of data production, the biosciences have reached a point where concerns have squarely turned to fundamental questions about how to know within and between all that data. This thesis assembles a database imaginary, recovering inventive terms of scholarly engagement with bioinformational databases and data, terms that remain critical without necessarily reverting to a database logic. Science studies and related disciplines, investigating illustrious projects like the UK Biobank, have developed a sustained critique of the perceived conflation of bodies and data. This thesis argues that these accounts forego an engagement with the database sui generis, as a situated arrangement of people, things, routines and spaces. It shows that databases have histories and continue established practices of collecting and curating. At the same time, it maps entanglements of the databases with experiments and discovery thereby demonstrates the vibrancy of data. Focusing on the question of what happens at these databases, the thesis follows data curators and programmers but also database records and the entities documented by them, such as uncultured bacteria. It contextualises ethnographic findings within the literature on the sociology and philosophy of science and technology while also making references to works of art and literature in order to bring into relief the boundary-defying scope of the issues raised

The Landscape of Consumer Credit Default: Tracing Technologies of Market Attachment

The first global recession of the twenty-first century has been widely characterised as a crisis rooted in secured credit default. But in the UK, a different, less visible, but increasingly common tale of credit default exists, which not only predates the economic downturn, but continues to compound its effects: that of unsecured, consumer credit default. This is the object of this thesis: it focuses on tracing the changing calculative landscapes that heavily indebted and defaulting consumer credit borrowers in the UK move through, from periods of borrowing, to managing debts, to being confronted by debt collectors. It draws together the perspectives of borrowers, defaulters, collectors, industry analysts and spokespersons, as well as insights from visits to three major debt collection agencies, shedding light on a domain of socio-economic life which has been subject to little detailed empirical research. At the centre of the thesis is the concept of ‘market attachment’, drawing on work within the ‘economization’ programme within economic sociology. In so doing, the thesis argues that in existing accounts of market attachment there has been a lack of attention (a) to the variable modes through which markets seek to enact attachments between consumer and producer and (b) to those constraining market attachments from which ‘detachment’ is difficult. In particular, the thesis explores the relationship between ‘affective’ modes of social action and economic calculation. Drawing attention to how emergent, corporeal relations can become central to markets, the thesis contributes towards enriching the vocabulary and expanding the potential empirical focus of economic sociology. In so doing, the thesis explores the distributed politics of consumer credit, centring on the separation enacted between ‘lender’ and ‘collector’. This separation, the thesis argues, is not only useful for the collections industry, it is strategically put to work and routinely re-enacted as a generative market device

Writing Manuals for the Masses

This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft. Often dismissed as commercial and stereotypical by authors and specialists alike, literary advice has nonetheless remained a flourishing business, embodying the unquestioned values of a literary system, but also functioning as a sign of a literary system in transition. Exploring the rise of new online amateur writing cultures in the twenty-first century, this collection of essays considers how literary advice proliferates globally, leading to new forms and genres