41,365 research outputs found
A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures
This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverableās authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes
Development Towards Sustainability: How to judge past and proposed policies?
The scientific data about the state of our planet, presented at the 2012
(Rio+20) summit, documented that today's human family lives even less
sustainably than it did in 1992. The data indicate furthermore that the
environmental impacts from our current economic activities are so large, that
we are approaching situations where potentially controllable regional problems
can easily lead to uncontrollable global disasters.
Assuming that (1) the majority of the human family, once adequately informed,
wants to achieve a "sustainable way of life" and (2) that the "development
towards sustainability" roadmap will be based on scientific principles, one
must begin with unambiguous and quantifiable definitions of these goals. As
will be demonstrated, the well known scientific method to define abstract and
complex issues by their negation, satisfies these requirements. Following this
new approach, it also becomes possible to decide if proposed and actual
policies changes will make our way of life less unsustainable, and thus move us
potentially into the direction of sustainability. Furthermore, if potentially
dangerous tipping points are to be avoided, the transition roadmap must include
some minimal speed requirements. Combining the negation method and the time
evolution of that remaining natural capital in different domains, the
transition speed for a "development towards sustainability" can be quantified
at local, regional and global scales.
The presented ideas allow us to measure the rate of natural capital depletion
and the rate of restoration that will be required if humanity is to avoid
reaching a sustainable future by a collapse transition.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, Paper presented at the 2013 World Resource Forum
in Davos, Switzerland. Keywords: Natural Capital, IPAT equation,
unsustainable living, development towards sustainabilit
Negative findings in electronic health records and biomedical ontologies: a realist approach
PURPOSEāA substantial fraction of the observations made by clinicians and entered into patient records are expressed by means of negation or by using terms which contain negative qualifiers (as in āabsence of pulseā or āsurgical procedure not performedā). This seems at first sight to present problems for ontologies, terminologies and data repositories that adhere to a realist view and thus reject any reference to putative non-existing entities. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Referent
Tracking (RT) are examples of such paradigms. The purpose of the research here described was to test a proposal to capture negative findings in electronic health record systems based on BFO and RT.
METHODSāWe analysed a series of negative findings encountered in 748 sentences taken from 41 patient charts. We classified the phenomena described in terms of the various top-level categories and relations defined in BFO, taking into account the role of negation in the corresponding descriptions. We also studied terms from SNOMED-CT containing one or other form of negation. We then explored ways to represent the described phenomena by means of the types of representational units available to realist ontologies such as BFO.
RESULTSāWe introduced a new family of ālacksā relations into the OBO Relation Ontology. The relation lacks_part, for example, defined in terms of the positive relation part_of, holds between a particular p and a universal U when p has no instance of U as part. Since p and U both exist, assertions involving ālacks_partā and its cognates meet the requirements of positivity.
CONCLUSIONāBy expanding the OBO Relation Ontology, we were able to accommodate nearly all occurrences of negative findings in the sample studied
Robots that Say āNoā. Affective Symbol Grounding and the Case of Intent Interpretations
Ā© 2017 IEEE. This article has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Modern theories on early child language acquisition tend to focus on referential words, mostly nouns, labeling concrete objects, or physical properties. In this experimental proof-of-concept study, we show how nonreferential negation words, typically belonging to a child's first ten words, may be acquired. A child-like humanoid robot is deployed in speech-wise unconstrained interaction with naĆÆve human participants. In agreement with psycholinguistic observations, we corroborate the hypothesis that affect plays a pivotal role in the socially distributed acquisition process where the adept conversation partner provides linguistic interpretations of the affective displays of the less adept speaker. Negation words are prosodically salient within intent interpretations that are triggered by the learner's display of affect. From there they can be picked up and used by the budding language learner which may involve the grounding of these words in the very affective states that triggered them in the first place. The pragmatic analysis of the robot's linguistic performance indicates that the correct timing of negative utterances is essential for the listener to infer the meaning of otherwise ambiguous negative utterances. In order to assess the robot's performance thoroughly comparative data from psycholinguistic studies of parent-child dyads is needed highlighting the need for further interdisciplinary work.Peer reviewe
Enforcing Architectural Styles in Presence of Unexpected Distributed Reconfigurations
Architectural Design Rewriting (ADR, for short) is a rule-based formal
framework for modelling the evolution of architectures of distributed systems.
Rules allow ADR graphs to be refined. After equipping ADR with a simple logic,
we equip rules with pre- and post-conditions; the former constraints the
applicability of the rules while the later specifies properties of the
resulting graphs. We give an algorithm to compute the weakest pre-condition out
of a rule and its post-condition. On top of this algorithm, we design a simple
methodology that allows us to select which rules can be applied at the
architectural level to reconfigure a system so to regain its architectural
style when it becomes compromised by unexpected run-time reconfigurations.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2012, arXiv:1212.345
Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management
Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has
increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be
able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute
and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of
services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available
with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs
requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences
and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several
advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge
representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business
requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and
enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The
article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy
for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate
flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for
Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS),
submitted 19th March 200
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