Multilevel semantic analysis and problem-solving in the flight domain

A computer based cockpit system which is capable of assisting the pilot in such important tasks as monitoring, diagnosis, and trend analysis was developed. The system is properly organized and is endowed with a knowledge base so that it enhances the pilot's control over the aircraft while simultaneously reducing his workload

Mechanomorphosis: Science, Management, and “Human Machinery” in Industrial Canada, 1900–45

By the early 20th century, the changes taking place in western industrial capitalist nations prompted an adaptive shift in the socioeconomic delineation of human bodies, and in scientific theories about how they worked and how they could be put to work. Just as the rising social sciences borrowed from medicine to convey images of social malaise, medicine increasingly appropriated an industrial vocabulary to conceptualize bodily health. Depicted variously as a machine, a motor, a factory in itself, the human body absorbed industrial symbolism. Modern industry demanded an intensification of labour that made bodily efficiency paramount. The corresponding definition of health also shifted, from emphasis on physical endurance, which could be secured by simple replacement of outworn workers, to optimum labour efficiency, which had to be actively instilled in all workers, present and future. Scientific management programs were easily integrated with regulatory medical notions concerning the human body and human nature, as science, medicine and technology combined forces to promote a machine ethic that equated modernity, progress, efficiency, and national health. This paper considers the relationship between changing conceptualizations of the human body, developing medical influence and state regulation of health, and attempts to “Taylorize” the labour process in early 20th century Canada

Expressions, Spring 2017

College of Humanities and the Arts Newsletter, Volume 1

Influential Pedagogies Using Digital Fabrication Laboratories onArchitectural Education

Innovation in advanced architectural design is imposing a revolution in ways to materialize contemporary buildings of geometrical complexities. In the professional field, such trend is demanding a constant update on the tools required to execute jobs. At the academic level, digital fabrication laboratories are becoming a place to fuse ideas with rationalized principles of construction in addition to helping students visualise the future challenges in the architectural practice. This paper tries to argue the influences on architectural education by the leading function of digital fabrication laboratories, with the prospect of presenting practical assessments of transforming digital information into analogue materiality, along with logical explorations to rationalize fabrication processes. A historical assessment of applied cases in architecture is included, in addition to a description of digital fabrication laboratories, and to an association between instructive approaches in digital fabrication and engineering laboratories. The impact of the introduction of such labs on architectural education is reflected in the conclusion

Optimum control strategies for maximum thrust production in underwater undulatory swimming

Fish, cetaceans and many other aquatic vertebrates undulate their bodies to propel themselves through water. Numerous studies on natural, artificial or analogous swimmers are dedicated to revealing the links between the kinematics of body oscillation and the production of thrust for swimming. One of the most open and difficult questions concerns the best kinematics to maximize this later quantity for given constraints and how a system strategizes and adjusts its internal parameters to reach this maximum. To address this challenge, we exploit a biomimetic robotic swimmer to determine the control signal that produces the highest thrust. Using machine learning techniques and intuitive models, we find that this optimal control consists of a square wave function, whose frequency is fixed by the interplay between the internal dynamics of the swimmer and the fluid-structure interaction with the surrounding fluid. We then propose a simple implementation for autonomous robotic swimmers that requires no prior knowledge of systems or equations. This application to aquatic locomotion is validated by 2D numerical simulations

Image data processing system requirements study. Volume 1: Analysis

Digital image processing, image recorders, high-density digital data recorders, and data system element processing for use in an Earth Resources Survey image data processing system are studied. Loading to various ERS systems is also estimated by simulation

Fifth Brigade at Verrieres Ridge

The Fifth Canadian Infantry Brigade arrived in France on 16 July 1944 during the worst days of the battle of Normandy. The Allies had expected heavy losses on the D-Day beaches and then, once through the Atlantic Wall, lighter casualties in a war of rapid movement. The opposite had happened. The coastal defences had been quickly breached, but then there were only slow movement and horrendous casualties. In one month more than 40,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded or missing, while almost 38,000 British and Canadian troops shared the same fate. The Allied air forces enjoyed total air superiority over the battlefield, but in June alone the cost was 6,200 aircrew. Soldiers on both sides were beginning to say that it was 1914–1918 all over again—a static battle of attrition with gains measured in yards and thousands of dead

Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot? : Effects of Error, Task Type and Personality on Human-Robot Cooperation and Trust

How do mistakes made by a robot affect its trustworthiness and acceptance in human-robot collaboration? We investigate how the perception of erroneous robot behavior may influence human interaction choices and the willingness to cooperate with the robot by following a number of its unusual requests. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in which participants interacted with a home companion robot in one of two experimental conditions: (1) the correct mode or (2) the faulty mode. Our findings reveal that, while significantly affecting subjective perceptions of the robot and assessments of its reliability and trustworthiness, the robot's performance does not seem to substantially influence participants' decisions to (not) comply with its requests. However, our results further suggest that the nature of the task requested by the robot, e.g. whether its effects are revocable as opposed to irrevocable, has a signicant im- pact on participants' willingness to follow its instructions

The Role of Ideas in the Emergence of Convergent Higher Education Policies in Europe: The Case of France. CES Working Paper, no. 73

How do ideas influence public policy ? French higher education is a good case in point. It seems reasonable to think that the recent evolution French universities underwent resulted from the diffusion of the convergent discourse held by most European countries on the need for increased university autonomy and more self regulation. But no empirical evidence proves that this diffusion process occured in the French case. Nevertheless, if the recent contractual policy in France can not be understood as the product of the emergence of new beliefs, of a new vision of the (European higher education) world, it certainly gave rise to the development of a new or paradigm. This leads us to revisit the relation of ideas and public policy in two ways. First in arguing that the causal link between them is not as unidirectional as generally stated. Second that change does not always happen through a paradigmatic revolution, but rather through an incremental process