Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Hybrid approaches based on computational intelligence and semantic web for distributed situation and context awareness

2011 - 2012The research work focuses on Situation Awareness and Context Awareness topics. Specifically, Situation Awareness involves being aware of what is happening in the vicinity to understand how information, events, and one’s own actions will impact goals and objectives, both immediately and in the near future. Thus, Situation Awareness is especially important in application domains where the information flow can be quite high and poor decisions making may lead to serious consequences. On the other hand Context Awareness is considered a process to support user applications to adapt interfaces, tailor the set of application-relevant data, increase the precision of information retrieval, discover services, make the user interaction implicit, or build smart environments. Despite being slightly different, Situation and Context Awareness involve common problems such as: the lack of a support for the acquisition and aggregation of dynamic environmental information from the field (i.e. sensors, cameras, etc.); the lack of formal approaches to knowledge representation (i.e. contexts, concepts, relations, situations, etc.) and processing (reasoning, classification, retrieval, discovery, etc.); the lack of automated and distributed systems, with considerable computing power, to support the reasoning on a huge quantity of knowledge, extracted by sensor data. So, the thesis researches new approaches for distributed Context and Situation Awareness and proposes to apply them in order to achieve some related research objectives such as knowledge representation, semantic reasoning, pattern recognition and information retrieval. The research work starts from the study and analysis of state of art in terms of techniques, technologies, tools and systems to support Context/Situation Awareness. The main aim is to develop a new contribution in this field by integrating techniques deriving from the fields of Semantic Web, Soft Computing and Computational Intelligence. From an architectural point of view, several frameworks are going to be defined according to the multi-agent paradigm. Furthermore, some preliminary experimental results have been obtained in some application domains such as Airport Security, Traffic Management, Smart Grids and Healthcare. Finally, future challenges is going to the following directions: Semantic Modeling of Fuzzy Control, Temporal Issues, Automatically Ontology Elicitation, Extension to other Application Domains and More Experiments. [edited by author]XI n.s

What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan

Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals

Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe

Design research in the Netherlands 2005 : proceedings of the symposium held on 19-20 May 2005, Eindhoven University of Technology

Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 is the third instalment of a symposium that intends to provide a forum for researchers across the academic and designing disciplines. The five-year interval (1995, 2000, and 2005) allows participants to take a step back from daily considerations and to reflect on their basic methodological assumptions, research programmes, and outcomes. Work on design research is organised in this book in three main parts: Design Research, Design Processes, and Design Tools. The part on Design Research contains papers from the Designed Intelligence Group of Industrial Design TU Eindhoven, the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management TU Delft, Design Theory and Methodology group of Industrial Design TU Delft, Form and Media Studies of Architecture TU Delft, and Technical Ecology of Architecture TU Delft. The part on Design Processes contains papers from Construction Management & Engineering of Engineering Technology University Twente, Construction Management of Architecture TU Eindhoven, Physical Aspects of the Built Environment Architecture TU Eindhoven, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, and Knowledge Centre Buildings & Systems TU/e-TNO. The part on Design Tools contains contributions from the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, Design, Integration and Operations of Aircraft and Rotorcraft of Aerospace Engineering TU Delft, TNO Delft, Computational Design of Architecture TU Delft, ID StudioLab of Industrial Design TU Delft, and Design Systems of Architecture TU Eindhoven. Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 in this way provides a sample sheet of the many varied ways in which design is investigated in the Netherlands

Design research in the Netherlands 2005 : proceedings of the symposium held on 19-20 May 2005, Eindhoven University of Technology

Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 is the third instalment of a symposium that intends to provide a forum for researchers across the academic and designing disciplines. The five-year interval (1995, 2000, and 2005) allows participants to take a step back from daily considerations and to reflect on their basic methodological assumptions, research programmes, and outcomes. Work on design research is organised in this book in three main parts: Design Research, Design Processes, and Design Tools. The part on Design Research contains papers from the Designed Intelligence Group of Industrial Design TU Eindhoven, the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management TU Delft, Design Theory and Methodology group of Industrial Design TU Delft, Form and Media Studies of Architecture TU Delft, and Technical Ecology of Architecture TU Delft. The part on Design Processes contains papers from Construction Management & Engineering of Engineering Technology University Twente, Construction Management of Architecture TU Eindhoven, Physical Aspects of the Built Environment Architecture TU Eindhoven, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, and Knowledge Centre Buildings & Systems TU/e-TNO. The part on Design Tools contains contributions from the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, Design, Integration and Operations of Aircraft and Rotorcraft of Aerospace Engineering TU Delft, TNO Delft, Computational Design of Architecture TU Delft, ID StudioLab of Industrial Design TU Delft, and Design Systems of Architecture TU Eindhoven. Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 in this way provides a sample sheet of the many varied ways in which design is investigated in the Netherlands

The Road to General Intelligence

Humans have always dreamed of automating laborious physical and intellectual tasks, but the latter has proved more elusive than naively suspected. Seven decades of systematic study of Artificial Intelligence have witnessed cycles of hubris and despair. The successful realization of General Intelligence (evidenced by the kind of cross-domain flexibility enjoyed by humans) will spawn an industry worth billions and transform the range of viable automation tasks.The recent notable successes of Machine Learning has lead to conjecture that it might be the appropriate technology for delivering General Intelligence. In this book, we argue that the framework of machine learning is fundamentally at odds with any reasonable notion of intelligence and that essential insights from previous decades of AI research are being forgotten. We claim that a fundamental change in perspective is required, mirroring that which took place in the philosophy of science in the mid 20th century. We propose a framework for General Intelligence, together with a reference architecture that emphasizes the need for anytime bounded rationality and a situated denotational semantics. We given necessary emphasis to compositional reasoning, with the required compositionality being provided via principled symbolic-numeric inference mechanisms based on universal constructions from category theory. • Details the pragmatic requirements for real-world General Intelligence. • Describes how machine learning fails to meet these requirements. • Provides a philosophical basis for the proposed approach. • Provides mathematical detail for a reference architecture. • Describes a research program intended to address issues of concern in contemporary AI. The book includes an extensive bibliography, with ~400 entries covering the history of AI and many related areas of computer science and mathematics.The target audience is the entire gamut of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning researchers and industrial practitioners. There are a mixture of descriptive and rigorous sections, according to the nature of the topic. Undergraduate mathematics is in general sufficient. Familiarity with category theory is advantageous for a complete understanding of the more advanced sections, but these may be skipped by the reader who desires an overall picture of the essential concepts This is an open access book

The Talking Heads experiment: Origins of words and meanings

The Talking Heads Experiment, conducted in the years 1999-2001, was the first large-scale experiment in which open populations of situated embodied agents created for the first time ever a new shared vocabulary by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. The agents could teleport to different physical sites in the world through the Internet. Sites, in Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, London, Cambridge and several other locations were linked into the network. Humans could interact with the robotic agents either on site or remotely through the Internet and thus influence the evolving ontologies and languages of the artificial agents. The present book describes in detail the motivation, the cognitive mechanisms used by the agents, the various installations of the Talking Heads, the experimental results that were obtained, and the interaction with humans. It also provides a perspective on what happened in the field after these initial groundbreaking experiments. The book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the history of agent-based models of language evolution and the future of Artificial Intelligence