Coalition Search and Rescue - Task Support: Intelligent Task Achieving Agents on the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.The Coalition Search and Rescue Task Support (CoSAR-TS) has been a DARPA DAML Program project to provide advanced capabilities linking models of organizational structures, policies, and doctrines with intelligent task support software. The project integrates AIAI’s I-X planning and collaboration technology, IHMC’s KAoS policy and domain services, and Semantic Web Services of various kinds. Search and rescue operations by nature require the kind of rapid dynamic composition of available policy-constrained services making it a good use case for Semantic Web technologies. Other participants in the application include BBN Technologies, SPAWAR, AFRL, and Carnegie Mellon University. At the beginning of the project, the joint AIAI/IHMC aims were: - Development of base technologies respectively I-X/I-Plan and KAoS Policy and Domain Services, - Deployment of the technology in a realistic CoAX agents demonstrator scenario, - Persuasion of closer integration of these two technologies with a perspective of a uniform tool release in the future. These goals were achieved in the subsequent years of the project as follows: - Year 1: Distributed multi-agent systems were developed and integrated with the semantic web in a realistic coalition search and rescue scenario. This culminated in an AAAI-2004 Intelligent Systems Demonstrator for CoSAR-TS. - Year 2: An initial web services composition and policy analysis tool for semantic web services (I-K-C) was implemented. The activity culminated in an IEEE Intelligent Systems journal article and an ISWC 2004 conference paper. Results of the project are available from several web sites including: the CoSAR-TS Project web site, the DAML-program results related SemWebCentral web site, and the I-K-C project web pages at AIAI and IHMC (please see Appendix C for details). The software developed during the project is available for download from the above-mentioned web pages. The projected also produced an impressive list of quality publications that thoroughly documented and publicized the project results in the research and military communities. The technology developed by the project is being used in a further transition effort with JFCOM/JPRA in the Co-OPR project, a seedling for DARPA’s Integrated Battle Command program (http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/co-opr/)

Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for January to June 2011 - November 11, 2010

If you attend the same conferences each year, you don’t need to scan this list. This list is your opportunity to “push the envelope” by trying something new. There are hundreds of professional development events that may give you a different perspective or help you learn a new skill. Rather than attend the same event you always do, scan this list and investigate conferences, symposiums, or workshops you have never attended. The list below covers selected events focused primarily on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2011 are complete as dates, locations, or URLs are not available for a number of events held after June 2011. A Word 2003 format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 or higher version and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference proceedings. (If you are seeking a more interactive listing, refer to online conference sites.) Consider using the “Find” tool under Microsoft Word’s “Edit” tab or similar tab in OpenOffice to locate the name of a particular conference, association, city, or country. If you enter the country “United Kingdom” in the “Find” tool, all conferences that occur in the United Kingdom will be highlighted. Then, “cut and paste” a list of suitable events for yourself and your colleagues. Please note that events, dates, titles, and locations may change; thus, CHECK the specific conference website. Note also that some events will be cancelled at a later date. All Internet addresses were verified at the time of publication. No liability is assumed for any errors that may have been introduced inadvertently during the assembly of this conference list. If possible, please do not remove the contact information when you re-distribute the list as that is how I receive updates and corrections. If you publish the list on the web, please note its source

Place of a Realistic Teacher Education Pedagogy in an ICT-Supported Learning Environment in Distance Teacher Education in Uganda

This article is based on a study undertaken to examine the impact of introducing a realistic teacher education pedagogy (RTEP) oriented learning environment supported by ICT on distance teacher education in Uganda. It gives an overview of the quality, quantity and training of teachers in primary and secondary schools in the country after which it positions distance learning in teacher education. Using the evidence gathered, it suggests solutions to challenges facing distance teacher education in the country. It is argued that the solutions may be relevant to distance teacher education worldwide

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

Semantic technologies: from niche to the mainstream of Web 3? A comprehensive framework for web Information modelling and semantic annotation

Context: Web information technologies developed and applied in the last decade have considerably changed the way web applications operate and have revolutionised information management and knowledge discovery. Social technologies, user-generated classification schemes and formal semantics have a far-reaching sphere of influence. They promote collective intelligence, support interoperability, enhance sustainability and instigate innovation. Contribution: The research carried out and consequent publications follow the various paradigms of semantic technologies, assess each approach, evaluate its efficiency, identify the challenges involved and propose a comprehensive framework for web information modelling and semantic annotation, which is the thesis’ original contribution to knowledge. The proposed framework assists web information modelling, facilitates semantic annotation and information retrieval, enables system interoperability and enhances information quality. Implications: Semantic technologies coupled with social media and end-user involvement can instigate innovative influence with wide organisational implications that can benefit a considerable range of industries. The scalable and sustainable business models of social computing and the collective intelligence of organisational social media can be resourcefully paired with internal research and knowledge from interoperable information repositories, back-end databases and legacy systems. Semantified information assets can free human resources so that they can be used to better serve business development, support innovation and increase productivity

A Two-Phase Heuristic Algorithm for the Common Frequency Routing Problem with Vehicle Type Choice in the Milk Run

High frequency and small lot size are characteristics of milk runs and are often used to implement the just-in-time (JIT) strategy in logistical systems. The common frequency problem, which simultaneously involves planning of the route and frequency, has been extensively researched in milk run systems. In addition, vehicle type choice in the milk run system also has a significant influence on the operating cost. Therefore, in this paper, we simultaneously consider vehicle routing planning, frequency planning, and vehicle type choice in order to optimize the sum of the cost of transportation, inventory, and dispatch. To this end, we develop a mathematical model to describe the common frequency problem with vehicle type choice. Since the problem is NP hard, we develop a two-phase heuristic algorithm to solve the model. More specifically, an initial satisfactory solution is first generated through a greedy heuristic algorithm to maximize the ratio of the superior arc frequency to the inferior arc frequency. Following this, a tabu search (TS) with limited search scope is used to improve the initial satisfactory solution. Numerical examples with different sizes establish the efficacy of our model and our proposed algorithm