Emergent Design

Explorations in Systems Phenomenology in Relation to Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Meta-dialectics of Design SYNOPSIS A Phenomenological Analysis of Emergent Design is performed based on the foundations of General Schemas Theory. The concept of Sign Engineering is explored in terms of Hermeneutics, Dialectics, and Ontology in order to define Emergent Systems and Metasystems Engineering based on the concept of Meta-dialectics. ABSTRACT Phenomenology, Ontology, Hermeneutics, and Dialectics will dominate our inquiry into the nature of the Emergent Design of the System and its inverse dual, the Meta-system. This is an speculative dissertation that attempts to produce a philosophical, mathematical, and theoretical view of the nature of Systems Engineering Design. Emergent System Design, i.e., the design of yet unheard of and/or hitherto non-existent Systems and Metasystems is the focus. This study is a frontal assault on the hard problem of explaining how Engineering produces new things, rather than a repetition or reordering of concepts that already exist. In this work the philosophies of E. Husserl, A. Gurwitsch, M. Heidegger, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, A. Badiou, G. Hegel, I. Kant and other Continental Philosophers are brought to bear on different aspects of how new technological systems come into existence through the midwifery of Systems Engineering. Sign Engineering is singled out as the most important aspect of Systems Engineering. We will build on the work of Pieter Wisse and extend his theory of Sign Engineering to define Meta-dialectics in the form of Quadralectics and then Pentalectics. Along the way the various ontological levels of Being are explored in conjunction with the discovery that the Quadralectic is related to the possibility of design primarily at the Third Meta-level of Being, called Hyper Being. Design Process is dependent upon the emergent possibilities that appear in Hyper Being. Hyper Being, termed by Heidegger as Being (Being crossed-out) and termed by Derrida as Differance, also appears as the widest space within the Design Field at the third meta-level of Being and therefore provides the most leverage that is needed to produce emergent effects. Hyper Being is where possibilities appear within our worldview. Possibility is necessary for emergent events to occur. Hyper Being possibilities are extended by Wild Being propensities to allow the embodiment of new things. We discuss how this philosophical background relates to meta-methods such as the Gurevich Abstract State Machine and the Wisse Metapattern methods, as well as real-time architectural design methods as described in the Integral Software Engineering Methodology. One aim of this research is to find the foundation for extending the ISEM methodology to become a general purpose Systems Design Methodology. Our purpose is also to bring these philosophical considerations into the practical realm by examining P. Bourdieu’s ideas on the relationship between theoretical and practical reason and M. de Certeau’s ideas on practice. The relationship between design and implementation is seen in terms of the Set/Mass conceptual opposition. General Schemas Theory is used as a way of critiquing the dependence of Set based mathematics as a basis for Design. The dissertation delineates a new foundation for Systems Engineering as Emergent Engineering based on General Schemas Theory, and provides an advanced theory of Design based on the understanding of the meta-levels of Being, particularly focusing upon the relationship between Hyper Being and Wild Being in the context of Pure and Process Being

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

Quantum-centric Supercomputing for Materials Science: A Perspective on Challenges and Future Directions

Computational models are an essential tool for the design, characterization, and discovery of novel materials. Hard computational tasks in materials science stretch the limits of existing high-performance supercomputing centers, consuming much of their simulation, analysis, and data resources. Quantum computing, on the other hand, is an emerging technology with the potential to accelerate many of the computational tasks needed for materials science. In order to do that, the quantum technology must interact with conventional high-performance computing in several ways: approximate results validation, identification of hard problems, and synergies in quantum-centric supercomputing. In this paper, we provide a perspective on how quantum-centric supercomputing can help address critical computational problems in materials science, the challenges to face in order to solve representative use cases, and new suggested directions.Comment: 60 pages, 14 figures; comments welcom

Engineering framework for service-oriented automation systems

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Engineering Language-Parametric End-User Programming Environments for DSLs

Human-computer communication can be achieved through different interfaces such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), command-line interfaces, and programming languages. In this thesis, we used some of these inter- faces; however, we focused on programming languages which are artificial languages consisting of instructions written by humans and executed by computers. In order to create these programs, humans use specialized tools called programming environments that offer a set of utilities that ease human-computer communication. When creating programs, users must learn the language’s syntax and get acquainted with the pro- gramming environment. Unfortunately, programming languages usually offer a single user interface or syntax, which is not ideal considering different types of users with varied backgrounds and expertise will use it. Given the increasing number of people performing any kind of programming activity, it is important to offer different inter- faces depending on the programming task and the background of the users. However, from the language engineering point of view, offering multiple user interfaces for the same language is expensive, and if we specifically consider Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), it is even more expensive given their audience and development teams’ size. Therefore, we study how to engineer different user interfaces for DSLs in a practical way.This thesis presents different mechanisms to engineer different language-parametric programming environments for end-users. These mechanisms rely heavily on reusing existing language components for existing languages or helping language engineers define these interfaces for new languages. We mainly studied four technological spaces, namely, Grammarware, Computational Notebooks, Block-based environments, and Projec- tional editors. We present three different language-parametric interfaces for interacting with DSLs, namely computational notebooks, projectional editors, and block-based editors. These interfaces offer different user experiences and rely upon different technological spaces. Different notations are associated with different technological spaces; for in- stance, grammarware is associated with text files, while block-based environments are associated with Blockly and JavaScript files. Therefore, to provide different notations for their languages, we have to "space travel" so that language engineers can select the most appropriate technological space and interface for their target audience. To support this, we defined grammarware as a common starting point to allow traveling to different technological spaces (e.g., computational notebooks space, projectional editors space, or block-based space). Based on this idea, we developed three tools that allowed language engineers to generate different interfaces for their DSLs based on a grammar definition of the language. Our results show that it is possible to generate these different user interfaces and decrease the effort required to create these. However, additional research is required to improve the usability of the generated interfaces and make the generation of these interfaces more flexible so that users’ data can be used as part of the generated interfaces

SAVCBS 2003: Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems

These are the proceedings for the SAVCBS 2003 workshop. This workshop was held at ESEC/FSE 2003 in Helsinki Finland in September 2003