WOF: Towards Behavior Analysis and Representation of Emotions in Adaptive Systems

International audienceWith the increasing use of new technologies such as Communicating Objects (COT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) in our daily life (connected objects, mobile devices, etc.), designing Intelligent Adaptive Distributed software Systems (DIASs) has become an important research issue. Human face the problem of mastering the complexity and sophistication of such systems as those require an important cognitive load for end-users who usually are not expert. Starting from the principle that it is to technology-based systems to adapt to end-users and not the reverse, we address the issue of how to help developers design and produce such systems. We then propose WOF, an object oriented Framework founded on the concept of Wise Object (WO), a metaphor to refer to human introspection and learning capabilities.To make systems able to learn by themselves, we designed introspection, monitoring and analysis software mechanisms such that WOs can learn and construct their own knowledge. We then define a WO as a software-based entity able to learn by itself on itself (i.e. on services it is intended to provide) and also on the others (i.e. the way others use its services). A WO is seen as an avatar of either a physical or a logical object (e.g. device/software component).In this paper, we introduce the main requirements for DIASs as well as the design principles of WOF. We detail the WOF conceptual architecture and the Java implementation we built for it. To provide application developers with relevant support, we designed WOF with the minimum intrusion in the application source code. Adaptation and distribution related mechanisms defined in WOF can be inherited by application classes. In our Java implementation of WOF, object classes produced by a developer inherit the behavior of Wise Object (WO) class. An instantiated system is a Wise Object System (WOS) composed of WOs that interact through an event bus. In the first version of WOF, a WO was able to use introspection and monitoring built-in mechanisms to construct knowledge on: (a) services it is intended to render; (b) the usage done of its services. In the current version, we integrated an event-based WO simulator and a set of Analyzer classes to provide a WO with the possibility to use different analysis models and methods on its data. Our major goal is that a WO can be able to identify common usage of its services and to detect unusual usage. We use the metaphor of emotions to refer to unusual behavior (stress, surprise, etc.). We show in the paper a first experiment based on a statistical analysis method founded on stationary processes to identify usual/unusual behavior

Pharmaceutical industry interactions of psychiatric trainees from 20 European countries

BACKGROUND: Interactions between the pharmaceutical industry (PI) and psychiatrists have been under scrutiny recently, though there is little empirical evidence on the nature of the relationship and its intensity at psychiatry trainee level. We therefore studied the level of PI interactions and the underlying beliefs and attitudes in a large sample of European psychiatric trainees. METHODS: One thousand four hundred and forty-four psychiatric trainees in 20 European countries were assessed cross-sectionally, with a 62-item questionnaire. RESULTS: The total number of PI interactions in the preceding two months varied between countries, with least interactions in The Netherlands (M (Mean)=0.92, SD=1.44, range=0-12) and most in Portugal (M=19.06, SD=17.44, range=0-100). Trainees were more likely to believe that PI interactions have no impact on their own prescribing behaviour than that of other physicians (M=3.30, SD=1.26 vs. M=2.39, SD=1.06 on a 5-point Likert scale: 1 "completely disagree" to 5 "completely agree"). Assigning an educational role to the pharmaceutical industry was associated with more interactions and higher gift value (IRR (incidence rate ratio)=1.21, 95%CI=1.12-1.30 and OR=1.18, 95%CI=1.02-1.37). CONCLUSIONS: There are frequent interactions between European psychiatric trainees and the PI, with significant variation between countries. We identified several factors affecting this interaction, including attribution of an educational role to the PI. Creating alternative educational opportunities and specific training dedicated to PI interactions may therefore help to reduce the impact of the PI on psychiatric training

Gradual elements in a fuzzy set

International audienceThe notion of a fuzzy set stems from considering sets where, in the words of Zadeh, the “transition from nonmembership to membership is gradual rather than abrupt”. This paper introduces a new concept in fuzzy set theory, that of a gradual element. It embodies the idea of fuzziness only, thus contributing to the distinction between fuzziness and imprecision. A gradual element is to an element of a set what a fuzzy set is to a set. A gradual element is as precise as an element, but the former is flexible while the latter is fixed. The gradual nature of an element may express the idea that the choice of this element depends on a parameter expressing some relevance or describing some concept. Applications of this notion to fuzzy cardinality, fuzzy interval analysis, fuzzy optimization, and defuzzification principles are outlined