Beware of agents when flying aircraft: Basic principles behind a generic methodology for the evaluation and certification of advanced aviation systems

There is currently a growing interest in the aeronautical community to assess the effects of the increasing levels of automation on pilots' performance and overall safety. The first effect of automation is the change in the nature of the pilot's role on the flight deck. Pilots have become supervisors who monitor aircraft systems in usual situations and intervene only when unanticipated events occur. Instead of 'hand flying' the airplane, pilots contribute to the control of aircraft by acting as mediators, instructions given to the automation. By eliminating the need for manually controlling normal situations, such a role division has reduced the opportunities for the pilot to acquire experience and skills necessary to safely cope with abnormal events. Difficulties in assessing the state and behavior of automation arise mainly from four factors: (1) the complexity of current systems and consequence mode-related problems; (2) the intrinsic autonomy of automation which is able to fire mode transitions without explicit commands from the pilots; (3) the bad quality of feed-back from the control systems displays and interfaces to the pilots; and (4) the fact that the automation currently has no explicit representation of the current pilots' intentions and strategy. Assuming certification has among its major goals to guarantee the passengers' and pilots' safety and the airplane integrity under normal and abnormal operational conditions, the authors suggest it would be particularly fruitful to come up with a conceptual reference system providing the certification authorities both with a theoretical framework and a list of principles usable for assessing the quality of the equipment and designs under examination. This is precisely the scope of this paper. However, the authors recognize that the conceptual presented is still under development and would thus be best considered as a source of reflection for the design, evaluation and certification processes of advanced aviation technologies

Body Wall Force Sensor for Simulated Minimally Invasive Surgery: Application to Fetal Surgery

Surgical interventions are increasingly executed minimal invasively. Surgeons insert instruments through tiny incisions in the body and pivot slender instruments to treat organs or tissue below the surface. While a blessing for patients, surgeons need to pay extra attention to overcome the fulcrum effect, reduced haptic feedback and deal with lost hand-eye coordination. The mental load makes it difficult to pay sufficient attention to the forces that are exerted on the body wall. In delicate procedures such as fetal surgery, this might be problematic as irreparable damage could cause premature delivery. As a first attempt to quantify the interaction forces applied on the patient's body wall, a novel 6 degrees of freedom force sensor was developed for an ex-vivo set up. The performance of the sensor was characterised. User experiments were conducted by 3 clinicians on a set up simulating a fetal surgical intervention. During these simulated interventions, the interaction forces were recorded and analysed when a normal instrument was employed. These results were compared with a session where a flexible instrument under haptic guidance was used. The conducted experiments resulted in interesting insights in the interaction forces and stresses that develop during such difficult surgical intervention. The results also implicated that haptic guidance schemes and the use of flexible instruments rather than rigid ones could have a significant impact on the stresses that occur at the body wall

Adaptive Automation and the Third Pilot

Currently, automation does not take into consideration the cognitive and emotional state of the crew. Rather, automation provides assistance based on explicit and static task assignments, with no adaptive capabilities, even though it is capable of providing higher or lower levels of support depending on the crew state and/or complexity of the operational situation. This chapter presents a new adaptive automation concept which offers an innovative ‘team’ centred approach to solving crew awareness/workload management problems and enhancing flight safety. Partnership underpins the ‘Third Pilot’ approach. The crew (pilot flying and pilot monitoring), automation and the ‘Third Pilot’ are in charge together. Overall, partnership is proposed. This replaces existing paradigms involving dynamic changes in control function, where changes can be autonomously controlled by the system. Moreover, a new multimodal cockpit concept is advanced providing enhanced assessment of crew state/workload

Helminth-induced IL-4 expands bystander memory CD8(+) T cells for early control of viral infection

Infection with parasitic helminths can imprint the immune system to modulate bystander inflammatory processes. Bystander or virtual memory CD8+ T cells (TVM) are non-conventional T cells displaying memory properties that can be generated through responsiveness to interleukin (IL)-4. However, it is not clear if helminth-induced type 2 immunity functionally affects the TVM compartment. Here, we show that helminths expand CD44hiCD62LhiCXCR3hiCD49dlo TVM cells through direct IL-4 signaling in CD8+ T cells. Importantly, helminth-mediated conditioning of TVM cells provided enhanced control of acute respiratory infection with the murid gammaherpesvirus 4 (MuHV-4). This enhanced control of MuHV-4 infection could further be explained by an increase in antigen-specific CD8+ T cell effector responses in the lung and was directly dependent on IL-4 signaling. These results demonstrate that IL-4 during helminth infection can non-specifically condition CD8+ T cells, leading to a subsequently raised antigen-specific CD8+ T cell activation that enhances control of viral infection

A constrained SSU-rRNA phylogeny reveals the unsequenced diversity of photosynthetic Cyanobacteria (Oxyphotobacteria).

OBJECTIVE: Cyanobacteria are an ancient phylum of prokaryotes that contain the class Oxyphotobacteria. This group has been extensively studied by phylogenomics notably because it is widely accepted that Cyanobacteria were responsible for the spread of photosynthesis to the eukaryotic domain. The aim of this study was to evaluate the fraction of the oxyphotobacterial diversity for which sequenced genomes are available for genomic studies. For this, we built a phylogenomic-constrained SSU rRNA (16S) tree to pinpoint unexploited clusters of Oxyphotobacteria that should be targeted for future genome sequencing, so as to improve our understanding of Oxyphotobacteria evolution. RESULTS: We show that only a little fraction of the oxyphotobacterial diversity has been sequenced so far. Indeed 31 rRNA clusters of the 60 composing the photosynthetic Cyanobacteria have a fraction of sequenced genomes < 1%. This fraction remains low (min = 1%, median = 11.1%, IQR = 7.3%) within the remaining "sequenced" clusters that already contain some representative genomes. The "unsequenced" clusters are scattered across the whole Oxyphotobacteria tree, at the exception of very basal clades. Yet, these clades still feature some (sub)clusters without any representative genome. This last result is especially important, as these basal clades are prime candidate for plastid emergence

A Phylogenomic analysis of the origin of plastids

Cyanobacteria are a morphologically diverse phylum, with their first occurrence dating from the Precambrian. Oxygenic photosynthesis appeared in this group during the same geological period. Several publications have established, without any doubt, that plastids (both primary and complex) form a monophyletic ensemble emerging from Cyanobacteria. However, the exact position of plastids within Cyanobacteria is still uncertain, with several recent papers leading to very different hypotheses. Here we present a phylogenomic analysis of the origin of plastids. Our study takes advantage of all the available genomes and thus represents the best taxonomic sampling seen so far: 140 genomes of Cyanobacteria, 101 genomes of plastids and 27 outgroups taken in Melainabacteria and Chloroflexi. It esults in an analysis using state-of- the-art methods (e.g., orthology assessment using USEARCH and rthoMCL, phylogenetic inference using CAT and CAT-GTR models) based on more than 160 protein alignments totalizing over 20,000 unambiguously aligned amino acids. To confirm our results, we performed gene jackknife inferences and gene reconciliation analyses on the same dataset. We expect that out approach accounts for potential phylogenetic artefacts due to changes in the evolutionary process having occurred when the guest cyanobacterium became an endosymbiont and eventually a plastid. Meanwhile, we improve the phylogeny of Cyanobacteria per se, notably because of the presence of Melainabacteria in our dataset

A Phylogenomic analysis of the origin of plastids

Cyanobacteria are a morphologically diverse phylum, with their first occurrence dating from the Precambrian. Oxygenic photosynthesis appeared in this group during the same geological period. Several publications have established, without any doubt, that plastids (both primary and complex) form a monophyletic ensemble emerging from Cyanobacteria. However, the exact position of plastids within Cyanobacteria is still uncertain, with several recent papers leading to very different hypotheses. Here we present a phylogenomic analysis of the origin of plastids. Our study takes advantage of all the available genomes and thus represents the best taxonomic sampling seen so far: 140 genomes of Cyanobacteria, 101 genomes of plastids and 27 outgroups taken in Melainabacteria and Chloroflexi. It results in an analysis using state-of-the-art methods (e.g., orthology assessment using USEARCH and OrthoMCL, phylogenetic inference using CAT and CAT-GTR models) based on more than 160 protein alignments totalizing over 20,000 unambiguously aligned amino acids. To confirm our results, we performed gene jackknife inferences and gene reconciliation analyses on the same dataset. We expect that out approach accounts for potential phylogenetic artefacts due to changes in the evolutionary process having occurred when the guest cyanobacterium became an endosymbiont and eventually a plastid. Meanwhile, we improve the phylogeny of Cyanobacteria per se, notably because of the presence of Melainabacteria in our dataset