Systematic methods for knowledge acquisition and expert system development

Nine cooperating rule-based systems, collectively called AUTOCREW, were designed to automate functions and decisions associated with a combat aircraft's subsystem. The organization of tasks within each system is described; performance metrics were developed to evaluate the workload of each rule base, and to assess the cooperation between the rule-bases. Each AUTOCREW subsystem is composed of several expert systems that perform specific tasks. AUTOCREW's NAVIGATOR was analyzed in detail to understand the difficulties involved in designing the system and to identify tools and methodologies that ease development. The NAVIGATOR determines optimal navigation strategies from a set of available sensors. A Navigation Sensor Management (NSM) expert system was systematically designed from Kalman filter covariance data; four ground-based, a satellite-based, and two on-board INS-aiding sensors were modeled and simulated to aid an INS. The NSM Expert was developed using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and the ID3 algorithm. Navigation strategy selection is based on an RSS position error decision metric, which is computed from the covariance data. Results show that the NSM Expert predicts position error correctly between 45 and 100 percent of the time for a specified navaid configuration and aircraft trajectory. The NSM Expert adapts to new situations, and provides reasonable estimates of hybrid performance. The systematic nature of the ANOVA/ID3 method makes it broadly applicable to expert system design when experimental or simulation data is available

Application of photosynthetic N2-fixing cyanobacteria to the CELSS program

Commercially available air lift fermentors were used to simultaneously monitor biomass production, N2-fixation, photosynthesis, respiration, and sensitivity to oxidative damage during growth under various nutritional and light regimes, to establish a data base for the integration of these organisms into a Closed Ecological Life Support System (CELSS) program. Certain cyanobacterial species have the unique ability to reduce atmospheric N2 to organic nitrogen. These organisms combine the ease of cultivation characteristics of prokaryotes with the fully developed photosynthetic apparatus of higher plants. This, along with their ability to adapt to changes in their environment by modulation of certain biochemical pathways, make them attractive candidates for incorporation into the CELSS program

Containing Contamination From Human Sources in the Surgical Suite with Fabrics and Garment Design

When compared to surgical environments of the 19th Century, today\u27s hospitals are paradigms of sterility. The bacterial counts from the air of uninhabited rooms are now virtually nil. This count begins to rise as soon as human activity begins, with levels of contamination being proportionate to the activity. Although the question remains as to the pathogenicity of these organisms, they cannot be ignored as potential infectors and may well be of particular importance in patients in whom host resistance has been diminished for whatever cause. Much has been written in the literature about the role of airborne contamination in surgical infection. Many methods have been used in an attempt to cope with the potential vectors, including ultra—violet irradiation and most recently the controversial laminar flow rooms. Researchers have found that bacteria shed from human skin constitute a major portion of those found in the air of the surgical suite. This dissertation describes a method of reducing the number of bacteria transferred to the environment from these sources. The approach uses a densely woven material fabricated into an occlusive design garment which encapsulates those areas of the body identified as the primary source of shedding of skin bacteria. The tests conducted demonstrated that an occlusive design garment, when worn properly, significantly reduces the bacterial air count. The elimination of these sources of environmental bacterial contamination may well be vital to the safe performance of many surgical procedures, and to the prevention of exogenous infection in unusually susceptible patients

Long Wavelength VCSELs and VCSEL-Based Processing of Microwave Signals

We address the challenge of decreasing the size, cost and power consumption for practical applications of next generation microwave photonics systems by using long-wavelength vertical cavity surface emitting lasers. Several demonstrations of new concepts of microwave photonics devices are presented and discussed

Проблеми легітимації земельних торгів (аукціонів) як віддзеркалення правового еігілізму в діяльності суб'єктів владних повноважень

Бєлкін Л. М. Прогблеми легітимації земельних торгів (аукціонів) як віддзеркалення правового нігілізму в діяльності суб'єктів владних повноважень / Л. М. Бєлкін // // Актуальні проблеми політики : зб. наук. пр. / редкол. : С. В. Ківалов (голов. ред.), Л. І. Кормич (заст. голов. ред.), Ю. П. Аленін [та ін.] ; МОНмолодьспорт України, НУ ОЮА. - Одеса : Фенікс, 2011. - Вип. 41. - С.268-276.In article in a historical context problem of legalization of the ground auctions (auctions), connected, on the one hand, with imperfection and discrepancy of the current legislation of Ukraine, and on the other hand, with aspiration of subjects of imperious powers to bypass a lawful order of a solution of a problem are considered. It is shown that carrying out of such auctions out of sphere of regulation by laws creates threat of revision of the concluded contracts for the purchaser of the rights to the earth

CULTURE AND THE USE OF INFORMATION UNDERSTANDING IN THE FIELD OF NATIONAL SECURITY (A CASE STUDY OF UKRAINE)

For the first time the article substantiates the informational understanding of culture on the basis of a systematic interdisciplinary approach and takes into account the information content as such and cultural content in the dialectical unity of information flows, including hostile, with further proposals for such information understanding. in the national security of Ukraine and democracies. The connection of relations in the sphere of culture, on the one hand, and in information, on the other hand, at the theoretical level, in normative regulation and in practical activity is established. Theoretically, based on the principle of evolutionism, it should be assumed that the information exchange, genetically determined, between individuals of the animal world occurs in the pre-human period. In the process of evolution and anthropogenesis, the result of cultural work is the creation, processing, assimilation, dissemination and transmission of information that has a non-biological, non-genetic nature. The objectivity of the relationship between relations in the field of culture, on the one hand, and relations in the field of information, on the other, creates appropriate relations at the level of administrative and legal regulation of these relations. This unity of administrative and legal regulation makes it possible to determine, by means of the same or similar principles, the legality of restrictions or the absence of grounds for such restrictions and on the basis of the principles of the 1950 European Convention. For the first time, from the point of view of the requirements of the European Court of Human Rights, the legality of restrictions on the introduction into the Ukrainian information space of information and cultural product of the Russian Federation as an aggressor waging an information war against Ukraine was analyzed and substantiated

Transductive Segmentation of Textured Meshes

International audienceThis paper addresses the problem of segmenting a textured mesh into objects or object classes, consistently with user-supplied seeds. We view this task as transductive learning and use the flexibility of kernel-based weights to incorporate a various number of diverse features. Our method combines a Laplacian graph regularizer that enforces spatial coherence in label propagation and an SVM classifier that ensures dissemination of the seeds characteristics. Our interactive framework allows to easily specify classes seeds with sketches drawn on the mesh and potentially refine the segmentation. We obtain qualitatively good segmentations on several architectural scenes and show the applicability of our method to outliers removing

Non-Redundant Spectral Dimensionality Reduction

Spectral dimensionality reduction algorithms are widely used in numerous domains, including for recognition, segmentation, tracking and visualization. However, despite their popularity, these algorithms suffer from a major limitation known as the "repeated Eigen-directions" phenomenon. That is, many of the embedding coordinates they produce typically capture the same direction along the data manifold. This leads to redundant and inefficient representations that do not reveal the true intrinsic dimensionality of the data. In this paper, we propose a general method for avoiding redundancy in spectral algorithms. Our approach relies on replacing the orthogonality constraints underlying those methods by unpredictability constraints. Specifically, we require that each embedding coordinate be unpredictable (in the statistical sense) from all previous ones. We prove that these constraints necessarily prevent redundancy, and provide a simple technique to incorporate them into existing methods. As we illustrate on challenging high-dimensional scenarios, our approach produces significantly more informative and compact representations, which improve visualization and classification tasks

Improving Global Knowledge Exchange for Mental Health Systems Improvement

Policymakers globally are paying increasing attention to the challenges of providing more accessible and integrated mental health care. For transformative change to take place, thought needs to be given to the structure and form of evidence-informed change strategies at all levels: individual, organizational, community and complex, large systems. Yet few frameworks specifically consider the transfer of evidence-based programs across jurisdictions at regional and national levels; most are focused on local service implementation. This paper examines how a specific analytical model developed to assess and develop Knowledge Exchange (KE) can be applied to regional and national KE initiatives.  It specifically examines the efforts of the International Knowledge Exchange Network for Mental Health (IKEN-MH), and the associated community of interest on change and improvement, to support mental health systems change at these levels. Using a theoretical model, the Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services framework (Kitson, Harvey, & McCormack, 1998, Rycroft-Malone, et al., 2002), we explore systems change efforts according to the constructs of evidence, context and facilitation. By matching some exemplars in the use of KE for mental health best practice against this model, the potential strategies of the IKEN-MH to assist transformational change emerge