An interactive, generative Punch and Judy show using institutions, ASP and emotional agents

Using Punch and Judy as a story domain, we describe an interactive puppet show, where the flow and content of the story can be influenced by the actions of the audience. As the puppet show is acted out, the audience reacts to events by cheering or booing the characters. This affects the agents’ emotional state, potentially causing them to change their actions, altering the course of the narrative. An institutional normative model is used to constrain the narrative so that it remains consistent with the Punch and Judy canon. Through this vignette of a socio-technical system (STS), comprising human and software actors, an institutional model – derived from narrative theory – and (simplistic) technological interaction artifacts, we begin to be able to explore some of the issues that can arise in STS through the prism of the World-Institution-Technology (WIT) model

In-hospital cardiac arrests: Effect of amended Australian Resuscitation Council 2006 guidelines

Objective: To evaluate cardiac arrest outcomes following the introduction of the Australian Resuscitation Council (ARC) 2006 amended guidelines for basic and advanced life support. Methods: A retrospective study of all consecutive cardiac arrests during a 3-year phase pre-implementation (2004–06) and a 3-year phase post-implementation (2007–09) of the ARC 2006 guidelines was conducted at a tertiary referral hospital in Brisbane, Australia. Results: Over the 6-year study phase 690 cardiac arrests were reported. Resuscitation was attempted in 248 patients pre-implementation and 271 patients post-implementation of the ARC 2006 guidelines. After adjusting for significant prognostic factors we found no significant change in return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) (odds ratio 1.21, 95% confidence interval 0.80–1.85, P = 0.37) or survival to discharge (odds ratio 1.49, 95% confidence interval 0.94–2.37, P = 0.09) after the implementation of the ARC 2006 guidelines. Factors that remained significant in the final model for both outcomes included having an initial shockable rhythm, a shorter length of time from collapse to arrival of cardiac arrest team, location of the patient in a critical-care area, shorter length of resuscitation and a day-time arrest (0700–2259 hours). In addition the arrest being witnessed was significant for ROSC and younger age was significant for survival to discharge. Conclusions: There are multiple factors that influence clinical outcomes following an in-hospital cardiac arrest and further research to refine these significant variables will assist in the future management of cardiac arrests. What is known about this topic?: The evaluation of outcomes from in-hospital cardiac arrests focuses on immediate survival expressed as ROSC and survival to hospital discharge. These clinical outcomes have not improved substantially over the last two decades. What does this paper add?: This paper identifies the factors that are related to ROSC and survival to discharge following the implementation of the ARC 2006 guidelines, which included a refocus on providing quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation with minimal interruptions. What are the implications for practitioners?: Given that multiple factors can influence clinical outcomes following an in-hospital cardiac arrest, focusing on maximising a range of factors surrounding cardiopulmonary resuscitation is essential to improve outcomes

LOG-IDEAH:ASP for architectonic asset preservation

To preserve our cultural heritage, it is important to preserve our architectonic assets, comprising buildings, their decorations and the spaces they encompass. In some geographical areas, occasional natural disasters, specifically earthquakes, damage these cultural assets. Perpetuate is a European Union funded project aimed at establishing a methodology for the classification of the damage to these buildings, expressed as "collapse mechanisms". Structural engineering research has identified 17 different collapse mechanisms for masonry buildings damaged by earthquakes. Following established structural engineering practice, paper-based decisions trees have been specified to encode the recognition process for each of the various collapse mechanisms. In this paper, we report on how answer set programming has been applied to the construction of a machineprocessable representation of these collapse mechanisms as an alternative for these decision-trees and their subsequent verification and application to building records from L'Aquila, Algiers and Rhodes. As a result, we advocate that structural engineers do not require the time-consuming and error-prone method of decisions trees, but can instead specify the properties of collapse mechanisms directly as an answer set program. © Viviana Novelli, Marina De Vos, Julian Padget, and Dina D'Ayala

ASP for architectonic asset preservation

To preserve our cultural heritage, it is important to preserve our architectonic assets, comprising buildings, their decorations and the spaces they encompass. In some geographical areas, occasional natural disasters, specifically earthquakes, damage these cultural assets. Perpetuate is a European Union funded project aimed at establishing a methodology for the classification of the damage to these buildings, expressed as "collapse mechanisms". Structural engineering research has identified 17 different collapse mechanisms for masonry buildings damaged by earthquakes. Following established structural engineering practice, paper-based decisions trees have been specified to encode the recognition process for each of the various collapse mechanisms. In this paper, we report on how answer set programming has been applied to the construction of a machine-processable representation of these collapse mechanisms as an alternative for these decision-trees and their subsequent verification and application to building records from L'Aquila, Algiers and Rhodes. As a result, we advocate that structural engineers do not require the time-consuming and error-prone method of decisions trees, but can instead specify the properties of collapse mechanisms directly as an answer set program

Social-aware routing for wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMN), most routing algorithms apply broadcasting at some stage of the path discovery process. They thereby consume large chunks of the network throughput. Intelligent rebroadcast algorithms aim to reduce this overhead by calculating the usefulness of a rebroadcast and the likelihood of collisions. Unfortunately, this introduces latency and breaks the rebroadcast chain, resulting in reduced reachability. In this paper we present our Social-aware Routing Protocol with Parallel Collision Guidance Broadcasting for WMN (SCG). It reduces rebroadcasting without a loss in reachability and without a significant increase in latency. Our claims are validated through simulations comparing our algorithm with existing protocols