Iterative Statistical Verification of Probabilistic Plans

Artificial intelligence seeks to create intelligent agents. An agent can be anything: an autopilot, a self-driving car, a robot, a person, or even an anti-virus system. While the current state-of-the-art may not achieve intelligence (a rather dubious thing to quantify) it certainly achieves a sense of autonomy. A key aspect of an autonomous system is its ability to maintain and guarantee safety—defined as avoiding some set of undesired outcomes. The piece of software responsible for this is called a planner, which is essentially an automated problem solver. An advantage computer planners have over humans is their ability to consider and contrast far more complex plans of action. Safety may be defined probabilistically, in which case the probability of “failure” must be below some given threshold θ. The process of deciding the level of safety a plan achieves is called verification. The plans considered in this work are too complex to analyze analytically (the process would take too much time and/or memory to complete). This motivates a statistical sampling based approach, which works by generating “sample traces” of the plan—like simulating a roll of dice. DAGification—the systematic expansion of this representation—allows the computation of the the required probabilities for safety with bounded levels of error and in a reasonable number of samples. This work presents several new DAGification schemes with a detailed discussion of their correctness

Private Policies Examined: Fair Warning or Fair Game?

Posting privacy policies has become a popular practice with businesses as they seek to shield themselves from potential liability or regulation, as well as inform users about their privacy and rights. These policies are in many ways modeled after software license statements, and are often more legalistic than user friendly. This paper examines the current practice of privacy policies as fair warning hold up from a usability perspective, and what steps can be taken to ensure that the average user can protect their privacy online

The emergence of marine recreational drone fishing: regional trends and emerging concerns

Online evidence suggests that there has been an increase in interest of using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones during land-based marine recreational fishing. In the absence of reliable monitoring programs, this study used unconventional publicly available online monitoring methodologies to estimate the growing interest, global extent, catch composition and governance of this practice. Results indicated a 357% spike in interest during 2016 primarily in New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. From an ecological perspective, many species targeted by drone fishers are vulnerable to overexploitation, while released fishes may experience heightened stress and mortality. From a social perspective, the ethics of drone fishing are being increasingly questioned by many recreational anglers and we forecast the potential for increased conflict with other beach users. In terms of governance, no resource use legislation specifically directed at recreational drone fishing was found. These findings suggest that drone fishing warrants prioritised research and management consideration.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Developing Voice-only Applications in the Absence of Speech Recognition Technology

In this paper, we describe an information access system with a voice-only interface. We outline a design process for generating guidelines for voice-only interaction in the absence of adequate speech recognition technology. Our usability studies make use of a "Wizard of Oz" scheme to replace the missing core technology

Identification and quantification of <i>Acanthamoeba</i> spp. within seawater at four coastal lagoons on the east coast of Australia

Acanthamoeba is an opportunistic free-living heterotrophic protist that is the most predominant amoeba in diverse ecological habitats. Acanthamoeba causes amoebic keratitis (AK), a painful and potentially blinding corneal infection. Major risk factors for AK have been linked to non-optimal contact lens hygiene practices and Acanthamoeba contamination of domestic and recreational water. This study investigated the incidence and seasonal variation of Acanthamoeba spp. within coastal lagoons located on the eastern coast of Australia and then examined the association between Acanthamoeba and water abiotic factors and bacterial species within the water.Water samples were collected from four intermittently closed and open lagoons (ICOLLs) (Wamberal, Terrigal, Avoca and Cockrone) every month between August 2019 to July 2020 except March and April. qPCR was used to target the Acanthamoeba 18S rRNA gene, validated by Sanger sequencing. Water abiotic factors were measured in situ using a multiprobe metre and 16S rRNA sequencing (V3-V4) was performed to characterise bacterial community composition. Network analysis was used to gauge putative associations between Acanthamoeba incidence and bacterial amplicon sequence variants (ASVs).Among 206 water samples analysed, 79 (38.3%) were Acanthamoeba positive and Acanthamoeba level was significantly higher in summer compared with winter, spring, or autumn (p = 0.008). More than 50% (23/45) water samples of Terrigal were positive for Acanthamoeba which is a highly urbanised area with extensive recreational activities while about 32% (16/49) samples were positive from Cockrone that is the least impacted lagoon by urban development. All sequenced strains belonged to the pathogenic genotype T4 clade except two which were of genotype clades T2 and T5. Water turbidity, temperature, intl1 gene concentration, and dissolved O2 were significantly associated with Acanthamoeba incidence (p &lt; 0.05). The ASVs level of cyanobacteria, Pseudomonas spp., Candidatus spp., and marine bacteria of the Actinobacteria phylum and Acanthamoeba 18S rRNA genes were positively correlated (Pearson's r ≥ 0.14). The presence of Acanthamoeba spp. in all lagoons, except Wamberal, was associated with significant differences in the composition of bacterial communities (beta diversity).The results of this study suggest that coastal lagoons, particularly those in urbanised regions with extensive water recreational activities, may pose an elevated risk to human health due to the relatively high incidence of pathogenic Acanthamoeba in the summer. These findings underscore the importance of educating the public about the rare yet devastating impact of AK on vision and quality of life, highlighting the need for collaborative efforts between public health officials and educators to promote awareness and preventive measures, especially focusing lagoons residents and travellers

Community level digital mental health interventions:A policy and practice brief

The prevalence of mental ill-health is increasing worldwide and brings adverse consequences at both the individual and societal level. Treatments and interventions for the symptoms that represent mental health conditions may target biological, behavioural and cognitive factors. Traditionally, treatments have included psychotropic medication, and/or psychological therapies which are delivered on a one to one or group basis. Both have a high economic cost, and efficacy varies. In addition, help seeking behaviour is impacted by stigma, symptom recognition &amp; understanding, and a host of factors associated with the disorders themselves, such as avoidance behaviour. The delivery of face-to-face interventions for those who are most marginalised and most at risk from mental ill-health, can also be impacted by barriers, such as knowledge of the services available and time, connectivity or travel constraints. The research presented here is co-produced with service providers, end users and academic experts across the disciplines of psychology, business, medicine, healthcare, interaction design and computer science. This briefing is based on the findings from our research programme on a community level digital mental health intervention.<br/

Tracking the decline of the world’s largest seabream against policy adjustments

For most rare marine species, abundance trends are poorly estimated. This uncertainty often translates into disagreement on management regulations, impeding conservation efforts when they are most urgently required. The world’s largest sea bream, the red steenbras Petrus rupestris, has undergone a substantial and widely acknowledged decline during the 20th century. Standardised probability of encounter over the last 3 decades was used to track red steenbras abundance trajectories in 2 regions, which together represent the species’ distribution. The results predicted a reduction in abundance of 44% in the East region and 96% in the South-West region, from what was already considered to be a collapsed population at the start of the time series. The species is now largely confined to areas in the centre of its historical abundance. Content analysis of a recreational angling magazine revealed a concurrent 50% decrease in reported size between 1984 and 2012. Shore-based observer data (2009-2010) indicate that the impact of recreational fishers on this species far exceeded that of commercial fishers at the time. Regulations in the form of progressively more stringent catch and effort restrictions appear to have been largely ineffective, too lenient, implemented too late or were unsuitable to control fishing mortality for this species. This study highlights 2 fundamental challenges in management of rare marine fish species: (1) providing decision makers with a credible measure of abundance for species whose rarity limits data availability and (2) implementing effective policy changes before the specific measures become ineffective and obsolete

Low fitness at low latitudes: Wintering in the tropics increases migratory delays and mortality rates in an Arctic breeding shorebird

Publisher's version (útgefin grein)Evolutionary theories of seasonal migration generally assume that the costs of longer migrations are balanced by benefits at the non-breeding destinations. We tested, and rejected, the null hypothesis of equal survival and timing of spring migration for High Arctic breeding sanderling Calidris alba using six and eight winter destinations between 55°N and 25°S, respectively. Annual apparent survival was considerably lower for adult birds wintering in tropical West Africa (Mauritania: 0.74 and Ghana: 0.75) than in three European sites (0.84, 0.84 and 0.87) and in subtropical Namibia (0.85). Moreover, compared with adults, second calendar-year sanderlings in the tropics, but not in Europe, often refrained from migrating north during the first possible breeding season. During northward migration, tropical-wintering sanderlings occurred at their final staging site in Iceland 5–15 days later than birds wintering further north or south. Namibia-wintering sanderlings tracked with solar geolocators only staged in West Africa during southward migration. The low annual survival, the later age of first northward migration and the later passage through Iceland during northward migration of tropical-wintering sanderlings, in addition to the skipping of this area during northward but not southward migration by Namibia-wintering sanderlings, all suggest they face issues during the late non-breeding season in West Africa. Migrating sanderlings defy long distances but may end up in winter areas with poor fitness prospects. We suggest that ecological conditions in tropical West Africa make the fuelling prior to northward departure problematic.Annual expeditions to Mauritania were organized by NIOZ, and we especially thank Maarten Brugge, Anne Dekinga, Jutta Leyrer and Bernard Spaans for their contributions. The Parc National du Banc d'Arguin granted research permits and facilitated access. J.R. and T.S.L.V. thank Aarhus University for logistical support at Zackenberg. Benoît Sittler organized expeditions to Karupelv Valley. The Farlington Ringing Group provided cannon‐net equipment. This work was supported by two grants from the Netherlands Polar Programme (851.40.072 and 866.15.207) of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific research (NWO) and from the Metawad project awarded by Waddenfonds (WF209925) to JR and TP. The measurements in Mauritania had their beginnings in the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfondsprijs to TP. JR and TP also received INTERACT grants for Transnational Access from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement No262693). JR received a generous donation from World Wildlife Fund Netherlands. JAA was supported by FCT (SFRH/BPD/91527/2012). OG and Loïc Bollache were supported by the French Polar Institute (IPEV; program ‘1036 Interactions') and TL by a Veni grant (no. 016.Veni.192.245) from NWO. The authors declare no conflict of interest. This study is based on the efforts of more than 2,000 observers reporting colour‐ringed sanderlings. We especially thank Guðmundur Örn Benediktsson, John Bowler, Ruth Croger, Anne de Potier, Benjamin Gnep, Kim Fischer, Kirsten Grond, Eileen Hughes, Hilger Lemke, Pedro Lourenço, Andy Johnson, Pierre Leon, Jelle Loonstra, Sebastien Nedellec, Afonso Rocha, Brian Rogers, Ron Summers, Jan van Dijk and Hein Verkade. Anneke Bol, Marco van der Velde and Yvonne Verkuil molecularly sexed the majority of birds, Maria Teixeira and Jérôme Moreau sexed eight individuals. Ron Porter created flags for geolocator attachment. Eldar Rakhimberdiev answered questions concerning FLightR and Allert Bijleveld, Jesse Conklin, Rosemarie Kentie, Thomas Oudman, Janne Ouwehand, Emma Penning, Eldar Rakhimberdiev, Brett Sandercock, Ron Summers, Yvonne Verkuil and two reviewers critically commented on drafts. Benjamin Gnep created Figure.Peer Reviewe