Embodiment, Cognition and the World Wide Web

Cognitive embodiment refers to the hypothesis that cognitive processes of all kinds are rooted in perception and action. Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience revealed that the motor cortex, long confined to the mere role of action programming and execution, in fact, plays a crucial role in complex cognitive abilities

US/UK Mental Models of Planning: The Relationship Between Plan Detail and Plan Quality

This paper presents the results of a research study applying a new cultural analysis method to capture commonalities and differences between US and UK mental models of operational planning. The results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way US and UK planners think about what it means to have a high quality plan. Specifically, the present study captures differences in how US and UK planners conceptualize plan quality. Explicit models of cultural differences in conceptions of plan quality are useful for establishing performance metrics for multinational planning teams. This paper discusses the prospects of enabling automatic evaluation of multinational team performance by combining recent advances in cultural modelling with enhanced ontology languages

What is a Good Plan? Cultural Variations in Expert Planners’ Concepts of Plan Quality

This article presents the results of a field research study examining commonalities and differences between American and British operational planners’ mental models of planning. We conducted Cultural Network Analysis (CNA) interviews with 14 experienced operational planners in the US and UK. Our results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way American and British expert planners conceive of a high quality plan. Our results revealed that the American planners’ model focused on specification of action to achieve synchronization, providing little autonomy at the level of execution, and included the belief that increasing contingencies reduces risk. The British planners’ model stressed the internal coherence of the plan, to support shared situational awareness and thereby flexibility at the level of execution. The British model also emphasized the belief that reducing the number of assumptions decreases risk. Overall, the American ideal plan serves a controlling function, whereas the British ideal plan supports an enabling function. Interestingly, both the US and UK would view the other’s ideal plan as riskier than their own. The implications of cultural models of plans and planning are described for establishing performance measures and designing systems to support multinational planning teams

Soil microstructure and electron microscopy

As part of the process of comparing Martian soils with terrestial soils, high resolution electron microscopy and associated techniques should be used to examine the finer soil particles, and various techniques of electron and optical microscopy should be used to examine the undisturbed structure of Martian soils. To examine the structure of fine grained portions of the soil, transmission electron microscopy may be required. A striking feature of many Martian soils is their red color. Although the present-day Martian climate appears to be cold, this color is reminiscent of terrestial tropical red clays. Their chemical contents are broadly similar

A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefitfrom human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies

Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

Discovery and mapping of the Triton seep site, Redondo Knoll: fluid flow and microbial colonization within an oxygen minimum zone

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Wagner, J. K. S., Smart, C., & German, C. R. Discovery and mapping of the Triton seep site, Redondo Knoll: fluid flow and microbial colonization within an oxygen minimum zone. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020): 108, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00108.This paper examines a deep-water (∼900 m) cold-seep discovered in a low oxygen environment ∼30 km off the California coast in 2015 during an E/V Nautilus telepresence-enabled cruise. This Triton site was initially detected from bubble flares identified via shipboard multibeam sonar and was then confirmed visually using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Hercules. High resolution mapping (to 1 cm resolution) and co-registered imaging has provided us with a comprehensive site overview – both of the geologic setting and the extent of the associated microbial colonization. The Triton site represents an active cold-seep where microorganisms can act as primary producers at the base of a chemosynthesis-driven food chain. But it is also located near the core of a local oxygen minimum zone (OMZ), averaging 100 m across the seafloor, dominate the site, while typical seep-endemic macro-fauna were noticeably absent from our co-registered photographic and high-resolution mapping surveys – especially when compared to all adjacent seep sites within the same California Borderlands region. While such absences of abundant macro-fauna could be attributable to variations in the availability of dissolved oxygen in the overlying water column this need not necessarily be the case. An alternate possibility is that the zonation in microbial activity that is readily observable at the seafloor at Triton reflects, instead, a concentric pattern of radially diminishing fluxes of reductants from the underlying seafloor. This unusual but readily accessible discovery, in close proximity to Los Angeles harbor, provides an intriguing new natural laboratory at which to examine biogeochemical and microbiological interactions associated with the functioning of cold seep ecosystems within an OMZ.Ship time was funded by NOAA – Office of Exploration and Research and the Ocean Exploration Trust. This material is based upon work supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (to JW), the Office of Naval Research (to CS), and NASA’s Astrobiology program (to CG)

Demo: A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefit from human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe aprototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies. Emphasis is put on the reuse of user generated mappings to improve the accuracy of automatically generated ones

Social Machines

The term ‘social machine’ has recently been coined to refer to Web-based systems that support a variety of socially-relevant processes. Such systems (e.g., Wikipedia, Galaxy Zoo, Facebook, and reCAPTCHA) are progressively altering the way a broad array of social activities are performed, ranging from the way we communicate and transmit knowledge, establish romantic partnerships, generate ideas, produce goods and maintain friendships. They are also poised to deliver new kinds of intelligent processing capability by virtue of their ability to integrate the complementary contributions of both the human social environment and a global nexus of distributed computational resources. This chapter provides an overview of recent research into social machines. It examines what social machines are and discusses the kinds of social machines that currently exist. It also presents a range of issues that are the focus of current research attention within the Web Science community