Transcendence over Diversity: black women in the academy

Universities, like many major public institutions have embraced the notion of ‘diversity’ virtually uncritically- it is seen as a moral ‘good in itself’. But what happens to those who come to represent ‘diversity’- the black and minority ethnic groups targeted to increase the institutions thirst for global markets and aversion to accusations of institutional racism? Drawing on existing literature which analyses the process of marginalization in higher education, this paper explores the individual costs to black and female academic staff regardless of the discourse on diversity. However despite the exclusion of staff, black and minority ethnic women are also entering higher education in relatively large numbers as students. Such ‘grassroots’ educational urgency transcends the dominant discourse on diversity and challenges presumptions inherent in top down initiatives such as ‘widening participation’. Such a collective movement from the bottom up shows the importance of understanding black female agency when unpacking the complex dynamics of gendered and racialised exclusion. Black women’s desire for education and learning makes possible a reclaiming of higher education from creeping instrumentalism and reinstates it as a radical site of resistance and refutation

Embedded command and control infrastructures for Intelligent Autonomous Systems

The issue of Command and Control (C2) is generally associated with the management infrastructure of large scale systems for warfare, public utilities and public transportation, and is concerned with ensuring that the distributed human elements of command and control can be fully integrated into a coherent, total system. Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IASs) are a class of complex systems that perform tasks autonomously in uncertain, dynamic environments, the management of which can be viewed from the perspective of embedded command and control systems. This thesis establishes a vision for the modular construction of intelligent autonomous embedded C2 systems, which defines a complex integration problem characterised by distributed intelligence, world knowledge and control, concurrent processing on heterogeneous platforms, and real-time performance requirements. It concludes that by adopting an appropriate systems infrastructure model, based on Object Technology, it is possible to view the construction of embedded C2 systems as the integration of a temporally assembled collection of reusable components. To support this metaphor it is necessary to construct a common reference model, or standards framework, for the representation and specification of modular C2 systems. This framework must support the coherent long term development and evolution in system capability, ensuring that systems are extensible, robust and perform correctly. In this research, which draws together the themes of other published research in object oriented systems and robotics, classical AI models for intelligent systems architectures are used to specify the overall system structure, with open systems technologies supporting the interoperation of elements within the architecture. All elements of this system are modelled in terms of objects, with well defined, implementation independent interfaces. This approach enables the system to be specified in terms of an object model, and the development process to be framed in terms of object technology, defining a new approach to IAS development. The implementation of an On-board Command and Control System for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is used to validate these concepts. The further application of emergent industrial standards in distributed object oriented systems means that this kind of component-based integration is scaleable, providing a near-term solution to generic command and control problems, including Computer Integrated Manufacturing and large scale autonomous systems, where individual autonomous systems, such as robots, form elements of a complete, total intelligent system, for application to areas such as fully automated factories and cooperating intelligent autonomous vehicles for construction sites

Command and Control Infrastructures: The Need for Open Systems Solutions

The issue of Command, Control and Communications is generally associated with the management infrastructure of large scale military systems. However, in the application of Command and Control principles to the synthesis and integration of complex robotic systems and other large scale distributed systems, a need emerges for a development approach emphasising interoperability, reusability and scalability. This approach represents an open systems solution to complex command and control problems, system development being focused on reusable component integration. A prototype Command and Control Reference Model is introduced, that supports component oriented construction of robotic systems infrastructures, and which is scalable to larger, high capital value command and control systems

Command and Control Infrastructures: The Need for Open Systems

The issue of Command, Control and Communications (C3) is generally associated with the management infrastructure of large scale military systems. However, in the application of Command and Control principles to the synthesis and integration of complex robotic systems and other large scale distributed systems, a need emerges for a development approach emphasising interoperability, reusability and scaleability. This approach represents an open systems solution to complex command and control problems, system development being focused on reusable component integration. A prototype Command and Control Reference Model is introduced, that supports component oriented construction of robotic systems infrastructures, and which is scalable to larger high capital value command and control systems

Intelligent autonomous plant for the construction industry

This paper argues that the future of intelligent autonomous systems, such as robotic vehicles in any complex nonbenign environment (such as construction), is as much dependent upon adoption of the appropriate management infrastructure, systems architectures and standards that demonstrate quality, as upon the specific technological development. An analysis and design paradigm supporting modularity and interoperability based upon object orientation is presented, that offers the potential for a product culture in robotics based on inherent quality features including robustness, correctness, compatibility, reusability and extensibility

Fuzzy and Temporal Representations for Task Level Mission Management of IAV's Using Object Orientation.

Task Level Mission Management forms an integral part of the command and control system for truly Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs). It is responsible for the overall coordination of robot subsystem activities, directing them to achieve some set of mission goals. The Task Level Mission Management processes for an autonomous land vehicle have been implemented in C++ taking advantage of object oriented techniques. The representations and structure of the software are described and the temporal and fuzzy extensions to the implemented classical planning component are discussed

Intelligent Self-Organising Controllers for Autonomous Guided Vehicles: Comparative Aspects of Fuzzy Logic and Neural Nets

Of central importance to autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) are the adaptive or intelligent tasks of:- (i) Multi-sensor data fusion or integration of sensory data for vehicle location, to represent or to model its internal states and its environment. (ii) Planning and navigation. (iii) Motion control. This paper addresses the last issue, motion controls that are vehicle dependent. Classical motion control is based upon deriving a set of vehicle model equations, and synthesising a set of feedback control laws. Unfortunately such an approach is limited only to constant velocity and environmental conditions and for small perturbations. Yet humans are able to generate driving algorithms with little physical insight, but with a great deal of experimental knowledge, this is flexible, robust, sufficiently precise for proper functioning, and intelligent, in that they adapt to differing environmental and payload conditions. This paper will review two approaches to AGV intelligent control adopted at Southampton, - (i) Self-organising fuzzy logic controllers (ii) associative memory type neural nets. Both approaches have the potential to provide real time adaptive convergent, robust decision strategies with little apriori knowledge. There are many similarities between the two approaches: (i) a transformed input space is required in both cases, (ii) Initial, approximate plant models are required, (iii) both adopt local weight/rule adaptation schemes - we also show an equivalence of learning through LMS based adaptation rules based upon B-splines, (v) both methods are extremely robust and fault tolerant

Implementing Task Level Mission Management for Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Mission Management forms an integral part of the command and control system for truly intelligent autonomous vehicles. It is responsible for overall coordination of robot subsystem activities, directing them to achieve some optimal set of goals. The Mission Management system for an autonomous land vehicle is implemented in C++ using clausal form logic and temporal reasoning. The representations used and the structure are described, emphasising the separation in software of the planning representations from their implementation in C++ classes