KI Systeme: Aktuelle Trends und Entwicklungen aus Perspektive der Technikfolgenabschätzung

Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) ist - ebenso wie damit verknüpfte Techniken wie maschinelles Lernen und Big Data - in aller Munde. Die große Dynamik und Tragweite dieser Entwicklungen zeigen sich bereits in zahlreichen Anwendungsgebieten von Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Wissenschaft. Technikfolgenabschätzung (TA) von KI hat in diesem Zusammenhang zunächst die Aufgabe, etwaige überzogene öffentliche Erwartungen und Befürchtungen in sachliche, realistische Perspektiven zu transformieren. In einem zweiten Schritt kann TA entlang begründbarer Entwicklungsziele von KI und legitimer gesellschaftlicher Wertvorstellungen Impulse für die weitere, wünschbare Gestaltung von KI geben. Wenn TA diese Orientierungsaufgabe nah am technologischen Kern wahrnimmt, findet sie dabei große gestalterische Freiräume in frühen Phasen der Technikentwicklung vor. Die damit zusammenhängenden Gedanken werden im vorliegenden Einleitungskapitel konkretisiert und auf die Beiträge zu diesem Themenschwerpunkt angewendet.Artificial intelligence (AI) is on everyone's lips - as well as the associated technologies of machine learning and big data. The enormous dynamics and consequences of these developments become already evident in numerous areas of application in business, society and science. In this context, technology assessment (TA) of AI initially has the task of transforming any excessive public expectations and fears to the factual level. In a second step, TA can provide impulses for the further, desirable design of AI based on reasonable development goals of AI and legitimate societal values. If TA conducts this orientation task close to the technological core, it can consider wide scopes of options for action in the early phases of technology development. Related thoughts are put into concrete terms in this article and will be related to the authors’ contributions to this topical focus

Actually, What Does “Ontology” Mean?

This article is a fictitious, moderated dialogue between an information scientist, a philosopher, and a psychologist. They explore the term “ontology” from the point of view of their own discipline, with the object of learning from each other. The target audience of this article are laypersons with respect to the specific disciplines – but who have a scientific background.The authors work in the fields of computer science, knowledge engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, neurobiology, philosophy, and psychology.</p

Scheduling in a generalized transaction/thread model

This thesis is about scheduling in object-oriented distributed systems that support nested transactions. Novel linguistic constructs are introduced that allow the specification of transaction and thread semantics over messages independently. This so-called generalized message scheme provides a richer set of useful programming abstractions than does the traditional nested transaction model. For this reason, the scheduling semantics of the traditional nested transaction model are extended to cover all abstractions provided by the generalized message scheme. An implementation-independent scheduling mechanism is presented that satisfies these scheduling semantics. Also, an efficient implementation of this scheduling mechanism is described. The mechanisms presented in this thesis have a number of advantages over existing approaches. Separation of transaction and thread semantics achieve more flexibility during system development and more efficiency during system execution. Typical features of object-orientation like reusability, extendibility and maintainability are supported. Programmers can fine-tune the performance of their applications without having to change the structure or semantics of the code. It is shown that the proposed mechanisms, though more general than traditional mechanisms, can be implemented as efficiently as traditional mechanisms

Global economic burden of unmet surgical need for appendicitis

Background There is a substantial gap in provision of adequate surgical care in many low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to identify the economic burden of unmet surgical need for the common condition of appendicitis. Methods Data on the incidence of appendicitis from 170 countries and two different approaches were used to estimate numbers of patients who do not receive surgery: as a fixed proportion of the total unmet surgical need per country (approach 1); and based on country income status (approach 2). Indirect costs with current levels of access and local quality, and those if quality were at the standards of high-income countries, were estimated. A human capital approach was applied, focusing on the economic burden resulting from premature death and absenteeism. Results Excess mortality was 4185 per 100 000 cases of appendicitis using approach 1 and 3448 per 100 000 using approach 2. The economic burden of continuing current levels of access and local quality was US $92 492 million using approach 1 and$73 141 million using approach 2. The economic burden of not providing surgical care to the standards of high-income countries was $95 004 million using approach 1 and$75 666 million using approach 2. The largest share of these costs resulted from premature death (97.7 per cent) and lack of access (97.0 per cent) in contrast to lack of quality. Conclusion For a comparatively non-complex emergency condition such as appendicitis, increasing access to care should be prioritized. Although improving quality of care should not be neglected, increasing provision of care at current standards could reduce societal costs substantially