Academic Panel: Can Self-Managed Systems be trusted?

Trust can be defined as to have confidence or faith in; a form of reliance or certainty based on past experience; to allow without fear; believe; hope: expect and wish; and extend credit to. The issue of trust in computing has always been a hot topic, especially notable with the proliferation of services over the Internet, which has brought the issue of trust and security right into the ordinary home. Autonomic computing brings its own complexity to this. With systems that self-manage, the internal decision making process is less transparent and the ‘intelligence’ possibly evolving and becoming less tractable. Such systems may be used from anything from environment monitoring to looking after Granny in the home and thus the issue of trust is imperative. To this end, we have organised this panel to examine some of the key aspects of trust. The first section discusses the issues of self-management when applied across organizational boundaries. The second section explores predictability in self-managed systems. The third part examines how trust is manifest in electronic service communities. The final discussion demonstrates how trust can be integrated into an autonomic system as the core intelligence with which to base adaptivity choices upon

Self-governance in Farmer-managed Irrigation Systems in Nepal

Effective governance of natural resources is a key challenge facing many developing nations. There is general agreement that without effective institutions, resources will be underprovided and overused. What is less certain, however, is what these institutions might be and who ought to provide them. Should governments take the lead in supplying institutions and organizing collective action, should this task be resolved through market forces, or should resource users of a "common pool resource" be encouraged to take the lead? This paper presents the view that it is difficult for external actors to design optimal institutions and enforce rules at low cost because solutions tend to be conditional and situation specific. Therefore, local resource users are better equipped to develop or be major participants in developing institutional solutions. Support for this idea is drawn from empirical studies of irrigation systems in Nepal. Comparisons of the performance of farmer-managed irrigation systems with that of agency-managed irrigation systems show that the former consistently out perform the latter on most performance measures. This paper offers two key insights: developing effective institutions is as important as developing physical infrastructure and local resource users may be able to offer better institutional solutions under certain conditions than government agencies when resources are local in scal

Wearables for Long Term Gait Rehabilitation of Neurological Conditions

Many people with long-term neurological and neurodegenerative conditions such as stroke, brain injury, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease suffer from an impaired walking gait pattern. Gait improvement can lead to better fluidity in walking, improved health outcomes, greater independence, and enhanced quality of life. Existing lab-based studies with wearable devices have shown that rhythmic haptic cueing can cause immediate improvements to gait features such as temporal symmetry, stride length and walking speed. However, current wearable systems are unsuitable for self-managed use, and to move this approach from out of the lab into long-term sustained usage, numerous design challenges need to be addressed. We are designing, developing, and testing a closed-loop system to provide adaptive haptic rhythmic cues for sustainable self-managed long-term use outside the lab by survivors of stroke, and other neurological conditions, in their everyday lives

Self-healing systems and virtual structures

Modern networks are large, highly complex and dynamic. Add to that the mobility of the agents comprising many of these networks. It is difficult or even impossible for such systems to be managed centrally in an efficient manner. It is imperative for such systems to attain a degree of self-management. Self-healing i.e. the capability of a system in a good state to recover to another good state in face of an attack, is desirable for such systems. In this paper, we discuss the self-healing model for dynamic reconfigurable systems. In this model, an omniscient adversary inserts or deletes nodes from a network and the algorithm responds by adding a limited number of edges in order to maintain invariants of the network. We look at some of the results in this model and argue for their applicability and further extensions of the results and the model. We also look at some of the techniques we have used in our earlier work, in particular, we look at the idea of maintaining virtual graphs mapped over the existing network and assert that this may be a useful technique to use in many problem domains

Manipulating Managed Execution Runtimes to Support Self-Healing Systems

Self-healing systems require that repair mechanisms are available to resolve problems that arise while the system executes. Managed execution environments such as the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) provide a number of application services (application isolation, security sandboxing, garbage collection and structured exception handling) which are geared primarily at making managed applications more robust. However, none of these services directly enables applications to perform repairs or consistency checks of their components. From a design and implementation standpoint, the preferred way to enable repair in a self-healing system is to use an externalized repair/adaptation architecture rather than hardwiring adaptation logic inside the system where it is harder to analyze, reuse and extend. We present a framework that allows a repair engine to dynamically attach and detach to/from a managed application while it executes essentially adding repair mechanisms as another application service provided in the execution environment

Self-recruiting species (SRS) from farmer managed aquatic systems: are they important to the livelihoods of rural communities?

Why are SRS important? The answer is to be found in this well-structured survey under: SRS as food source; SRS as additional source of cash income; Role of SRS in social capital. An analysis of the threats to SRS and the potential management options for farmer managed aquatic systems are also available in this survey along with the following definition of SRS: SRS are defined as aquatic animals that can be harvested from farmer managed aquatic systems without regular stocking. (PDF contains 4 pages

Wearable Haptic Devices for Gait Re-education by Rhythmic Haptic Cueing

This research explores the development and evaluation of wearable haptic devices for gait sensing and rhythmic haptic cueing in the context of gait re-education for people with neurological and neurodegenerative conditions. Many people with long-term neurological and neurodegenerative conditions such as Stroke, Brain Injury, Multiple Sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease suffer from impaired walking gait pattern. Gait improvement can lead to better fluidity in walking, improved health outcomes, greater independence, and enhanced quality of life. Existing lab-based studies with wearable devices have shown that rhythmic haptic cueing can cause immediate improvements to gait features such as temporal symmetry, stride length, and walking speed. However, current wearable systems are unsuitable for self-managed use for in-the-wild applications with people having such conditions. This work aims to investigate the research question of how wearable haptic devices can help in long-term gait re-education using rhythmic haptic cueing. A longitudinal pilot study has been conducted with a brain trauma survivor, providing rhythmic haptic cueing using a wearable haptic device as a therapeutic intervention for a two-week period. Preliminary results comparing pre and post-intervention gait measurements have shown improvements in walking speed, temporal asymmetry, and stride length. The pilot study has raised an array of issues that require further study. This work aims to develop and evaluate prototype systems through an iterative design process to make possible the self-managed use of such devices in-the-wild. These systems will directly provide therapeutic intervention for gait re-education, offer enhanced information for therapists, remotely monitor dosage adherence and inform treatment and prognoses over the long-term. This research will evaluate the use of technology from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, including clinicians, carers and patients. This work has the potential to impact clinical practice nationwide and worldwide in neuro-physiotherapy

No longer diseases of the wealthy : prevalence and health-seeking for self-reported chronic conditions among urban poor in Southern India

Background: The burden of chronic conditions is high in low-and middle-income countries and poses a significant challenge to already weak healthcare delivery systems in these countries. Studies investigating chronic conditions among the urban poor remain few and focused on specific chronic conditions rather than providing overall profile of chronic conditions in a given community, which is critical for planning and managing services within local health systems. We aimed to assess the prevalence and health-seeking behaviour for self-reported chronic conditions in a poor neighbourhood of a metropolitan city in India. Methods: We conducted a house-to-house survey covering 9299 households (44514 individuals) using a structured questionnaire. We relied on self-report by respondents to assess presence of any chronic conditions, including diabetes and hypertension. Multivariable logistic regression was used to analyse the prevalence and health-seeking behaviour for self-reported chronic conditions in general as well as for diabetes and hypertension in particular. The predictor variables included age, sex, income, religion, household poverty status, presence of comorbid chronic conditions, and tiers in the local health care system. Results: Overall, the prevalence of self-reported chronic conditions was 13.8% (95% CI = 13.4, 14.2) among adults, with hypertension (10%) and diabetes (6.4%) being the most commonly reported conditions. Older people and women were more likely to report chronic conditions. We found reversal of socioeconomic gradient with people living below the poverty line at significantly greater odds of reporting chronic conditions than people living above the poverty line (OR = 3, 95% CI = 1.5, 5.8). Private healthcare providers managed over 80% of patients. A majority of patients were managed at the clinic/health centre level (42.9%), followed by the referral hospital (38.9%) and the super-specialty hospital (18.2%) level. An increase in income was positively associated with the use of private facilities. However, elderly people, people below the poverty line, and those seeking care from hospitals were more likely to use government services. Conclusions: Our findings provide further evidence of the urgent need to improve care for chronic conditions for urban poor, with a preferential focus on improving service delivery in government health facilities

CONVERSION OF A LAMB PRODUCTION SYSTEM TO ORGANIC FARMING: HOW TO MANAGE, FOR WHICH RESULTS?

Two sheep flocks were managed organically (for two years from conversion onwards) under different lambing strategies (1 lambing/year vs. 3 lambings every two years). The second system was tested as there was a producer’s interest in high productivity that is a guarantee of good economic results in conventional. Reproduction, feeding, lamb production, carcass quality, health (particularly internal parasitism), economic return of the flock, grass production, and pasture biodiversity were evaluated. The lambs were bred under low therapeutic input. The economical advantage of increasing lambing frequency was not demonstrated, whereas this strategy complexified management and resulted in higher internal parasitic infection of the lambs, and finally showed a lower stability. There were difficulties in establishing a very high feed self-sufficiency in both systems, especially the more intensive system (4 points lower), due to harsh climatic conditions; following this five-year experiment, we are changing our strategy to provide nitrogen in the systems