Ethical regulations on robotics in Europe

There are only a few ethical regulations that deal explicitly with robots, in contrast to a vast number of regulations, which may be applied. We will focus on ethical issues with regard to “responsibility and autonomous robots”, “machines as a replacement for humans”, and “tele-presence”. Furthermore we will examine examples from special fields of application (medicine and healthcare, armed forces, and entertainment). We do not claim to present a complete list of ethical issue nor of regulations in the field of robotics, but we will demonstrate that there are legal challenges with regard to these issues.

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Dialogue in context, towards a referential approach in collective learning

In this article, we present research in the making of a collective work environment within the framework of a distance education course. We base our theoretical and methodological standpoints on examples of dialogical discourses recorded within the framework of this CSCL system called Symba. In fact, the results of previous research lead us to rethink our vision of the study of collaborative moments between participants in a computer-supported human learning environment that proposes several communication tools. Redefining the methodological process aiming at finding and understanding these rich learning moments is also necessary. We intend to describe “socio-technical” instances during which these collaboration phases appear. More generally speaking, our aim is to draw up both new theoretical and methodological perspectives that would be reusable in CSCL environments; in view of the nature of these two perspectives, and the diversity of the domain knowledge (sociology, cognitivism, linguistics, philosophy, statistics, etc.) brought to bear in the study of the environment in question, our approach constitutes a trans-disciplinary reassessment of the uses of the communication tools—and the study thereof—proposed.

Imagining a non-biological machine as a legal person

As non-biological machines come to be designed in ways which exhibit characteristics comparable to human mental states, the manner in which the law treats these entities will become increasingly important both to designers and to society at large. The direct question will become whether, given certain attributes, a non-biological machine could ever be viewed as a “legal person.” In order to begin to understand the ramifications of this question, this paper starts by exploring the distinction between the related concepts of “human,” “person,” and “property.” Once it is understood that person in the legal sense can apply to a non-biological entity such as a corporation, the inquiry then goes on to examine the folk psychology view of intentionality and the concept of autonomy. The conclusion reached is that these two attributes can support the view that a non-biological machine, at least in theory, can be viewed as a legal person.

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Managing Next Generation Networks and Services: A Report on APNOMS 2007

This article presents a report on APNOMS 2007, which was held October 10–12, 2007 in Sapporo, Japan. The theme of APNOMS 2007 was “Managing the Next Generation Networks and Services.”

Movie story intensity representation through audiovisual tempo analysis

A comprehensive method for movie abstraction is developed in this research for applications in fast movie content exploring, indexing, browsing, and skimming, Most current approaches rely heavily on specific domain knowledge or models to identify and extract the determining scenes of a given movie; however, the segments extracted are often isolated, presenting a fragmented outline of the original. Our proposed method fuses simple audiovisual features, and measures the “tempos” of a movie directly, especially that of long-term ones. These tempos form a curve that catches the high-level semantics of a movie, indicating the events of interests named as “story intensity.” Through tempo, the proposed algorithm provides a natural way that segments a movie into manageable parts. As our experimental results demonstrate, the condensed skimming clips efficiently extract semantic content that contains the most interesting and informative parts of the original movie.

Video scene retrieval with interactive genetic algorithm

This paper proposes a video scene retrieval algorithm based on emotion. First, abrupt/gradual shot boundaries are detected in the video clip of representing a specific story. Then, five video features such as “average color histogram,” “average brightness,” “average edge histogram,” “average shot duration,” and “gradual change rate” are extracted from each of the videos, and mapping through an interactive genetic algorithm is conducted between these features and the emotional space that a user has in mind. After the proposed algorithm selects the videos that contain the corresponding emotion from the initial population of videos, the feature vectors from them are regarded as chromosomes, and a genetic crossover is applied to those feature vectors. Next, new chromosomes after crossover and feature vectors in the database videos are compared based on a similarity function to obtain the most similar videos as solutions of the next generation. By iterating this process, a new population of videos that a user has in mind are retrieved. In order to show the validity of the proposed method, six example categories of “action,” “excitement,” “suspense,” “quietness,” “relaxation,” and “happiness” are used as emotions for experiments. This method of retrieval shows 70% of effectiveness on the average over 300 commercial videos.

The sudden experience of the computer

The experience of computer use can be productively articulated with concepts developed in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. Building on the insights of classical phenomenologists, Ihde has advanced a sophisticated view of the ways humans relate to technology. I review and expand on his notions of “technological mediation,” “embodiment,” and “multistability,” and apply them to the experience of computer interface. In particular, I explore the experience of using a computer that fails to work properly. A revealing example is the experience of a user who suddenly and unexpectedly encounters a slowly-loading webpage while using the Internet. This phenomenological framework provides an account of the ways a suddenly failing technology changes our relationships to the device, to the world, and to ourselves, and it also suggests how this experience can be usefully reconceptualized.

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The Method of Levels of Abstraction

The use of “levels of abstraction” in philosophical analysis (levelism) has recently come under attack. In this paper, I argue that a refined version of epistemological levelism should be retained as a fundamental method, called the method of levels of abstraction. After a brief introduction, in section “Some Definitions and Preliminary Examples” the nature and applicability of the epistemological method of levels of abstraction is clarified. In section “A Classic Application of the Method of Abstraction”, the philosophical fruitfulness of the new method is shown by using Kant’s classic discussion of the “antinomies of pure reason” as an example. In section “The Philosophy of the Method of Abstraction”, the method is further specified and supported by distinguishing it from three other forms of “levelism”: (i) levels of organisation; (ii) levels of explanation and (iii) conceptual schemes. In that context, the problems of relativism and antirealism are also briefly addressed. The conclusion discusses some of the work that lies ahead, two potential limitations of the method and some results that have already been obtained by applying the method to some long-standing philosophical problems.

Retrieving information on the World Wide Web: effects of domain specific knowledge

In this study, we intend to examine information retrieval behaviors from a psychological point of view using a search engine on the World Wide Web (WWW). We investigated information retrieving behaviors in detail based on both the recorded data of retrievers’ web browsing actions and their thinking processes by the “think aloud” method. We focused on selected keywords for retrieving and compared them between retrievers who had enough knowledge about their task and those who did not. Our goal was to learn about the literacy needed for finding required information efficiently on the WWW.

Mobile phone-based mixed reality: the Snap2Play game

The ubiquity of camera phones provides a convenient platform to develop immersive mixed-reality games. In this paper we introduce such a game which is loosely based on the popular card game “Memory”, where players are asked to match a pair of identical cards among a set of overturned cards by revealing only two cards at a time. In our game, the players are asked to match a “digital card”, which corresponds to a scene in a virtual world, to a “physical card”, which is an image of a scene in the real world. The objective is to convey a mixed-reality sensation. Cards are matched with a scene identification engine which consists of multiple classifiers trained on previously collected images. We present our comprehensive overall game design, as well as implementation details and results. We also describe how we constructed our scene identification engine and its performance. Finally, we present an analysis of player surveys to gauge the potential market acceptance.

Defining the grid: a snapshot on the current view

The term “Grid” was introduced in early 1998 with the launch of the book “The Grid. Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure”. Since that time many technological changes have occurred in both hardware and software. One of the most important ones seems to be the wide acceptance of Web services. Although the basic Grid idea has not changed much in the last decade, many people have different ideas about what a Grid really is. In the following article we report on a survey where we invited many people in the field of Grid computing to give us their current understanding.

Multirelational classification: a multiple view approach

Multirelational classification aims at discovering useful patterns across multiple inter-connected tables (relations) in a relational database. Many traditional learning techniques, however, assume a single table or a flat file as input (the so-called propositional algorithms). Existing multirelational classification approaches either “upgrade” mature propositional learning methods to deal with relational presentation or extensively “flatten” multiple tables into a single flat file, which is then solved by propositional algorithms. This article reports a multiple view strategy—where neither “upgrading” nor “flattening” is required—for mining in relational databases. Our approach learns from multiple views (feature set) of a relational databases, and then integrates the information acquired by individual view learners to construct a final model. Our empirical studies show that the method compares well in comparison with the classifiers induced by the majority of multirelational mining systems, in terms of accuracy obtained and running time needed. The paper explores the implications of this finding for multirelational research and applications. In addition, the method has practical significance: it is appropriate for directly mining many real-world databases.

Multilingual language resources and interoperability

This article introduces the topic of “Multilingual language resources and interoperability”. We start with a taxonomy and parameters for classifying language resources. Later we provide examples and issues of interoperatability, and resource architectures to solve such issues. Finally we discuss aspects of linguistic formalisms and interoperability.

Integrating human factors in freight interoperability safety design

According to European Directives, it would be necessary to develop freight interoperability, defined as crossing borders from one country to another without changing either locomotive or driving crew. This project is a challenge for the railway companies that control infrastructures and traffic. The interoperability implementation implies changes in work techniques, regulation and organisation, that may affect the reliability of the systems involved, giving rise to risky situations in terms of production, regularity and safety. The purpose of this paper is to describe a proactive ergonomic approach used for the integration of human factors and safety at the early stages of design for future interoperable situations. Ergonomic analysis has been oriented within a socio-technical frame where a workstation is viewed in its technical and organisational dimensions. Three methods have been used: observations in marshalling yards and driving cabin in other countries, staff interviews and analyses of incidents and hazards. Results formed the basis for developing “a methodological guide for integrating human factors”. In a more general way, some principles for an ecological design of a safe organisational system are provided in the last section of this paper.

Efficient PAC Learning for Episodic Tasks with Acyclic State Spaces

This paper considers the problem of computing an optimal policy for a Markov decision process, under lack of complete a priori knowledge of (1) the branching probability distributions determining the evolution of the process state upon the execution of the different actions, and (2) the probability distributions characterizing the immediate rewards returned by the environment as a result of the execution of these actions at different states of the process. In addition, it is assumed that the underlying process evolves in a repetitive, episodic manner, with each episode starting from a well-defined initial state and evolving over an acyclic state space. A novel efficient algorithm for this problem is proposed, and its convergence properties and computational complexity are rigorously characterized in the formal framework of computational learning theory. Furthermore, in the process of deriving the aforementioned results, the presented work generalizes Bechhofer’s “indifference-zone” approach for the ranking & selection problem, that arises in statistical inference theory, so that it applies to populations with bounded general distributions.

History and Status of Operations Support Systems

Operations Support Systems (OSS) have been a critical component of any telecommunications company’s business plan. In this paper we examine the history of OSS from the perspectives of maturing support for problem domains, enabling technologies, and system integration. Finally, we will look at the problems posed by the coming “everything over IP” networks, the changing communications provider landscape and the impact on operations support systems.

The concept and theory of material flow

This paper, for the first time, presents seven main theories under the Material Flow (MF) Theory, namely “Material flow theory”, “Comprehensive MF theory”, “MF element theory”, “MF nature theory”, “MF science and technology theory”, “MF engineering theory” and “MF industry theory”. The paper points out that the MF is the collective term for the flow of macroscopic goods and that of microcosmic substances. The material flow is not only an economic phenomenon, but also social and natural ones. There is not only economic MF, but also social and natural ones. The economic MF is the core for the MF, and the social and natural MF is the basis for the MF; no matter whether in nature, society or economic circles, the MF comprises of five basic elements: Material, Flow, Owner, Region and Time, among which Material is the core one; the MF is divided into intrinsic and extrinsic ones by nature. Its intrinsic natures include Material, Flow, Owner, Region and Time; its extrinsic natures include Party, Service, Management, Technology and Economy. The MF science and technology is a scientific and technological field with very strong comprehensibility, dealing with subjects including natural science, engineering technology and science, and human and social studies; the MF engineering is a syntheses comprising of six MF elements or six MF forces. The MF’s hard science and technology and its soft science and technology can be applied to national economy in the most efficient way, with the fundamental purpose to benefit the mankind; the MF is not only an industry, but also a backbone industry, and even a backbone industry group. The paper provides some insights into future enterprise integration in a global supply chain environment.

Hack-proof synchronization protocol for multi-player online games

Synchronization protocols based on “dead-reckoning” are vulnerable to a popular type of cheat called speed-hack. A speed-hack helps a cheater to gain unfair advantages by essentially speeding up the actions of the avatar controlled by the cheater, so that the cheater can move, explore and gather items faster than honest players. This paper presents a novel version of a dead-reckoning protocol that is invulnerable to speed-hacks. Existing games based on dead-reckoning can easily be modified to use this hack-proof dead-reckoning protocol and how the protocol works on both client-server architecture and peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture will be demonstrated in this paper.

An Algorithm for Timing Verification of Systems Constrained by Min–max Inequalities

To determine the maximum separation between events for nonrepetitive systems with max and linear constraints, there are the “iterative tightening from above” (ITA) approach and the “iterative tightening from below” (ITB) approach. Since such systems can be formulated as systems constrained by min–max inequalities, this paper gives an algorithm named MMIMaxSep for solving min–max inequalities. The algorithm is a generalization and a mathematically elegant reformulation of Yen et al.’s MaxSeparation algorithm which uses the ITB approach. Our numerical experiments indicate that MMIMaxSep is very efficient. Moreover, MMIMaxSep has a unique advantage of being able to directly handle tree-represented min–max functions, and its complexity is closely related to the complexity of computing cycle time of min–max functions.