A framework for controlling model-based diagnosis systems with multiple actions

In recent years reasoning about structure and function of physical systems for the purpose of diagnosis has seen a dramatic increase in activities. New exciting results concerning modelling issues, diagnostic inference patterns and inferential power have emerged. A state of the art diagnosis agent now has a considerable toolset at hand. A main obstacle for building large diagnosis systems, however, remains. How can we controlwhen to usewhich inference pattern or representation? We argue that the actions available to a diagnosis agent can be understood in terms of change ofworking hypotheses. The control problem then becomes a belief revision problem: when to adopt or drop beliefs. Our approach proceeds in two steps. First, we adopt the principle of informational economy from Gärdenfors, Knowledge in Flux (MIT Press, 1988) as kind of a law of inertia for diagnostic processes, that helps us identify candidates for revised belief states. In a second step we employ specificdiagnostic knowledge to actually choose the next belief state. We demonstrate the use of our concepts on an example in the domain of ballast tank systems as e.g. used in offshore plants.     

Typical models: minimising false beliefs

A knowledge system S describing a part of real-world does, in general, not contain complete information. Reasoning with incomplete information is prone to errors since any belief derived from S may be false in the present state of the world. A false belief may suggest wrong decisions and lead to harmful actions. So, an important goal is to make false beliefs as unlikely as possible. This work introduces the notions of typical atoms and typical models, and shows that reasoning with typical models minimises the expected number of false beliefs over all ways of using incomplete information. Various properties of typical models are studied, in particular, correctness and stability of beliefs suggested by typical models, and their connection to oblivious reasoning.     

Iterated belief change in the situation calculus

John McCarthy's situation calculus has left an enduring mark on artificial intelligence research. This simple yet elegant formalism for modelling and reasoning about dynamic systems is still in common use more than forty years since it was first proposed. The ability to reason about action and change has long been considered a necessary component for any intelligent system. The situation calculus and its numerous extensions as well as the many competing proposals that it has inspired deal with this problem to some extent. In this paper, we offer a new approach to belief change associated with performing actions that addresses some of the shortcomings of these approaches. In particular, our approach is based on a well-developed theory of action in the situation calculus extended to deal with belief. Moreover, by augmenting this approach with a notion of plausibility over situations, our account handles nested belief, belief introspection, mistaken belief, and handles belief revision and belief update together with iterated belief change.     

普适计算及其定位感知系统

普适计算的目的是为了使计算机更好地为人类服务，提高人们的生活质量。普适计算中的定位感知系统是普适计算研究中的核心部分之一，如何确定室内用户的动态位置信息，如何主动向用户提供各种所需的信息，这些都是其研究话题。给出了一种自行设计的普适计算室内定位感知系统的最小功能模型。     

Editorial: the evolving partnership between cognitive science and HCI

The theme of this special issue is “The Role of Cognitive Science in Human-Computer Interaction” (HCI). A generally accepted definition states that the main goal of HCI is to advance the design, implementation, and use of interactive computing systems by human beings (ACM, SIGCHI, 1992). Since the current primary use of computers is as tools for acting on and for observing the (information) world, the role of cognitive science-interpreted broadly as an endeavour to understand intelligent behaviour-is, consequently, tied to the questions:• how do our interactions with computing systems affect our representations of the objects that we manipulate?• how does interactions design influence our senses and our actions?• how does using computers to perform tasks transforms our notions of the relationships that exist in the world around us?     

文化融合语境下的视觉形态设计研究

在文化意识日益流失的今天,作为反映某种意图、目的的设计来说,隐形的体现文化氛围是至关重要的。我们身边的设计,包括产品、包装、字体、海报等等,人们往往注意其表现形式和表现语言,对其传承的文化意蕴却视而不见。看起来微不足道的设计其实是某种文化形态的体现,包含了人类智慧和某个民族的文化精神。     

Exploring the Belief Systems of Software Development Professionals

It is commonly accepted that an individual's beliefs and actions are based on his or her assessment and perceptions of the world. In order to determine what practices an individual is likely to follow at any given time, it is necessary to understand the individual's behavioral intention in a given circumstance. From an Information Technology perspective, a software development professional's belief systems are potentially the basis for the adoption and implementation of new and innovative work practices and processes. In this article, we explore the belief systems of software development professionals in order to understand the beliefs underlying intention and practice, and we seek answers about how they adopt or reject new and innovative software development processes and practices. The results point out a strong influence of past experiences, personality types, and repeated behavior on current software development processes and practices in industrial settings.     

Supporting Developmental Decision Processes: the Evolution of an OR Approach

A case is developed for recognizing the distinctive contribution which OR scientists can make to the understanding and support of processes of developmental decision making, conceived as processes in which people work progressively (and often collaboratively) to address ever-changing clusters of decisions which are richly connected and non-recurrent. The argument is illustrated through reference to the evolution over the last three decades of the strategic choice approach to planning under uncertainty, as one example of an OR methodology that can be located within an emergent generic field of developmental decision science. It is argued that this perspective can complement that of systems theory in ways which are important not only for the future of OR, but also for the future development of human capacities to address daunting societal problems.     

National security,individual privacy and public access to government-held information: the need for changing perspectives in a global environment

Governments are often the largest collectors of data within their jurisdiction, and often that data collection and storage is financially supported with public taxes. How governments manage and make available that information when requested by non-government parties varies by country. As the data-sharing world finds new and multi-platform ways to network, variations in legal access to government-held information create both opportunities and challenges. In this article, recent research is reviewed on problems faced by legal systems trying to navigate conflicts between individual privacy, public access and national state security.     

设计模式及其在PACS中的应用

面向对象建模是困难的，虽然目前已提出了不少方法，但还存在不尽人意之处，设计模式是面向对象建模的一种辅助设计手段。它总结了面向对象设计的宝贵经验，使得在遇到相似场景时可以直接套用，把设计模式应用于PACS系统的对象建模中取得了较好的效果。     

设计中的和谐之美

从审美的角度研究和探讨人类行为,日用器物以及生产生活环境,寻找规律性的东西,就是设计美学问题。设计以一种更宽泛、更深入的美学形式渗透到我们的生活当中,它包括了物质文化、精神文化和艺术文化等诸方面的综合审美形式。和谐是美学的最高境界。和谐化设计是产品的发展趋势之一,其目的在于处理人、产品和环境要素的相互关系时,使各个因素在动态的发展中求得平衡,并将具有差异性、甚至矛盾性的因素互补融合,建构成一个有机的、谐调的整体。     

Forgetting techniques for stream-based matrix factorization in recommender systems

Forgetting is often considered a malfunction of intelligent agents; however, in a changing world forgetting has an essential advantage. It provides means of adaptation to changes by removing effects of obsolete (not necessarily old) information from models. This also applies to intelligent systems, such as recommender systems, which learn users’ preferences and predict future items of interest. In this work, we present unsupervised forgetting techniques that make recommender systems adapt to changes of users’ preferences over time. We propose eleven techniques that select obsolete information and three algorithms that enforce the forgetting in different ways. In our evaluation on real-world datasets, we show that forgetting obsolete information significantly improves predictive power of recommender systems.     

Some pitfalls in the promises of automated and autonomous vehicles

Differing forms of self-operating transportation are already among us and some have been in operation now for an extended period of time. From elevators and escalators to airport transit trams, we already use many fully automatic systems. Now such technologies are very publicly and prominently penetrating into the on-road environment of everyday personal vehicle usage. The present article raises and addresses a number of the specific and more general human factors/ergonomic issues associated with such an evolutionary step. One particular concern is that of identified responsibility when such systems fail to perform flawlessly. The ways in which this (r)evolution will impact the social and cultural fabric of affected societies is also considered. Further observations as to the vector of the future characteristics of these vehicular forms and how they and other autonomous systems will affect our world are examined. The very future of the human experience depends upon the ways in which such systems are designed, enacted and integrated into everyday life and these are fundamentally ergonomic endeavours.Practitioner’s Summary: The prominence of practitioners working on advanced human-machine systems will increase with public concerns surrounding self-driving vehicles. Driverless cars are not only a technological step but they will also exert widespread effects throughout society. Practitioners should prepare for these broad socio-technical challenges in an evolving, autonomous world.     

Coordinated atomic actions as a technique for implementing distributed gamma computation

The intentions of this paper are to discuss Coordinated Atomic (CA) actions and to demonstrate how they can be used in a very new application area. We apply this concept to designing a particular case of the Gamma computational paradigm, i.e. distributed Gamma computation. Within our approach, each Gamma reaction is an action. We demonstrate how Gamma computation can be effectively implemented in conventional distributed message passing systems using CA actions. The paper discusses our design and the benefits we gain by applying CA actions: allowing as much concurrency as possible, together with guaranteeing data consistency, a better system structuring, clear separation of different system levels, and additional flexibility. This experimental design and the Java implementation allow us to conclude that CA actions are a very powerful paradigm which can be used for implementing many complex systems and, in particular, software to support some parallel computational models and paradigms.     

Quality in the present and future decades

Global marketplaces are rapidly expanding, which affects our organisational, human and managerial demands. Quality is the key to competitiveness and has become a fundamental way of managing any business anywhere for market growth and profitability. In this rapidly changing world, we must make accurate judgements and take prompt actions. At the same time, it is a fundamental requirement for us to recognise that there are certain important, underlying constraints that remain essentially the same. Quality is of a more basic and intrinsic character than cost and productivity, and it is closely related with the attractiveness of products and services and our positive satisfaction.     

Wearables and Robots: A Shared View

As robots get increasingly sophisticated, we'll ask them to help us with our daily lives in increasingly complicated ways. We'll expect them to work closely with us and the objects in our environments. To do so, they'll need to perceive our world and understand us well enough to perform the tasks we desire. Achieving this level of sophistication presents challenging research problems for roboticists. Wearables provide a way for computers to share our experiences. Instead of using a robotic body to explore our world, a computer can ride along with us. Through wearables, computers can observe the world and our activities from a privileged, first-person perspective that's analogous to the perspective they would have from a robotic body. So, roboticists can use wearables as a development platform for the sophisticated robots of the future.     

设计艺术学视野中的中国古代三足器研究

三足器,在本文中是指鬶、鼎、爵等以三足为造型特征的器物,这些器物曾经在中国古代文化中扮演过特殊的角色。文章把这种造型特殊的器型看作一个整体的类型——三足器,试图通过三足器的历史演化来解读它独特的文化身份并探寻中国古代的设计思想。     

Presence: Is it just pretending?

Our sense of presence in the real world helps regulate our behaviour within it by telling us about the status and effectiveness of our actions. As such, this ability offers us practical advantages in dealing effectively with the world. It is also an automatic or intuitive response to where and how we find ourselves in that it does not require conscious thought or deliberation. In contrast, the experience of presence or immersion in a movie, game or virtual environment is not automatic but is the product of our deliberate engagement with it, an engagement which first requires a disengagement or decoupling with the real world. Of course, we regularly decouple from the real world and embrace other, possible worlds every time we daydream, or engage in creative problem solving or, most importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, when we make-believe. We propose that make-believe is a plausible psychological mechanism which underpins the experience of mediated presence.     

First-order logical filtering

Logical filtering is the process of updating a belief state (set of possible world states) after a sequence of executed actions and perceived observations. In general, it is intractable in dynamic domains that include many objects and relationships. Still, potential applications for such domains (e.g., semantic web, autonomous agents, and partial-knowledge games) encourage research beyond intractability results.In this paper we present polynomial-time algorithms for filtering belief states that are encoded as First-Order Logic (FOL) formulas. Our algorithms are exact in many cases of interest. They accept belief states in FOL without functions, permitting arbitrary arity for predicates, infinite universes of elements, and equality. They enable natural representation with explicit references to unidentified objects and partially known relationships, still maintaining tractable computation. Previous results focus on more general cases that are intractable or permit only imprecise filtering. Our algorithms guarantee that belief-state representation remains compact for STRIPS actions (among others) with unbounded-size domains. This guarantees tractable exact filtering indefinitely for those domains. The rest of our results apply to expressive modeling languages, such as partial databases and belief revision in FOL.     

基于非单调逻辑的自适应BDI模型

由于Agent直接与现实世界发生交互作用，设计者难以事先预料所有可能出现的环境状况并一一规定恰当的处理方法，Agent往往不能产生恰当的行为，从而可能导致问题求解失败。本文结合BDI模型和非单调逻辑的优点，引入了可能信念概念和信念维护算子，表达了Agent和动态环境之阃的互动关系;引入Agent价值概念和行为规划算子，表达了期 期望和意图之间的动态约束关系，很好地解决了Agent在非预期环境中的适应性问题。