A polynomial dynamic system approach to software design for attractivity requirement

Because of the widespread increasing application of Web services and autonomic computing, self-adaptive software is an area gaining increasing importance. Control theory provides a theoretical foundation for self-adaptive software. In this paper, we propose the use of the supervisory control theory of discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS) to provide a rigorous foundation for designing software for reactive systems. This paper focuses in particular on design of software with an attractivity requirement. It studies this problem using the polynomial dynamic system (PDS) model of DEDS. A necessary and sufficient condition for software existence and two algorithms for such software design are presented.     

Powers of observation in creative design

Being perceptive is a trait highly valued in scientific and engineering professions. What a scientist or engineer notices while considering a problem, evaluating alternatives, or interpreting data has a profound impact on how a problem is viewed and solved. This paper focuses on processes we believe underlie being perceptive: firstly, preparation—becoming attuned to salient or important features; secondly, assimilation-detection and exploration of patterns (invariants) as well as anomalies; and thirdly, strategic control-heuristic strategies for exploring the implications of what has been observed. These processes play an integral role in characteristic activities within creative design, including problem reformulation, the emergence of properties and constraints on the solution, and the ability to incorporate into the design experimental feedback from the environment and from experiences with prototypes and previous designs. The paper presents a computational model incorporating these ideas, implemented in a system called IMPROVISER.     

How to make and defend a proposal in a deliberation dialogue

In this paper it is shown how tools developed in argumentation theory and artificial intelligence can be applied to the development of a new dialectical analysis of the speech act of making a proposal in a deliberation dialogue. These tools are developed, modified and used to formulate dialogue pre-conditions, defining conditions and post-conditions for the speech act of making a proposal in a deliberation dialogue. The defining conditions set out what is required for a move in a dialogue to count as the making of a proposal by one of the parties. What is required are the conditions that (1) the move fit the requirements of the argumentation scheme for practical reasoning, and (2) the premises are propositions describing common goals of both parties or propositions that they reasonably consider means to achieve these goals. The analysis goes beyond the standard speech act approach by specifying not only the normative requirements for making a well-formed proposal, but also the requirements for responding to it by questioning or criticizing it, and the requirements for defending it.     

Branching and pruning: An optimal temporal POCL planner based on constraint programming

A key feature of modern optimal planners such as graphplan and blackbox is their ability to prune large parts of the search space. Previous Partial Order Causal Link (POCL) planners provide an alternative branching scheme but lacking comparable pruning mechanisms do not perform as well. In this paper, a domain-independent formulation of temporal planning based on Constraint Programming is introduced that successfully combines a POCL branching scheme with powerful and sound pruning rules. The key novelty in the formulation is the ability to reason about supports, precedences, and causal links involving actions that are not in the plan. Experiments over a wide range of benchmarks show that the resulting optimal temporal planner is much faster than current ones and is competitive with the best parallel planners in the special case in which actions have all the same duration.¹     

Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning.

Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency--receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficult-to-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one's brow (Experiment 3)--reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4). Metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency appear to serve as an alarm that activates analytic forms of reasoning that assess and sometimes correct the output of more intuitive forms of reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

State observability and condition observability for a class of interacting discrete event systems

This paper introduces the concepts of state observability and condition observability for condition systems, a class of systems composed of discrete state components which interact via discrete binary signals called conditions. Given a set of externally observed conditions, state observability implies that the state of the system can be determined from the observations, and condition observability implies that all unobserved input and output conditions of the system can be determined from the observations. In this paper, we present a class of systems which is state observable and condition observable. We present a method to synthesize an observer system to provide state and condition signal estimates for a single component subsystem.     

程控交换机收号系统模拟的研究

本文提出了一种模拟程控交换机收号系统的有效方法,采用消息驱动收号事件表的思想,运用并发控制技术,实现了在没有话路硬设备的条件下多用户同时拨号在线模拟收号控制的功能。本文提出的收号系统模拟方案已成功应用于某国产中大容量程控交换机的呼叫模拟系统中。     

主动推送模式下的情报需求预测模型

针对主动推送模式下的情报需求预测问题,提出了基于案例推理的解决方案。设计了进行情报需求预测案例分析的工作流程,建立了案例属性描述模型;应用最近邻法进行案例的相似度评价,并通过信息增益的计算确定每个属性的权值,获得相似案例(集);提出了方案调整和推理策略。     

基于多模态推理图神经网络的场景文本视觉问答模型

文本阅读能力差和视觉推理能力不足是现有视觉问答(visual question answering, VQA)模型效果不好的主要原因,针对以上问题,设计了一个基于图神经网络的多模态推理(multi-modal reasoning graph neural network, MRGNN)模型。利用图像中多种形式的信息帮助理解场景文本内容,将场景文本图片分别预处理成视觉对象图和文本图的形式,并且在问题自注意力模块下过滤多余的信息;使用加入注意力的聚合器完善子图之间相互的节点特征,从而融合不同模态之间的信息,更新后的节点利用不同模态的上下文信息为答疑模块提供了更好的功能。在ST-VQA和TextVQA数据集上验证了有效性,实验结果表明,相比较此任务的一些其他模型,MRGNN模型在此任务上有明显的提升。