How practice produces suboptimal heuristics that render backup instruments ineffective

The operation of machines typically requires attention to instruments that signal the state of the machine. One safeguard against primary instrument malfunction is to provide backup instruments, but this works only if the operators react to malfunction by switching attention to the backups. Little is known about the effect of negative outcomes or feedback on allocation of attention to backup instruments. Four experiments demonstrated that prior practice causes operators of a simulated machine to adapt to instrument malfunction by changing to a suboptimal decision rule rather than by reallocating attention to a different set of instruments. This fallacy appears linked to the operators' failures to notice feedback that they should switch during the simulations and operators' failures to correctly interpret outcome feedback following the simulations. The results raise theoretical questions and warn interface designers not to overrate backup instruments.     

How practice produces suboptimal heuristics that render backup instruments ineffective

The operation of machines typically requires attention to instruments that signal the state of the machine. One safeguard against primary instrument malfunction is to provide backup instruments, but this works only if the operators react to malfunction by switching attention to the backups. Little is known about the effect of negative outcomes or feedback on allocation of attention to backup instruments. Four experiments demonstrated that prior practice causes operators of a simulated machine to adapt to instrument malfunction by changing to a suboptimal decision rule rather than by reallocating attention to a different set of instruments. This fallacy appears linked to the operators' failures to notice feedback that they should switch during the simulations and operators' failures to correctly interpret outcome feedback following the simulations. The results raise theoretical questions and warn interface designers not to overrate backup instruments.     

Development of a strategic research plan for an academic department through the use of quality function deployment

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a popular approach for formalizing the process of listening to “the voice of the customer,” and assigning responsibilities to members of an organization in an effort to respond effectively to customer needs, QFD is being used by the Department of Industrial Engineering at Mississippi State University to help identify key customers for departmental research efforts, to identify and track the research needs of those customers, to fashion a comprehensive strategic plan for departmental research activities based on customer needs, to deploy various research functions and responsibilities to specific faculty members or groups, and to track research performance relative to goals. This approach appears to be an excellent means of formalizing the process of strategic research planning.     

Design, fabrication, and testing of silicon microgimbals forsuper-compact rigid disk drives

This paper documents results related to design optimization, fabrication process refinement, and micron-level static/dynamic testing of silicon micromachined microgimbals that have applications in super-compact computer disk drives as well as many other engineering applications of microstructures and microactuators requiring significant out-of-plane motions. The objective of the optimization effort is to increase the in-plane to out-of-plane stiffness ratio in order to maximize compliance and servo bandwidth and to increase the displacement to strain ratio to maximize the shock resistance of the microgimbals, while that of the process modification effort is to simplify in order to reduce manufacturing cost. The testing effort is to characterize both the static and dynamic performance using precision instrumentation in order to compare various prototype designs     

集群负载均衡--CSM的实现

对于现在的互联网络通信状况,负载均衡显示其越来越多的重要性,通常实现负载均衡是使用软件并结合相应的算法,该文所描述的是利用Cisco公司的CSM模块来实现安全可靠的负载均衡,CSM模块将客户机的请求分发到不同的虚拟服务器,配合Cisco MSFC模块并合理地进行DNS的配置,实现网络服务的负载均衡。简要介绍了CSM模块的工作原理,如何配置DNS,如何设置虚拟主服务器,以及如何对系统CSM模块进行设置做了描述。     

A self-adaptation scheme for workflow management in multi-agent systems

Business processes, operational environment, variability of resources and user needs may change from time to time. An effective workflow management software system must be able to accommodate these changes. The ability to dynamically adapt to changes is a key success factor for workflow management systems. Holonic multi-agent systems (HMS) provide a flexible and reconfigurable architecture to accommodate changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Although HMS provides a potential architecture to accommodate changes, the dynamic organization formed in HMS poses a challenge in the development of a new software development methodology to dynamically compose the services and adapt to changes as needed. This motivates us to study and propose a methodology to design self-adaptive software systems based on the HMS architecture. In this paper, we formulate a workflow adaptation problem (WAP) and propose an interaction mechanism based on contract net protocol (CNP) to find a solution to WAP to compose the services based on HMS. The interaction mechanism relies on a service publication and discovery scheme to find a set of task agents and a set of actor agents to compose the required services in HMS. We propose a viable self-adaptation scheme to reconfigure the agents and the composed services based on cooperation of agents in HMS to accommodate the changes in workflow and capabilities of actors. We propose architecture for our design methodology and present an application scenario to illustrate our idea.     

The Content Control That Wasn't: Two Years of the Online Services Amendment

The stated aims of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act were to provide a means for addressing complaints about Internet content, to restrict access to Internet content likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult and to protect children from exposure to Internet content unsuitable for them. However, two years after the Amendment took effect, it can be seen that while some marginal changes may have occurred, in reality the Act has failed to regulate or control Internet content or Australians' access to it. It may, however, have met other objectives attributed to the Government--for example, appeasing community concern by giving the appearance that action had been taken to control 'problematic' Internet content while not overly burdening the Australian Internet industry.     

Strategies for adding features to CAD models in order to optimize performance

This paper presents an approach which enables new parameters to be added to a CAD model for optimization purposes. It aims to remove a common roadblock to CAD based optimization, where the parameterization of the model does not offer the shape sufficient flexibility for a truly optimized shape to be created. A technique has been developed which uses adjoint based sensitivity maps to predict the sensitivity of performance to the addition to a model of four different feature types, allowing the feature providing the greatest benefit to be selected. The optimum position to add the feature is also discussed. It is anticipated that the approach could be used to iteratively add features to a model, providing greater flexibility to the shape of the model, and allowing the newly-added parameters to be used as design variables in a subsequent shape optimization.     

Product selection for promotion planning

This paper addresses a very important question—how to select the right products to promote in order to maximize promotional benefit. We set up a framework to incorporate promotion decisions into the data-mining process, formulate the profit maximization problem as an optimization problem, and propose a heuristic search solution to discover the right products to promote. Moreover, we are able to get access to real supermarket data and apply our solution to help achieve higher profits. Our experimental results on both synthetic data and real supermarket data demonstrate that our framework and method are highly effective and can potentially bring huge profit gains to a marketing campaign.     

卫星伪距定位精度模拟评估软件设计

基于研发人员进行嵌入式导航型用户设备的研究工作中,需要全面考虑各种因素对定位精度的影响,研究提高用户设备定位精度的方法。本文提出设计卫星伪距定位精度评估软件的方法,该软件具有对影响伪距定位精度的多种算法进行评估功能,还具有选取用户机软硬件设备、研究选星方法等功能,为研发人员提高伪距定位精度提供了一种有效的手段。     

合作学习在中职信息教学中的应用

合作学习理论作为一种新的学习理念已经被广泛地运用到各类学校的学习当中,经过不断地实践检验取得了不错的效果。将合作学习的相关理论运用到实践能力要求较高中职信息技术教学中,不仅可以增强学生的学习能力,通过合作学习培养学生之间互相帮助、共同进步的精神,提高他们信息技术学习的水平,还可以培养他们的团队精神,适应将来的就业需要。     

关于多变量PID自适应解耦控制器的设计

本文对于多变量自适应解耦控制与PID控制相组合．这一工业过程控制的重要设计方法，主要是对一些控制算法和全局收敛性分析等问题，进行了研究和探索。     

上海数据中心会议展望

从低能耗的微处理器,到最优化负载：从高温环境的自然制冷到低温数据中心的高温机柜,哪些会成为我们接下来所关注的重点问题？在向前发展的过程中,是否有一些小步骤或者巨大的飞跃？企业需要不断地评估数据中心的需求,并决定如何更好地适应业务增长的需求以及企业IT运营和使用模式的改变。数据中心的能效只是等式的一半——优化数据中心当中所有运营的系统是关键,从处理系统到网络系统再到应用系统,不一而足。     

TORUS: A step towards bridging the gap between data bases and the casual user

This paper describes TORUS, a natural language understanding system that serves as a front end to a data base management system in order to facilitate communication with casual users. The system employs a semantic network to store knowledge about a data base of student files. This knowledge is used to find the meaning of each input statement, to decide what action to take with respect to the data base, and to select information that must be output in response to the input statement. A prototype version of TORUS has been implemented.     

What artificial experts can and cannot do

One's model of skill determines what one expects from neural network modelling and how one proposes to go about enhancing expertise. We view skill acquisition as a progression from acting on the basis of a rough theory of a domain in terms of facts and rules to being able to respond appropriately to the current situation on the basis of neuron connections changed by the results of responses to the relevant aspects of many past situations. Viewing skill acquisition in this ways suggests how one can avoid the problem currently facing AI of how to train a network to make human-like generalizations. In training a network one must progress, as the human learner does, from rules and facts to wholistic responses. As to future work, from our perspective one should not try to enhance expertise as in traditional AI by attempting to construct improved theories of a domain, but rather by improving the learner's access to the relevant aspects of a domain so as to facilitate learning from experience.     

基于混合战略博弈的P2P激励机制

针对P2P系统中的搭便车问题,提出了一种基于混合策略博弈的激励机制。将信誉值作为激励节点贡献资源和提供服务的基础,节点是否能获得服务也是与节点当前信誉值成比例的,节点只能通过提供服务来增加其信誉值。同时节点是否响应服务请求是以某一概率来进行的,通过调节该概率来有效的激励节点提供服务。仿真实验表明,节点在经过一段时间的博弈之后,其响应次数和请求次数基本相等,提高了节点在系统中的参与度。     

基于状态表决的大规模数据库在线更新算法

目前,数据库为了保证运行安全需要进行在线更新,由于大量的数据要在短时间之内完成加载,那么计算机很难直接对其表决。针对这种问题,我们提出针对数据库的实时状态表决,而不是对数据库直接表决,并基于这种表决方法设计出相应的算法,有效解决数据量过大的问题。     

Retinal adaptation to non-uniform fields: average luminance or symbol luminance?

Various lighting and video display terminal design recommendations have been based on the assumption that the eye adapts to the average luminance of the field being viewed. Other evidence suggests that for irregular patterns the eye adapts to a level biased toward the peak luminance in the field being viewed. Subjects in this study adapted to uniform fields of varying average luminance and to two test patterns, one of which (dots) had a peak luminance equal to the brightest uniform field and an average luminance equal to the least bright uniform field. Time, to respond to a test pattern following adaptation to dots was intermediate between the two extreme uniform fields, but closer to that of the brighter field which had an average luminance equal to the test pattern's peak luminance. For that reason, proposed lighting differences based on image polarity or recommendations of positive image polarity do not appear to be warranted.     

A data science approach for spatiotemporal modelling of low and resident air pollution in Madrid (Spain): Implications for epidemiological studies

Model developments to assess different air pollution exposures within cities are still a key challenge in environmental epidemiology. Background air pollution is a long-term resident and low-level concentration pollution difficult to quantify, and to which population is chronically exposed. In this study, hourly time series of four key air pollutants were analysed using Hidden Markov Models to estimate the exposure to background pollution in Madrid, from 2001 to 2017. Using these estimates, its spatial distribution was later analysed after combining the interpolation results of ordinary kriging and inverse distance weighting. The ratio of ambient to background pollution differs according to the pollutant studied but is estimated to be on average about six to one. This methodology is proposed not only to describe the temporal and spatial variability of this complex exposure, but also to be used as input in new modelling approaches of air pollution in urban areas.     

Voices that cannot be heard: Can shyness explain how we communicate on Facebook versus face-to-face?

Social networking sites have gained popularity among all populations, especially young adults. Personality traits were found to be predictive of how individuals use social media. Therefore, this study sought to examine the association between shyness and self-disclosure to a Facebook friend as well as self-disclosure to a face-to-face friend. Two studies were conducted. The first study tested how shyness and social loneliness are related to self-disclosure to a Facebook friend to whom an individual talks most often. The second, follow-up study tested how shyness is related to self-disclosure to a Facebook friend to whom a person speaks to only though Facebook, and also to a face-to-face friend to whom the participants talk only face-to-face and never through Facebook. Participants were college students from a large research university in the United States. Study 1 found a negative association between shyness and self-disclosure to a Facebook friend. Study 2 found a negative association between shyness and self-disclosure to a face-to-face friend. The theoretical implications and limitations are discussed.