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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Optimal Control of Two-Stage Discrete Event Systems with Real-Time Constraints

We consider discrete event systems (DES) involving tasks with real-time constraints and seek to control processing times so as to minimize a cost function subject to each task meeting its own constraint. When tasks are processed over a single stage, it has been shown that there are structural properties of the optimal sample path that lead to very efficient solutions of such problems. When tasks are processed over multiple stages and are subject to end-to-end real-time constraints, these properties no longer hold and no obvious extensions are known. We consider a two-stage problem with homogeneous cost functions over all tasks at each stage and derive several new optimality properties. These properties lead to the idea of introducing “virtual” deadlines at the first stage, thus partially decoupling the stages so that the known efficient solutions for single-stage problems can be used. We prove that the solution obtained by an iterative virtual deadline algorithm (VDA) converges to the global optimal solution of the two-stage problem and illustrate the efficiency of the VDA through numerical examples.

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.”

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.

Genre and CSCL: The form and rhetoric of the online posting

Genre analysis, the investigation of typified communicative actions arising in recurrent situations, has been developed to study information use and interchange online, in businesses and in other organizations. As such, it holds out promise for the investigation of similarly typified communicative actions and situations in CSCL contexts. This study explores this promise, beginning with an overview of ways that genre analysis has been adapted and applied in related areas: in the study of group behavior in organizations, and of evolving and proliferating communicative forms, actions, and situations on the Internet (e-mails, blogs, FAQs, etc.). Focusing on the particular genre of the Internet “posting” in CSCL contexts, the paper hypothesizes that the educational use of this genre bears recognizable similarities with its generic antecedent, the letter. In testing this hypothesis, the paper describes a pilot case study of a set of CSCL postings (n = 136), which attempts to quantify the occurrence of rhetorical characteristics common to both the epistolary and CSCL “genres.” This content analysis shows the recurrence in this sample of a range of rhetorical markers (240 in total) that are characteristic of epistolary dynamics. It concludes by considering the implications of these findings and of a “genre approach” for CSCL research generally, and for community of inquiry models in particular.

The election problem in asynchronous distributed systems with bounded faulty processes

Determining the “weakest” failure detectors is a central topic in solving many agreement problems such as Consensus, Non-Blocking Atomic Commit and Election in asynchronous distributed systems. So far, this has been studied extensively for several such fundamental problems. It is stated that Perfect Failure Detector P is the weakest failure detector to solve the Election problem with any number of faulty processes. In this paper, we introduce Modal failure detector M and show that to solve Election, M is the weakest failure detector to solve election when the number of faulty processes is less than ⌈n/2⌉. We also show that it is strictly weaker than P.

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.

Finding cohesive clusters for analyzing knowledge communities

Documents and authors can be clustered into “knowledge communities” based on the overlap in the papers they cite. We introduce a new clustering algorithm, Streemer, which finds cohesive foreground clusters embedded in a diffuse background, and use it to identify knowledge communities as foreground clusters of papers which share common citations. To analyze the evolution of these communities over time, we build predictive models with features based on the citation structure, the vocabulary of the papers, and the affiliations and prestige of the authors. Findings include that scientific knowledge communities tend to grow more rapidly if their publications build on diverse information and if they use a narrow vocabulary.

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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.

Finding maximum-length repeating patterns in music databases

This paper introduces the problem of discovering maximum-length repeating patterns in music objects. A novel algorithm is presented for the extraction of this kind of patterns from a melody music object. The proposed algorithm discovers all maximum-length repeating patterns using an “aggressive” accession during searching, by avoiding costly repetition frequency calculation and by examining as few as possible repeating patterns in order to reach the maximum-length repeating pattern(s). Detailed experimental results illustrate the significant performance gains due to the proposed algorithm, compared to an existing baseline algorithm.

Toward cinematizing our daily lives

We introduce a cinematographic video production system to create movie-like attractive footage from our indoor daily life. Since the system is designed for ordinary users in non-studio environments, it is composed of standard hardware components, provides a simple interface, and works in near real-time of 5 ~ 6 frames/sec. The proposed system reconstructs a visual hull from acquired multiple videos and then generates final videos from the model by referring to the camera shots used in film-making. The proposed method utilizes “Reliability” to compensate for errors that may have occurred in non-studio environments and to produce the most natural scene from the reconstructed model. By using a virtual camera control system, even non-experts can easily convert the 3D model to movies that look as if they were created by experienced filmmakers.

Understanding and capturing people’s privacy policies in a mobile social networking application

A number of mobile applications have emerged that allow users to locate one another. However, people have expressed concerns about the privacy implications associated with this class of software, suggesting that broad adoption may only happen to the extent that these concerns are adequately addressed. In this article, we report on our work on PeopleFinder, an application that enables cell phone and laptop users to selectively share their locations with others (e.g. friends, family, and colleagues). The objective of our work has been to better understand people’s attitudes and behaviors towards privacy as they interact with such an application, and to explore technologies that empower users to more effectively and efficiently specify their privacy preferences (or “policies”). These technologies include user interfaces for specifying rules and auditing disclosures, as well as machine learning techniques to refine user policies based on their feedback. We present evaluations of these technologies in the context of one laboratory study and three field studies.

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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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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.

Some historical remarks on Block’s “Aunt Bubbles” argument

The aim of this paper is to present a certain kind of argumentation against the idea of the Turing test (we call it CCSC—Complete Conversation System Claim) and to discuss the issue of its first formulation. Ned Block, with his idea of “Aunt Bubbles” argument, is thought of as a founding father of CCSC, but we present the results of our bibliographical researches which clearly show that the first formulation of CCSC should be ascribed to Polish writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem.

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.

Machine learning multi-classifiers for peptide classification

In this paper, we study the performance improvement that it is possible to obtain combining classifiers based on different notions (each trained using a different physicochemical property of amino-acids). This multi-classifier has been tested in three problems: HIV-protease; recognition of T-cell epitopes; predictive vaccinology. We propose a multi-classifier that combines a classifier that approaches the problem as a two-class pattern recognition problem and a method based on a one-class classifier. Several classifiers combined with the “sum rule” enables us to obtain an improvement performance over the best results previously published in the literature.

Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Should be Refutable

We give an example from the theory of Markov decision processes which shows that the “optimism in the face of uncertainty” heuristics may fail to make any progress. This is due to the impossibility to falsify a belief that a (transition) probability is larger than 0. Our example shows the utility of Popper’s demand of falsifiability of hypotheses in the area of artificial intelligence.

OpenMP based parallel normalized direct methods for sparse finite element linear systems

A new parallel normalized exact inverse algorithm is presented for solving sparse symmetric finite element linear systems on symmetric multiprocessor systems (SMP), based upon an antidiagonal motion approach (“wave”-like pattern) for overcoming the data dependencies. The proposed algorithm was implemented using OpenMP directives. Numerical results, such as speedups and efficiency, are presented illustrating the efficient performance on a symmetric multiprocessor computer system, where the proposed algorithmic solution method achieves good speedups.

Non-negative matrix factorization for semi-supervised data clustering

Traditional clustering algorithms are inapplicable to many real-world problems where limited knowledge from domain experts is available. Incorporating the domain knowledge can guide a clustering algorithm, consequently improving the quality of clustering. In this paper, we propose SS-NMF: a semi-supervised non-negative matrix factorization framework for data clustering. In SS-NMF, users are able to provide supervision for clustering in terms of pairwise constraints on a few data objects specifying whether they “must” or “cannot” be clustered together. Through an iterative algorithm, we perform symmetric tri-factorization of the data similarity matrix to infer the clusters. Theoretically, we show the correctness and convergence of SS-NMF. Moveover, we show that SS-NMF provides a general framework for semi-supervised clustering. Existing approaches can be considered as special cases of it. Through extensive experiments conducted on publicly available datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of SS-NMF for clustering.