Putting the brain to work: neuroergonomics past, present, and future

OBJECTIVE: The authors describe research and applications in prominent areas of neuroergonomics. BACKGROUND: Because human factors/ergonomics examines behavior and mind at work, it should include the study of brain mechanisms underlying human performance. METHODS: Neuroergonomic studies are reviewed in four areas: workload and vigilance, adaptive automation, neuroengineering, and molecular genetics and individual differences. RESULTS: Neuroimaging studies have helped identify the components of mental workload, workload assessment in complex tasks, and resource depletion in vigilance. Furthermore, real-time neurocognitive assessment of workload can trigger adaptive automation. Neural measures can also drive brain-computer interfaces to provide disabled users new communication channels. Finally, variants of particular genes can be associated with individual differences in specific cognitive functions. CONCLUSIONS: Neuroergonomics shows that considering what makes work possible - the human brain - can enrich understanding of the use of technology by humans and can inform technological design. APPLICATION: Applications of neuroergonomics include the assessment of operator workload and vigilance, implementation of real-time adaptive automation, neuroengineering for people with disabilities, and design of selection and training methods.     

WWW: past, present, and future

The World Wide Web is simply defined as the universe of global network-accessible information. It is an abstract space within which people can interact, and it is chiefly populated by interlinked pages of text, images, and animations, with occasional sounds, videos, and three-dimensional worlds. The Web marks the end of an era of frustrating and debilitating incompatibility between computer systems. It has created an explosion of accessibility, with many potential social and economical impacts. The Web was designed to be a space within which people could work on a project. This was a powerful concept, in that: people who build a hypertext document of their shared understanding can refer to it at all times; people who join a project team can have access to a history of the team's activities, decisions, and so on; the work of people who leave a team can be captured for future reference; and a team's operations, if placed on the Web, can be machine-analyzed in a way that could not be done otherwise. The Web was originally supposed to be a personal information system and a tool for groups of all sizes, from a team of two to the entire world. People have rapidly developed new features for the Web, because of its tremendous commercial potential. This has made the maintenance of globalWeb interoperability a continuous task. This has also created a number of areas into which research must continue     

Connectionism: past,present, and future

Research efforts to study computation and cognitive modeling on neurally-inspired mechanisms have come to be called Connectionism. Rather than being brand new, it is actually the rebirth of a research programme which thrived from the 40s through the 60s and then was severely retrenched in the 70s. Connectionism is often posed as a paradigmatic competitor to the Symbolic Processing tradition of Artificial Intelligence (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1988), and, indeed, the counterpoint in the timing of their intellectual and commercial fortunes may lead one to believe that research in cognition is merely a zero-sum game. This paper surveys the history of the field, often in relation to AI, discusses its current successes and failures, and makes some predictions for where it might lead in the future.     

Energy-efficient networking: past, present, and future

The twenty-first century has witnessed major technological changes that have transformed the way we live, work, and interact with one another. One of the major technology enablers responsible for this remarkable transformation in our global society is the deployment and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) equipment. In fact, today ICT has become highly integrated in our society that includes the dependence on ICT of various sectors, such as business, transportation, education, and the economy to the point that we now almost completely depend on it. Over the last few years, the energy consumption resulting from the usage of ICT equipment and its impact on the environment have fueled a lot of interests among researchers, designers, manufacturers, policy makers, and educators. We present some of the motivations driving the need for energy-efficient communications. We describe and discuss some of the recent techniques and solutions that have been proposed to minimize energy consumption by communication devices, protocols, networks, end-user systems, and data centers. In addition, we highlight a few emerging trends and we also identify some challenges that need to be addressed to enable novel, scalable, cost-effective energy-efficient communications in the future.     

Rough sets: past,present, and future

Introduction of rough sets by Professor Zdzis?aw Pawlak has completed 35 years. The theory has already attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners, who have contributed essentially to its development, from all over the world. The methods, developed based on rough set theory alone or in combination with other approaches, found applications in many areas. In this article, we outline some selected past and present research directions of rough sets. In particular, we emphasize the importance of searching strategies for relevant approximation spaces as the basic tools in achieving computational building blocks (granules or patterns) required for approximation of complex vague concepts. We also discuss new challenges related to problem solving by intelligent systems (IS) or complex adaptive systems (CAS). The concern is to control problems using interactive granular computing, an extension of the rough set approach, for effective realization of computations realized in IS or CAS. These challenges are important for the development of natural computing too.     

Neural machine translation: past,present, and future

Neural Computing and Applications - Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved great success in several research areas like information retrieval, image processing, and speech recognition. In the...     

Information ecology research: past,present, and future

This paper examines the status of information ecology research through studying the published papers on the topic of information ecology included in Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index database from 1992 to 2013. It applies bibliometrics and knowledge mapping to analyze the changes in the number of published papers as time goes on, in terms of country and geographic area, research topics, research methods, funding sources, hot research spots, and research trends. In addition, this paper summarizes the origin and the evolution of information ecology research and introduces institutions that conduct information ecology research. The results indicate that information ecology is an emerging field with vigorous development in recent years, and information ecology research is a multi-disciplinary subject. The research also reveals that information ecology research mainly focuses on information ecosystems, information ecology in e-commerce, and information ecology in a network. This paper calls for wider and deeper research on information ecology, in order to explore information ecology issues caused by the rapid development of new technologies.     

The past, present, and future of supply-chain automation

We trace 20th-Century developments in the area of supply-chain automation and discuss the history of automation from the viewpoints of material-flow, information-flow, supervision and control, and relationship automation and identify future directions. The main message is that it is important to make balanced investments in all four facets of automation: material-flow, information-flow, supervision and control, and relationship automation to maximize shareholder value. to maximize shareholder value. Just in time to enhance 21st-century industry, material-flow, information-flow, supervision and control, and relationship automation are reaching maturity     

Challenges of evolvable hardware: past,present and the path to a promising future

Nature is phenomenal. The achievements in, for example, evolution are everywhere to be seen: complexity, resilience, inventive solutions and beauty. Evolvable Hardware (EH) is a field of evolutionary computation (EC) that focuses on the embodiment of evolution in a physical media. If EH could achieve even a small step in natural evolution’s achievements, it would be a significant step for hardware designers. Before the field of EH began, EC had already shown artificial evolution to be a highly competitive problem solver. EH thus started off as a new and exciting field with much promise. It seemed only a matter of time before researchers would find ways to convert such techniques into hardware problem solvers and further refine the techniques to achieve systems that were competitive with or better than human designs. However, 15 years on—it appears that problems solved by EH are only of the size and complexity of that achievable in EC 15 years ago and seldom compete with traditional designs. A critical review of the field is presented. Whilst highlighting some of the successes, it also considers why the field is far from reaching these goals. The paper further redefines the field and speculates where the field should go in the next 10 years.     

Surgical robotics: Reviewing the past,analysing the present,imagining the future

This paper presents an overview of the surgical robotics field, highlighting significant milestones and grouping the various propositions into cohorts. The review does not aim to be exhaustive but rather to highlight how surgical robotics is acting as an enabling technology for minimally invasive surgery. As such, there is a focus on robotic surgical solutions which are commercially available; research efforts which have not gained regulatory approval or entered clinical use are mostly omitted. The practice of robotic surgery is currently largely dominated by the da Vinci system of Intuitive Surgical (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) but other commercial players have now entered the market with surgical robotic products or are appearing in the horizon with medium and long term propositions. Surgical robotics is currently a vibrant research topic and new research directions may lead to the development of very different robotic surgical devices in the future—small, special purpose, lower cost, possibly disposable robots rather than the current large, versatile and capital expensive systems. As the trend towards minimally invasive surgery (MIS) increases, surgery becomes more technically demanding for surgeons and more challenging for medical device technologists and it is clear that surgical robotics has now an established foothold in medicine as an enabling technology of MIS.     

Coping with complexity: past, present and future

In 1981, a technical report was published with the somewhat enigmatic title ‘Coping with complexity.’ Its purpose was to discuss how computers could be used to assist process plant operators in coping with complex situations during plant disturbances. Today, coping with complexity is a problem not only for process plant operators but for everyone. And while computers in 1981 were looked upon as the solution, they are now seen as the source of the problem. This paper discusses why and how the meaning of ‘coping with complexity’ has changed over the years and speculate on what may lie ahead.     

The LINPACK Benchmark: past,present and future

This paper describes the LINPACK Benchmark and some of its variations commonly used to assess the performance of computer systems. Aside from the LINPACK Benchmark suite, the TOP500 and the HPL codes are presented. The latter is frequently used to obtained results for TOP500 submissions. Information is also given on how to interpret the results of the benchmark and how the results fit into the performance evaluation process. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.