The presence of vegetation on railway tracks threatens track safety and longevity. However, vegetation inspections in Sweden are currently being carried out manually. Manually inspecting vegetation is very slow and time consuming. Maintaining an even quality standard is also very difficult. A machine vision-based approach is therefore proposed to emulate the visual abilities of the human inspector. Work aimed at detecting vegetation on railway tracks has been split into two main phases. The first phase is aimed at detecting vegetation on (...) the tracks using appropriate image analysis techniques. The second phase is aimed at detecting the rails in the image to determine the cover of vegetation that is present between the rails as opposed to vegetation present outside the rails. Results achieved in the current work indicate that the machine vision approach has performed reasonably well in detecting the presence/absence of vegetation on railway tracks when compared with a human operator. (shrink)

Based upon literature that argues technology, and even simple classification systems, embody cultural values, I ask if software bug tracking systems are similarly value laden. I make use of discourse within and around Web browser software development to identify specific discursive values, adopted from Ferree et al.'s "normative criteria for the public sphere," and conclude by arguing that such systems mediate community concerns and are subject to contested interpretations by their users.

To shorten the travel time and improve comfort, the automatic train driving system is considered to replace manual driving. In this article, an automatic control method of computer application data-processing system based on artificial intelligence is proposed. An automatic train operation (ATO) introduced the structure and function of an autopilot system (train), optimized the train running on the target curve, introduced the basic principle of fuzzy generalized predictive control (PC) algorithm, and combined with the characteristics of ATO system design (...) the speed controller based on optimization algorithm, the target curve to make use of the designed controller to track and simulation validation. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that when the train runs to 90 s, the displacement difference reaches about 40 m, which proves that the fuzzy PC has better displacement tracking, punctual arrival, and higher stopping accuracy. (shrink)

Internet of thing building sensors can capture several types of building operations, performances, and conditions and send them to a central dashboard to analyze data to support decision-making. Traditionally, laptops and cell phones are the majority of Internet-connected devices. IoT tracking allows customers to close the distance between devices and enterprises by collecting and analyzing various IoT data through connected devices, customers, and applications on the network. There is a lack of requirements for IoT edge applications security and approval. (...) There are no best practices regarding operations focused on IoT incidents. IoT elements are not covered by audit and logging requirements. In this article, a big data analytics-based customer operation system analyzes the operation. With the exponential rise in data usage, the explosive development in the IoT devices reflects the ideal overlap of big data growth with IoT. Big data analytics continuously evolving network raises trivial questions about the performance, distribution of data, analysis, and protection of data collection. IoT modifies almost all the construction industry characteristics. Human-centered artificial intelligence is described as systems that always improve because of human input while also delivering an effective experience between the human and the robotic. The IoT is the key factor that ensures greater building performance. It was the first evolution of technology in a long time to turn genuine inventions into an industry that depended heavily on paper and manual processes. The benefits of the IoT in construction are now quite obviously much heavier than those of current manual processes. As a result, more construction companies explore and incorporate IoT strategies to address their productivity challenges, increasing efficiencies and profits. The simulation analysis shows that the proposed BDA-CO model enhances the trust score of 98.5%, accuracy detection ratio of 93.4%, probability ratio of 97.6%, and security ratio of 98.7% and reduces the false negative ratio of 21.3%, response time of 10.5%, delay rate of 19.9%, and packet loss ratio of 15.4% when compared to other existing techniques. (shrink)

Based on the motor theory of language, which asserts an evolution from gestures along several stages to today's speech and language, we suggest that speech ontogeny may partly reflect speech phylogeny, in that perception of prosodic contours is an intermediary stage between a manual communication system and a fully developed language faculty.

Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that may underlie the establishment of joint attention between parents and toddlers. In an experimental task, parents and toddlers played together with multiple toys. We objectively measured joint attention—and the sensory-motor behaviors that (...) underlie it—using a dual head-mounted eye-tracking system and frame-by-frame coding of manual actions. By tracking the momentary visual fixations and hand actions of each participant, we precisely determined just how often they fixated on the same object at the same time, the visual behaviors that preceded joint attention and manual behaviors that preceded and co-occurred with joint attention. We found that multiple sequential sensory-motor patterns lead to joint attention. In addition, there are developmental changes in this multi-pathway system evidenced as variations in strength among multiple routes. We propose that coordinated visual attention between parents and toddlers is primarily a sensory-motor behavior. Skill in achieving coordinated visual attention in social settings—like skills in other sensory-motor domains—emerges from multiple pathways to the same functional end. (shrink)

In "Off Track" art and philosophy are the inspiration to look differently at daily life and organizations. The book is a plea to approach the complexity of the current world with new metaphors. The author calls this "hinking around". She sees that in "square worlds" there is a need for tools to approach entrenched patterns and systems differently and to get thought processes moving. Sarai van de Boel challenges the reader to look at one's own systems from the (...) inside with a philosophical approach. In eight chapters there are eight "tracks" to follow, but it is also possible to go off the rails. More than fifty works of art by well-known and lesser-known artists and designers play a role in these traces. The author questions the essence of their works and asks philosophical questions about phenomena they evoke. With Marlene Dumas, Marinus Boezem, L.A. Raeven, Ed Atkins, Wong Ping, Kazumasa Nagai, Remy Jungerman, Otto Piene, Eiko Ishioka, Campana brothers, Ann Demeulemeester and Kara Walker. The book ends with the Art & Philosophy Strategy, a theoretical framework for the use of art and philosophy. (shrink)

The Joint Battle Management Language (JBML) is an XML-based language designed to allow Command and Control (C2) systems to interface easily with Modeling and Simulation (M&S) systems. While some of the XML-tags defined in this language correspond to types of entities that exist in reality, others are mere syntactic artifacts used to structure the messages themselves. Because these two kinds of tags are not formally distinguishable, JBML messages in effect confuse data with what the data represent. In this (...) paper we show how a realism-based ontology combined with a rule language can be used to make these distinctions explicit. The approach allows storage of the contents of JBML messages in a Referent Tracking System in a format that mimics the structure of reality thereby providing an aid to message validation. (shrink)

O objetivo deste manual é orientar pesquisadores e autores que desejem submeter seus textos à revista _HORIZONTE._.

Social anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent mental disorders, with high impact on the life of an affected social system and its individual social system members. We developed a manualized disorder-specific integrative systemic and family therapy for SAD, and evaluated its feasibility in a pilot randomized controlled trial. The ISFT is inspired by Helm Stierlin’s concept of related individuation developed during the early 1980s, which has since continued to be refined. It integrates solution-focused language, social network diagnostics, and genogram (...) work, as well as resource- and problem orientation for both case conceptualization and therapy planning. Post-Milan symptom prescription to fluidize the presented symptoms is one of the core interventions in the ISFT. Theoretically, the IFST is grounded in radical constructivism and “Cybern-Ethics,” multi-directional partiality, and a both/and attitude toward a disorder-specific vs. non-disorder-specific therapy approach. SAD is understood from the viewpoint of social systems theory, especially in adaptation to a socio-psycho-biological explanatory model of social anxiety. In a prospective multicenter, assessor-blind pilot RCT, we included 38 clients with SAD : 18 patients participated in the ISFT, and 20 patients in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Within-group, simple-effect intention-to-treat analyses showed significant reduction in social anxiety, while intention-to-treat mixed-design ANOVA demonstrated the advantage of ISFT. Per-protocol analyses supported these results. The remission rate based on blind diagnosticians’ ratings was good to satisfactory ; this has yet to be verified in a subsequent confirmatory RCT. The article will present the ISFT rationale and manual, including a special focus on multi-person settings, and the central findings from our pilot RCT. (shrink)

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the (...) sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. (shrink)

In an issue that contains a large dossier devoted to the philosophy of Paul Ricœur, we are, exceptionally, publishing a few texts in French. We believe that it is important for scholars of Ricœur’s philosophy to be able to deal with testimonies such as that offered by Catherine Goldenstein in their original formulation. We also appreciate the importance of the original French wording and semantic associations when it comes to grasping Ricœur’s arguments in all their completeness.The texts published in French (...) are accompanied by metadata in English. Their bibliographies are also presented in English, for the sake of consistency with citation tracking systems. Footnotes have been formatted in line with French typographic customs, while still following the broad lines of the Chicago Manual of Style. (shrink)

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this chapter, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals is not only legal but also ethical.

The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans’ capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001; Wimmer & Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false belief tasks at 13 or 15 months (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007). Non-human animals also fail critical tests of belief reasoning but can show very complex social behaviour (e.g., (...) Call & Tomasello, 2005). Fluent social interaction in adult humans implies efficient processing of beliefs, yet direct tests suggest that belief reasoning is cognitively demanding, even for adults (e.g., Apperly, Samson & Humphreys, 2005). We interpret these findings by drawing an analogy with the domain of number cognition, where similarly contrasting results have been observed. We propose that the success of infants and non-human animals on some belief reasoning tasks may be best explained by a cognitively efficient but inflexible capacity for tracking belief-like states. In humans this capacity persists in parallel with later-developing, more flexible but more cognitively demanding theory of mind abilities. (shrink)

This paper addresses variable-time impulsive control for coordinated tracking problem in nonlinear multiagent systems. To make followers coordinately track the leader, a variable-time impulsive controller is designed. Under some well-selected conditions, the comparison system of variable-time impulsive tracking control system is constructed by employing B-equivalence method. And we theoretically demonstrate that the two systems have the same stability property. Coordinated tracking criteria of multiagent systems are obtained by considering the comparison system. Numerical simulation is (...) also provided to illustrate the correctness of theoretical results and the efficiency of the variable-time impulsive controller. (shrink)

A tracking control algorithm of nonlinear multiple agents with undirected communication is studied for each multiagent system affected by external interference and input saturation. A control design scheme combining iterative learning and adaptive control is proposed to perform parameter adaptive time-varying adjustment and prove the effectiveness of the control protocol by designing Lyapunov functions. Simulation results show that the high-precision tracking control problem of the nonlinear multiagent system based on adaptive iterative learning control can be well realized even (...) when the input is saturated. Finally, the validity of the proposed algorithm is verified by numerical analysis. (shrink)

For corporate memory and enterprise ontology systems to be maximally useful, they must be freed from certain barriers placed around them by traditional knowledge management paradigms. This means, above all, that they must mirror more faithfully those portions of reality which are salient to the workings of the enterprise, including the changes that occur with the passage of time. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories based on philosophical realism can contribute to this objective. We discuss (...) how realism-based ontologies (capturing what is generic) combined with referent tracking (capturing what is specific) can play a key role in building the robust and useful corporate memories of the future. (shrink)

In this paper, the fixed-time practical bipartite tracking problem for the networked robotic systems with parametric uncertainties, input disturbances, and directed signed graphs is investigated. A new fixed-time estimator-based control algorithm for the NRSs is presented to address the abovementioned problem. By applying a sliding surface and the time base generator approach, a new stability analysis method is proposed to achieve the fixed-time practical bipartite tracking for the NRSs. We also derive the upper bound of the convergence (...) time for employing the presented control algorithm to solve the practical bipartite tracking problem and further demonstrate that the convergence time is independent of the initial value. Finally, the simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the presented algorithms. (shrink)

One of the major problems that artificial intelligence needs to tackle is the combination of different and potentially conflicting sources of information. Examples are multi-sensor fusion, database integration and expert systems development. In this paper we are interested in the aggregation of propositional logic-based information, a problem recently addressed in the literature on information fusion. It has applications in multi-agent systems that aim at aggregating the distributed agent-based knowledge into an (ideally) unique set of propositions. We consider a (...) group of autonomous agents who individually hold a logically consistent set of propositions. Each set of propositions represents an agent’s beliefs on issues on which the group has to make a collective decision. To make the collective decision, several aggregation procedures have been proposed in the literature. Assuming that all propositions in question are factually right or wrong, we ask how good belief fusion is as a truth tracker. Will it single out the true set of propositions? And how does information fusion compare with other aggregation procedures? We address these questions in a probabilistic framework and show that information fusion does especially well for agents with a middling competence of hitting the truth of an individual proposition. (shrink)

The problem of finite-time tracking control is discussed for a class of uncertain nonstrict-feedback time-varying state delay nonlinear systems with full-state constraints and unmodeled dynamics. Different from traditional finite-control methods, a C 1 smooth finite-time adaptive control framework is introduced by employing a smooth switch between the fractional and cubic form state feedback, so that the desired fast finite-time control performance can be guaranteed. By constructing appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals, the uncertain terms produced by time-varying state delays are compensated (...) for and unmodeled dynamics is coped with by introducing a dynamical signal. In order to avoid the inherent problem of “complexity of explosion” in the backstepping-design process, the DSC technology with a novel nonlinear filter is introduced to simplify the structure of the controller. Furthermore, the results show that all the internal error signals are driven to converge into small regions in a finite time, and the full-state constraints are not violated. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

The current paper studies guaranteed cost time-varying formation tracking design and analysis problems of high-order swarm systems subject to intermittent communications. Different from the existing work of the time-varying formation control, the time-varying formation tracking can be achieved while certain performance can be guaranteed, and the impacts of the intermittent communications and switching topologies are considered. First, a new intermittent time-varying formation tracking control protocol with a global performance index is proposed, where not only the formation (...) regulation performances but also the control energy expenditures are involved. The codesign of the gain matrix with the performance index is achieved to compromise the formation regulation performances against control energy expenditures, and the guaranteed cost is determined to restrain the upper bound of the performance index. Then, guaranteed cost time-varying formation tracking design and analysis criteria are given, where the matrix variable of the linear matrix inequality conditions is used to design the gain matrix and to determine the guaranteed cost. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. (shrink)

The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to the entities existing in concrete spatiotemporal reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth, insofar as these are salient to diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to directly and explicitly, something which cannot be achieved when familiar (...) concept-based systems are used in what is called “clinical coding”. In this paper we describe the components of a referent tracking system in an informal way and we outline the procedures that would have to be followed by healthcare personnel in using such a system. We argue that the referent tracking paradigm can be introduced with only minor – though nevertheless ontologically important – technical changes to existing EHR infrastructures, but that it will require a radically different mindset on the part of those involved in clinical coding and terminology development from that which has prevailed hitherto. (shrink)

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are organized around two kinds of statements: those reporting observations made, and those reporting acts performed. In neither case does the record involve any direct reference to what such statements are actually about. They record not: what is happening on the side of the patient, but rather: what is said about what is happening. While the need for a unique patient identifier is generally recognized, we argue that we should now move to an EHR regime in (...) which all clinically salient particulars – from the concrete disorder on the side of the patient and the body parts in which it occurs to the concrete treatments given – should be uniquely identified. This will allow us to achieve interoperability among different systems of records at the level where it really matters: in regard to what is happening in the real world. It will also allow us to keep track of particular disorders and of the effects of particular treatments in a precise and unambiguous way. We discuss the ontological and epistemological aspects of our claim and describe a scenario for implementation within EHR systems. (shrink)

When ordinary people - mathematicians among them - take something to follow from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analogues invented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, (...) of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmatic case of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof. (shrink)