1,721,166 research outputs found
Resilient strategies for socially compliant autonomous assistive dressing robots
No full textDeveloping resilient autonomous systems requires an interdisciplinary approach that can understand performance variability and respond to critical events when they occur. Resilience within autonomous systems must also account for social norms as well as broader ethical and legal considerations. Within this paper we outline the importance of embedding Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic and Cultural (SLEEC) constraints within the development of future autonomous systems. A novel methodological approach is presented that combines Human Factors methods with Computer Science techniques to generate the environmental and situational requirements in combination with a computer rule-based requirements language. This approach also provides a possible structure for capturing contextual and situational information from key stakeholders in the development of autonomous systems. This structure will enable engagement with the stakeholders with respect to key elements identified from this interdisciplinary approach in a responsible way to ensure that future autonomous systems are user centred. The approach is domain independent, but it is applied here to the case of an autonomous assistive dressing robot that aids a user in a dressing task, with a specific critical event that requires a SLEEC resilient response
Configuration Space Exploration for Digital Printing Systems
No full textWithin the printing industry, much of the variety in printed applications comes from the variety in finishing. Finishing comprises the processing of sheets of paper after being printed, e.g. to form books. The configuration space of finishers, i.e. all possible configurations given the available features and hardware capabilities, are large. Current control software minimally assists operators in finding useful configurations. Using a classical modelling and integration approach to support a variety of configuration spaces is suboptimal with respect to operatability, development time, and maintenance burden. In this paper, we explore the use of a modeling language for finishers to realize optimizing decision making over configuration parameters in a systematic way and to reduce development time by generating control software from models. We present CSX, a domain-specific language for high-level declarative specification of finishers that supports specification of the configuration parameters and the automated exploration of the configuration space of finishers. The language serves as an interface to constraint solving, i.e., we use low-level SMT constraint solving to find configurations for high-level specifications. We present a denotational semantics that expresses a translation of CSX specifications to SMT constraints. We describe the implementation of the CSX compiler and the CSX programming environment (IDE), which supports well-formedness checking, inhabitance checking, and interactive configuration space exploration. We evaluate CSX by modelling two realistic finishers. Benchmarks show that CSX has practical performance (<1s) for several scenarios of configuration space exploration.Programming Language
Medical practitioner perspectives on AI in emergency triage
No full textIntroduction: a proposed Diagnostic AI System for Robot-Assisted Triage (“DAISY”) is under development to support Emergency Department (“ED”) triage following increasing reports of overcrowding and shortage of staff in ED care experienced within National Health Service, England (“NHS”) but also globally. DAISY aims to reduce ED patient wait times and medical practitioner overload. The objective of this study was to explore NHS health practitioners' perspectives and attitudes towards the future use of AI-supported technologies in ED triage.Methods: between July and August 2022 a qualitative-exploratory research study was conducted to collect and capture the perceptions and attitudes of nine NHS healthcare practitioners to better understand the challenges and benefits of a DAISY deployment. The study was based on a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews. The study involved qualitative data analysis of the interviewees' responses. Audio-recordings were transcribed verbatim, and notes included into data documents. The transcripts were coded line-by-line, and data were organised into themes and sub-themes. Both inductive and deductive approaches to thematic analysis were used to analyse such data.Results: based on a qualitative analysis of coded interviews with the practitioners, responses were categorised into broad main thematic-types, namely: trust; current practice; social, legal, ethical, and cultural concerns; and empathetic practice. Sub-themes were identified for each main theme. Further quantitative analyses explored the vocabulary and sentiments of the participants when talking generally about NHS ED practices compared to discussing DAISY. Limitations include a small sample size and the requirement that research participants imagine a prototype AI-supported system still under development. The expectation is that such a system would work alongside the practitioner. Findings can be generalisable to other healthcare AI-supported systems and to other domains.Discussion: this study highlights the benefits and challenges for an AI-supported triage healthcare solution. The study shows that most NHS ED practitioners interviewed were positive about such adoption. Benefits cited were a reduction in patient wait times in the ED, assistance in the streamlining of the triage process, support in calling for appropriate diagnostics and for further patient examination, and identification of those very unwell and requiring more immediate and urgent attention. Words used to describe the system were that DAISY is a “good idea”, “help”, helpful, “easier”, “value”, and “accurate”. Our study demonstrates that trust in the system is a significant driver of use and a potential barrier to adoption. Participants emphasised social, legal, ethical, and cultural considerations and barriers to DAISY adoption and the importance of empathy and non-verbal cues in patient interactions. Findings demonstrate how DAISY might support and augment human medical performance in ED care, and provide an understanding of attitudinal barriers and considerations for the development and implementation of future triage AI-supported systems
Clustering formulation using constraint optimization
No full textThe problem of clustering a set of data is a textbook machine learning problem, but at the same time, at heart, a typical optimization problem. Given an objective function, such as minimizing the intracluster distances or maximizing the inter-cluster distances, the task is to find an assignment of data points to clusters that achieves this objective. In this paper, we present a constraint programming model for a centroid based clustering and one for a density based clustering. In particular, as a key contribution, we show how the expressivity introduced by the formulation of the problem by constraint programming makes the standard problem easy to be extended with other constraints that permit to generate interesting variants of the problem. We show this important aspect in two different ways: first, we show how the formulation of the density-based clustering by constraint programming makes it very similar to the label propagation problem and then, we propose a variant of the standard label propagation approach
Uncertainty in Self-adaptive Systems:A Research Community Perspective
Full text linkOne of the primary drivers for self-adaptation is ensuring that systems achieve their goals regardless of the uncertainties they face during operation. Nevertheless, the concept of uncertainty in self-adaptive systems is still insufficiently understood. Several taxonomies of uncertainty have been proposed, and a substantial body of work exists on methods to tame uncertainty. Yet, these taxonomies and methods do not fully convey the research community’s perception on what constitutes uncertainty in self-adaptive systems and on the key characteristics of the approaches needed to tackle uncertainty. To understand this perception and learn from it, we conducted a survey comprising two complementary stages in which we collected the views of 54 and 51 participants, respectively. In the first stage, we focused on current research and development, exploring how the concept of uncertainty is understood in the community and how uncertainty is currently handled in the engineering of self-adaptive systems. In the second stage, we focused on directions for future research to identify potential approaches to dealing with unanticipated changes and other open challenges in handling uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the first stage are: (a) an overview of uncertainty sources considered in self-adaptive systems, (b) an overview of existing methods used to tackle uncertainty in concrete applications, (c) insights into the impact of uncertainty on non-functional requirements, (d) insights into different opinions in the perception of uncertainty within the community and the need for standardised uncertainty-handling processes to facilitate uncertainty management in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the second stage are: (a) the insight that over 70% of the participants believe that self-adaptive systems can be engineered to cope with unanticipated change, (b) a set of potential approaches for dealing with unanticipated change, (c) a set of open challenges in mitigating uncertainty in self-adaptive systems, in particular in those with safety-critical requirements. From these findings, we outline an initial reference process to manage uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. We anticipate that the insights on uncertainty obtained from the community and our proposed reference process will inspire valuable future research on self-adaptive systems.sponsorship: Danny Weyns' work was supported by the projects "Trustworthy Decentralized Self-Adaptive Systems" (C14/18/066) and "Dependable Adaptive Software Systems for the Digital World" (ISPLI/18/019). Radu Calinescu's work was funded by the UKRI project EP/V026747/1 Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node in Resilience and the Assuring Autonomy Interational Programme. (project "Trustworthy Decentralized Self-Adaptive Systems"|C14/18/066, project "Dependable Adaptive Software Systems for the Digital World"|ISPLI/18/019, UKRI project|EP/V026747/1, SPF|EP/V026747/1)status: Publishe
Mission Specification Patterns for Mobile Robots: Providing Support for Quantitative Properties
Full text linkWith many applications across domains as diverse as logistics, healthcare, and agriculture, service robots are in increasingly high demand. Nevertheless, the designers of these robots often struggle with specifying their tasks in a way that is both human-understandable and sufficiently precise to enable automated verification and planning of robotic missions. Recent research has addressed this problem for the functional aspects of robotic missions through the use of mission specification patterns. These patterns support the definition of robotic missions involving, for instance, the patrolling of a perimeter, the avoidance of unsafe locations within an area, or reacting to specific events. Our paper introduces a catalog of QUantitAtive RoboTic mission spEcificaTion patterns (QUARTET) that tackles the complementary and equally important challenge of specifying the reliability, performance, resource use, and other key quantitative properties of robotic missions. Identified using a methodology that included the analysis of 73 research papers published in 17 leading software engineering and robotics venues between 2014–2021, our 22 QUARTET patterns are defined in a tool-supported domain-specific language. As such, QUARTET enables: (i) the precise definition of quantitative robotic-mission requirements; and (ii) the translation of these requirements into probabilistic reward computation tree logic (PRCTL), and thus their formal verification and the automated planning of robotic missions. We demonstrate the applicability of QUARTET by showing that it supports the specification of over 95% of the quantitative robotic mission requirements from a systematically selected set of recent research papers, of which 75% can be automatically translated into PRCTL for the purposes of verification through model checking and mission planning
Automated synthesis of protocol converters with BALM-II
No full textWe address the problem of the automatic design of automata to translatebetween different protocols, and we reduce it to the solution of equationsdefined over regular languages and finite automata (FA)/finite state machines(FSMs).The largest solution of the defined language equations includesall protocol converters that solve the problem;this is a strong advantage over computational techniques that deliver only oneor a few solutions, which might lead to suboptimal implementations(e.g., as sequential circuits).Our model is versatile, because it can handle different topologies andconstraints on the solutions.We propose a fully automatic procedure implemented inside a software packageBALM-II which solves language equations.For illustration we show examples of setting up and solving language equationsfor classical protocol mismatch problems, aiming at the design of protocolconverters to interface an alternating-bit (AB) sender and a non-sequenced(NS) receiver.Our automatic converter synthesis procedure yields a complete solutionfor automata and FSMs, and may serve as a core engineto embed into any full-fledged interface synthesis tool
- …
