Adaptable airbag-based system with semi-passive valve for improved impact protection

Nowadays, the use of computers and Internet in education is on the increase. Web-based educational systems (WES) are now widely used to both provide support to distance learning and to complement the traditional teaching process in the classroom. To be very useful in the classroom, one of the characteristics expected in a WES is the ability to be aware of students’ behaviors so that it can take into account the level of knowledge and preferences of the students in order to make reasonable recommendations (Hong, Kinshuk, He, Patel, & Jesshope, 2001). The main goal of adaptation in educational systems is to guide the students through the course material in order to improve the effectiveness of the learning process. Usually, when speaking of adaptive Web-based educational systems, we refer also to adaptable systems. Nevertheless, these terms are not really synonyms. Adaptable systems are abundant (Kobsa, 2004). In these systems, any adaptation is pre-defined and can be modified by the users before the execution of the system. In contrast, adaptive systems are still quite rare. In adaptive systems, any adaptation is dynamic which changes while the user is interacting with the system, depending on users’ behaviors. Nowadays, adaptable and adaptive systems recently gained strong popularity on the Web under the notion of personalized systems. A system can be adaptable and adaptive at the same time. In educational context, adaptable systems include also those systems that allow the teacher to modify certain parameters and change the response that the system gives to the students. In this situation, we claim that, in educational context, it is important to provide both types of personalization. On one hand, it is necessary to let teachers control the adaptation to students. On the other hand, due to a great diversity of interactions that take place in a WES, it is necessary to help teachers in the assessment of the students’ actions by providing certain dynamic adaptation automatically performed by the system. In this article, we will present how we can obtain adaptable and adaptive systems. Next, we will briefly present how we combine both types of personalization in PDINAMET, a WES for Physics. Finally we will describe some future trends and conclusions.

Recent developments in the World Wide Web infrastructure enabled the development of highly interactive hypermedia systems for e-commerce, e-government, and mobile commerce. Such applications have much to gain exploring adaptation, through the use of adaptable and adaptive mechanisms to customize services and interfaces. Adaptable systems are those that can be configured by the user before or during their use. Adaptive systems automatically acquire input data in order to infer adaptation opportunities and react accordingly. Adaptable and adaptive systems consider three different adaptation targets: human matters, interaction matters, and computer matters. The first target regards preferences, interests, and other personal information to allow system personalization. The second target regards goals and activities that are intended by the user in order to adjust the system according to the dialogue with the human being. The third target regards resource-availability discovery and optimization, such as needed by mobile applications due to limitations in computation and communication infrastructure. The design of modern hypermedia systems requires an integrated approach contemplating modeling principles, evaluation frameworks, and reference models. Several approaches and methods exist, but it is difficult to understand how they complement or interfere among themselves during a design. Fischer (1989) considers that systems with strong interactive requirements, such as those related to usability, lack structure and present design instability. Adaptation aggravates this difficulty. Tobar and Ricarte (2005) believe that one of the main reasons behind the difficulty in developing and evaluating adaptable and adaptive systems is the absence of a reference (normative) model for describing them from different perspectives. They provided some clues toward this missing type of model through the E-ACM (extended abstract categorization map), used to present modeling dimensions. It is a graphical representation to capture different aspects of hypermedia systems and models, considering all types of adaptation. It can be used before system authoring and design to a broad spectrum of hypermedia applications including e-commerce, e-government, and mobile commerce.

It is investigated that the formation of a system of adaptation of personnel at enterprises is very important in the context of modern conditions of management and business. Much attention today is paid to the modernization of personnel decisions and the system of personnel adaptation in the management of professional activities, but the problem of improving this process is not well understood. It is substantiated that adaptation is part of the personnel management system. The main goal of adaptation is the most complete, quick and effective acquaintance of a new employee with the enterprise and its functional duties. It is proved that this is not only a mechanism of interaction of personnel with the organizational environment, but also a method of developing the potential of human resources. An additional incentive to revise the system of adaptation and communication approaches was the "new format" of remote and hybrid work with the transfer of tasks to outsourcing, which covered the entire economic world. It is substantiated that the improvement of the system of personnel adaptation at enterprises is an urgent issue due to the dynamics of society and human resources. It has been studied that adaptation of personnel is a process of familiarization of employees with the conditions and rules of work in the organization, as well as assistance in integrating the employee into the team. It is necessary for both specialists who have just come to work in the company, and employees who have undergone advanced training. The importance of the formation of a new system of personnel adaptation as a tool for developing the potential of the personnel potential of the organization, which determines the relevance and applied significance of the study, has been substantiated. It is proved that the issue of formation of the personnel adaptation system at enterprises is relevant due to technological, innovative, financial and managerial changes. In modern management conditions, it is obvious that the success of any enterprise is its staff. It is substantiated that the quality of personnel of any enterprise is formed at the expense of knowledge, skills and professional level possessed by the employee. Also, an important factor of full, effective, competitive and well-established work of the enterprise is the system of adaptation of each employee to the relevant conditions and requirements of labour.

It is widely known that, for most computer applications, their users and contexts of usage are quite heterogeneous and change in time. A variability analysis approach was developed to bridge the gap between requirements engineering and human-computer interaction can help identify these variations and design flexible, adaptable and adaptive solutions that accommodate them at interaction time, i.e., during system usage. The core assumption of the approach is that an in-depth exploration of how user goals can be formulated into diverse user requests expressed in a linguistic structure using cases, designers will be better equipped to create solutions that cope with variations during user-system interaction. This paper shows how a set of adaptation-related questions and related interactive solutions may help to bridge the problem and solution spaces of flexible, adaptable and adaptive systems.

Much research has been devoted to adaptable and adaptive systems over a decade, with the aim to improve user-system interaction. Despite these efforts, we still lack a systematic approach to deal with variations in users, user goals, and contexts of use. In this paper, we revise some previous work on a language-based variability analysis process, propose a structure for the solution space of adaptable and adaptive systems, and illustrate how design decisions on how to cope with variability can be made in this approach.

The paper describes benchmarking for evolvable and adaptable real time command and control systems. MITRE's Evolvable Real-Time C3 initiative developed an approach that would enable current real time systems to evolve into the systems of the future. We designed and implemented an infrastructure and data manager so that various applications could be hosted on the infrastructure. Then we completed a follow-on effort to design flexible adaptable distributed object management systems for command and control (C2) systems. Such an adaptable system would switch scheduling algorithms, policies, and protocols depending on the need and the environment. Both initiatives were carried out for the United States Air Force. One of the key contributions of the work is the investigation of real time features for distributed object management systems. Partly as a result of our work we are now seeing various real time distributed object management products being developed. In selecting a real time distributed object management systems, we need to analyze various criteria. Therefore, we need benchmarking studies for real time distributed object management systems. Although benchmarking systems such as Hartstone and Distributed Hartstone have been developed for middleware systems, these systems are not developed specifically for distributed object based middleware. Since much of our work is heavily based on distributed objects, we developed benchmarking systems by adapting the Hartstone system. The paper describes our efforts in developing benchmarks.

Previous cytologieal evidence provides grounds for the view that heterokaryosis may well be of common occurrence in fungi, especially of the Fungi imperfecti. Previous genetical evidence shows that, so long as they are in cytoplasmic connexion, the genetically unlike nuclei of a heterokaryon can co-operate in action so that a heterokaryon can survive and grow in the laboratory on a medium which would be fatal to homokaryons, pure for the individual nuclei. It has been shown thatPenicilliumcommonly occurs wild in the form of heterokaryons enjoying an advantage in growth rate over the homokaryons which can be extracted from them. These wild heterokaryons are not, however, stable on all media, presumably because they do not enjoy an advantage in all circumstances. Heterokaryon no. 4 breaks down on a minimal medium but can be resynthesized on more natural media containing 10% apple pulp or 2% malt extract. The properties of this heterokaryon were investigated by estimating the numerical ratio of the two kinds of nucleus. Estimates were made by plating out the uninucleate spores they produce and classifying the single spore colonies so obtained as homokaryon 4 A or 4 B. A critical survey of the plating technique employed showed that these estimates could be biased by differences in recoverability of the spores, depending on a number of factors such as the concentration of spores per plate. These effects have been either standardized throughout the estimations or measured and suitable corrections applied to the results obtained. The nuclear ratios of the heterokaryons have been shown to alter characteristically with the medium. Thus, for example, on 10 % apple medium the ratio 4 A:4 B was 1:11 while on a medium containing only 20 parts of this 10% apple pulp to 80 of minimal medium it was 1:6. A correlation has been demonstrated between the nuclear ratio of the heterokaryon and the comparative growth rates of its two component homokaryons on the same medium. Variation in nuclear ratio thus affords a means of immediate somatic adjustment to a new food supply or of progressive adjustment to a changing one. These results serve to demonstrate heterokaryosis in wildPenicilliumas a system of limited somatic variation and adaptation well suited to the needs of a saprophytic fungus living on various and often changing substrates. In such a system immediate variation no longer depends on the sexual cycle which, presumably for this reason, has been lost from imperfect fungi such asPenicillium. The loss of the sexual cycle must, however, lead by its abolition of gene recombination to a lack of genetical plasticity which may be expected to be fatal in the long run. Heterokaryosis thus takes its place with other variants of the sexual system in being of immediate advantage to its possessor, under the latter’s special circumstances, but doomed in the evolutionary sense by the rigidity resulting from the sacrifice of gene recombination within nuclei. The somatic flexibility of a heterokaryon arises from the substitution of a flexible physiological control over nuclear behaviour expressed through the cytoplasm, for the rigidity of mechanical control experienced by genes within a common nucleus. In this form of control it resembles other systems of cellular adaptation depending on various types of cytoplasmic particles. The view is put forward that although dikaryons of heterothallic Basidiomycetes fall under the general heading of heterokaryons, they differ from the wild heterokaryons of Penicillia both in their past evolution and present function.

Relevance and goals. Today, the role of managing cross-cultural collectives is increasing, as there are more and more foreigners interested in working on various national platforms, in various countries and international holdings. In order for cross-cultural interaction to be devoid of negative consequences, and the effect of personnel management itself to acquire a positive trend, it is necessary to take into account certain and numerous factors that affect the characteristics of not only an individual in a multicultural team, but also the entire team in the future. The study of the topic of this topic is due to a number of important factors. First of all, there is currently an increase in the number of international companies and multicultural teams that need not only competent management, but also a system of adaptation and training, for this it is necessary to take into account the specifics of managing multicultural teams. Secondly, the globalization of the economy and the political system in one way or another affects the organization of the management process and trends in cross-cultural interaction. In this situation, the importance of cross-cultural exchange and development increases, as well as the need for knowledge about the nuances of cross-cultural management for effective business organization and prevention of potential conflicts in multicultural teams. The purpose of the study is to investigate the factors that need to be taken into account when managing a cross-cultural team. Materials and methods. To achieve the set research objectives, scientific sources of information were used on the specifics of managing cross-cultural interaction and issues of managing cross-cultural collectives. The research methodology is based on systematic and sociocultural approaches. Results. In the course of the analytical work, the factors that need to be taken into account when managing cross-cultural collectives were revealed, the importance of global and individual factors in cross-cultural interaction was outlined. The important role in the system and program of modern adaptation of personnel in cross-cultural collectives is revealed. Conclusions. The management system of cross-cultural collectives has its own characteristics, in addition, there are many factors that form the characteristics of a multicultural team, they must be taken into account. Solving modern problems in the field of cross-cultural team management requires new solutions from the management of companies, in particular, special attention should be paid to the development of a modern personnel adaptation system.

Navigation-assisted implantation of Gamma3 nails – What are the benefits of the ADAPT system?

Organic Computing (OC) and other research initiatives like Autonomic Computing or Proactive Computing have developed the vision of systems possessing life-like properties: they self-organize, adapt to their dynamically changing environments, and establish other so-called self-x properties, like self-healing, self-configuration, self-optimization, etc. What we are searching for in OC are methodologies and concepts for systems that allow to cope with increasingly complex networked application systems by introduction of self-x properties and at the same time guarantee a trustworthy and adaptive response to externally provided system objectives and control actions. Therefore, in OC, we talk about controlled self-organization . Although the terms self-organization and adaptivity have been discussed for years, we miss a clear definition of self-organization in most publications, which have a technically motivated background. In this article, we briefly summarize the state of the art and suggest a characterization of (controlled) self-organization and adaptivity that is motivated by the main objectives of the OC initiative. We present a system classification of robust, adaptable, and adaptive systems and define a degree of autonomy to be able to quantify how autonomously a system is working. The degree of autonomy distinguishes and measures external control that is exerted directly by the user ( no autonomy ) from internal control of a system which might be fully controlled by an observer/controller architecture that is part of the system ( full autonomy ). The quantitative degree of autonomy provides the basis for characterizing the notion of controlled self-organization. Furthermore, we discuss several alternatives for the design of organic systems.

Enhancing reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks for adaptive river monitoring systems: Reflections on their long-term deployment in Brazil

Human recognition-behavioral adaptation system, which corresponds to the physical adaptation system, maintains homeostasis of Human Intelligence, the recognition-behavioral Self and the recognition-behavioral World. The recognition-behavioral adaptation system was studied in the various research fields, however, it was not clearly integrated. Structuralism provides a qualitative research method to analyze the underlying structural patterns of human recognition-behavioral adaptation in the humanities. Systems theory provides a quantitative research method to analyze performance of meta-systems consisting of interrelated and interdependent single-systems in the biological sciences. In the present study, the adaptation system was analyzed via the multidisciplinary scientific procedure integrating the qualitative research method and the quantitative research method. The adaptation system of Human Intelligence was considered to be the language-metabolism system utilizing the single-modeling-codes and the meta-modeling-codes which are formed in Neuronal Network of the brain. The Self is structured corresponding to the complex-network meta-modeling-code and the centroid-hierarchy meta-modeling-code, and it involves the cybernetic feedback system in the structure. The Intelligence-module, the core of the Self, works corresponding to the syllogistic meta-modeling-code. The adaptation system of the World was considered to be the self-reference adaptation system working corresponding to the complex-network meta-modeling-code and the ascending nest-hierarchy meta-modeling-code. Reality of Psychotherapy was reductively explained with the cybernetic feedback system and the self-reference system. Finally, it was concluded that human recognition-behavioral adaptation system is reductively and holistically analyzed via the multidisciplinary scientific procedure.

With the proliferation of learning resources on the Web, finding suitable content (using telephone) has become a rigorous task for voice-based online learners to achieve better performance. The problem with Finding Content Suitability (FCS) with voice E-Learning applications is more complex when the sight-impaired learner is involved. Existing voice-enabled applications in the domain of E-Learning lack the attributes of adaptive and reusable learning objects to be able to address the FCS problem. This study provides a Voice-enabled Framework for Recommender and Adaptation (VeFRA) Systems in E-learning and an implementation of a system based on the framework with dual user interfaces – voice and Web. A usability study was carried out in a visually impaired and non-visually impaired school using the International Standard Organization’s (ISO) 9241-11 specification to determine the level of effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction. The result of the usability evaluation reveals that the prototype application developed for the school has “Good Usability” rating of 4.13 out of 5 scale. This shows that the application will not only complement existing mobile and Web-based learning systems, but will be of immense benefit to users, based on the system’s capacity for taking autonomous decisions that are capable of adapting to the needs of both visually impaired and non-visually impaired learners.

This paper describes the architectural approach for Environmental Monitoring Systems and its application to the area of quality monitoring of river water. It presents the first emerging results of the ESPRIT project EMS1. Based on the needs for water quality monitoring the requirements for an architecture capable to link distributed monitoring stations and laboratory databases are identified. Especially for adaptable and upgradable systems, information sources have to be described on a more abstract level. For this purpose a Logical Sensor Model approach has been adopted allowing the specification of data and control flow on different abstraction levels. Special emphasis is put on the three fusion layers: Sensor Validation, Situation Description, and Situation Assessment. Flexible and adaptable systems must be able to make their own decisions during a fusion process such as selecting specific sensors or applying different fusion techniques. In order to do this, an architecture concept based on Distributed AI principles is proposed.KeywordsSingle SensorMessage TypeSituation AssessmentLogical SensorWater SupplierThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Using warning systems with adaptable thresholds: Choice of security level, compliance and performance in a simulated computer security task