High-level Directives Research Articles

CARL

Motion synthesis in a dynamic environment has been a long-standing problem for character animation. Methods using motion capture data tend to scale poorly in complex environments because of their larger capturing and labeling requirement. Physics-based controllers are effective in this regard, albeit less controllable. In this paper, we present CARL, a quadruped agent that can be controlled with high-level directives and react naturally to dynamic environments. Starting with an agent that can imitate individual animation clips, we use Generative Adversarial Networks to adapt high-level controls, such as speed and heading, to action distributions that correspond to the original animations. Further fine-tuning through the deep reinforcement learning enables the agent to recover from unseen external perturbations while producing smooth transitions. It then becomes straightforward to create autonomous agents in dynamic environments by adding navigation modules over the entire process. We evaluate our approach by measuring the agent's ability to follow user control and provide a visual analysis of the generated motion to show its effectiveness.

Zero Trust Validation: From Practical Approaches to Theory

How can high-level directives concerning risk, cybersecurity and compliance be operationalized in the central nervous system of any organization above a certain complexity? How can the effectiveness of technological solutions for security be proven and measured, and how can this technology be aligned with the governance and financial goals at the board level? These are the essential questions for any CEO, CIO or CISO that is concerned with the wellbeing of the firm. The concept of Zero Trust (ZT) approaches information and cybersecurity from the perspective of the asset to be protected, and from the value that asset represents. Zero Trust has been around for quite some time. Most professionals associate Zero Trust with a particular architectural approach to cybersecurity, involving concepts such as segments, resources that are accessed in a secure manner and the maxim “always verify never trust”. This paper describes the current state of the art in Zero Trust usage. We investigate the limitations of current approaches and how these are addressed in the form of Critical Success Factors in the Zero Trust Framework developed by ON2IT ‘Zero Trust Innovators’ (1).

ACC_TEST: Hybrid Testing Approach for OpenACC-Based Programs

In recent years, OpenACC has been used in many supercomputers and attracted many non-computer science specialists for parallelizing their programs in different scientific fields, including weather forecasting and simulations. OpenACC is a high-level programming model that supports parallelism and is easy to learn to use by adding high-level directives without considering too many low-level details. Testing parallel programs is a difficult task, made even harder if using programming models, especially if they have been badly programmed. If so, it will be challenging to detect their runtime errors as well as their causes, whether the error is from the user source code or from the programming model directives. Even when these errors are detected and the source code modified, we cannot guarantee that the errors have been corrected or are still hidden. There are many tools and studies that have investigated several programming models for identifying and detecting related errors. However, OpenACC has not been targeted clearly in any testing tool or previous studies, even though OpenACC has many benefits and features that could lead to increasing use in achieving parallel systems with less effort. In this paper, we enhance ACC_TEST with the ability to test OpenACC-based programs and detect runtime errors by using hybrid-testing techniques that enhance error coverage occurring in OpenACC as well as overheads and testing time.

A National Priority: Improving Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People With Cancer Through an Optimal Care Pathway

Background and context: Cancer survival rates in Australia are among the best in the world, yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (indigenous) people continue to experience disparities in the distribution and burden of cancer, and unwarranted variations in outcomes. Indigenous Australians are 40% more likely to die of cancer than non-Indigenous Australians. Cancer Australia developed the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cancer Framework (the framework), which identified 7 national priorities to address disparities in cancer outcomes experienced by indigenous Australians. An ongoing collaboration with indigenous Australians was integral to developing this shared agenda. Priority 5 in the framework highlights the need to ensure indigenous Australians affected by cancer receive optimal and culturally appropriate treatment, services, and supportive and palliative care. Aim: To improve cancer outcomes for indigenous Australians through the development and national endorsement of a population-specific Optimal Care Pathway (OCP) to guide the delivery of consistent, safe, high-quality, culturally appropriate and evidence-based care. Strategy/Tactics: Cancer Australia formed a partnership with the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to address Priority 5 and develop the OCP. The approach to development was underpinned by Cancer Australia's Model of Engagement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and guided by the national Leadership Group on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cancer Control (Leadership Group). Program/Policy process: Cancer Australia, in collaboration with DHHS: • reviewed experiences of care and the framework's comprehensive evidence base • developed a draft OCP to complement tumor-specific pathways • facilitated an Expert Working Group, comprising indigenous health sector leaders and consumers to refine and validate the draft OCP • undertook national public consultation, including with the indigenous health sector and community, health professionals and professional colleges • received an indication of support to proceed to endorsement from the Leadership Group. Outcomes: The first population-specific OCP for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with cancer received national endorsement. It will guide the delivery of consistent, safe, high-quality, culturally appropriate and evidence-based care. What was learned: Key elements of optimal care include: addressing the cultural appropriateness of the healthcare environment; improving cross-cultural communication; relationship building with local community; optimizing health literacy; recognition of men's and women's business; and the need to use culturally appropriate resources. The national priority in the framework informed and unified high-level direction, which was integral to effective OCP development and endorsement. The evidence-based, step-wise development approach contributed to its relevance, utility and quality.

Interacting with team oriented plans in multi-robot systems

Team oriented plans have become a popular tool for operators to control teams of autonomous robots to pursue complex objectives in complex environments. Such plans allow an operator to specify high level directives and allow the team to autonomously determine how to implement such directives. However, the operators will often want to interrupt the activities of individual team members to deal with particular situations, such as a danger to a robot that the robot team cannot perceive. Previously, after such interrupts, the operator would usually need to restart the team plan to ensure its success. In this paper, we present an approach to encoding how interrupts can be smoothly handled within a team plan. Building on a team plan formalism that uses Colored Petri Nets, we describe a mechanism that allows a range of interrupts to be handled smoothly, allowing the team to efficiently continue with its task after the operator intervention. We validate the approach with an application of robotic watercraft and show improved overall efficiency. In particular, we consider a situation where several platforms should travel through a set of pre-specified locations, and we identify three specific cases that require the operator to interrupt the plan execution: (i) a boat must be pulled out; (ii) all boats should stop the plan and move to a pre-specified assembly position; (iii) a set of boats must synchronize to traverse a dangerous area one after the other. Our experiments show that the use of our interrupt mechanism decreases the time to complete the plan (up to 48 % reduction) and decreases the operator load (up to 80 % reduction in number of user actions). Moreover, we performed experiments with real robotic platforms to validate the applicability of our mechanism in the actual deployment of robotic watercraft.

Проект «государственный центр реставрации музыкальных инструментов» в контексте сохранения материального наследия музыкальной культуры

The article discusses the functioning of organizations and the increasing social and economic significance of the
 results of activity of economic entities in the sphere of culture. In this case, the orientation of the management
 of cultural institutions is in the direction of higher levels of economic activity, utility and profitability. In this
 regard, there is the question about the effectiveness of the institutions of culture not only in economic but also
 in social sphere. The need for the implementation of the project “national centre of restoration of musical
 instruments” as a scientific-educational center is proved by the fact that the budgetary allocation for its creation
 and development will support the unique mission of the center for the broadcast world tradition of preserving
 material heritage of musical culture. On the other hand, it will contribute to a social result, which is expressed
 in the effectiveness of the protection events of the musical objects of cultural heritage. A separate issue is the
 preservation of cultural heritage, including tangible objects and music culture through a series of government
 support measures. However, in recent years, there is a tendency to stagnation in the share of expenditure on
 culture. The article presents the planned expenditures of the budgetary system, which is planned spending on
 culture be left at 0.5% of GDP. On the other hand, financing of applied scientific research in the field of culture
 has increased. This decision is connected with the growing social and economic significance of the results of
 activity of economic entities in the sphere of culture in the direction of higher levels of economic activity, utility
 and profitability. The feasibility of the implementation of the project “national centre of restoration of musical
 instruments” as a scientific-educational center is to broadcast the world’s traditions of preservation of material
 heritage of musical culture and assist in attracting private investment in projects and activities for restoration
 and examination of objects of musical culture.

Interventions to Support System-level Implementation of Health Promoting Schools: A Scoping Review.

Health promoting schools (HPS) is recognized globally as a multifaceted approach that can support health behaviours. There is increasing clarity around factors that influence HPS at a school level but limited synthesized knowledge on the broader system-level elements that may impact local implementation barriers and support uptake of a HPS approach. This study comprised a scoping review to identify, summarise and disseminate the range of research to support the uptake of a HPS approach across school systems. Two reviewers screened and extracted data according to inclusion/exclusion criteria. Relevant studies were identified using a multi-phased approach including searching electronic bibliographic databases of peer reviewed literature, hand-searching reference lists and article recommendations from experts. In total, 41 articles met the inclusion criteria for the review, representing studies across nine international school systems. Overall, studies described policies that provided high-level direction and resources within school jurisdictions to support implementation of a HPS approach. Various multifaceted organizational and professional interventions were identified, including strategies to enable and restructure school environments through education, training, modelling and incentives. A systematic realist review of the literature may be warranted to identify the types of intervention that work best for whom, in what circumstance to create healthier schools and students.

Orchestration of energy efficiency capabilities in networks

The energy demand for operating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems has been growing, implying in high operational costs and consequent increase of carbon emissions. Both in datacenters and telecom infrastructures, the networks represent a significant amount of energy spending. Given that, there is an increased demand for energy efficiency solutions, and several capabilities to save energy have been proposed. However, it is very difficult to orchestrate such energy efficiency capabilities, that is, coordinate or combine them in the same network, ensuring a conflict-free operation and choosing the best one for a given scenario, ensuring that a capability not suited to the current bandwidth utilization will not be applied and lead to congestion or packet loss. There is neither a way to do this taking business directives into account. In this regard, a method able to orchestrate different energy efficiency capabilities is proposed considering the possible combinations and conflicts among them, as well as the best option for a given workload and network characteristics. The business policies are refined down to the network level in order to bring high-level directives into the operation, and a Utility Function is used to combine energy efficiency and performance requirements. A Decision Tree able to determine what to do in each scenario is deployed in a Software Defined Network environment. The proposed method was validated with different experiments, testing the Utility Function, checking the extra savings when combining several capabilities, the decision tree interpolation and dynamicity aspects. The orchestration proved valid to solve the problem of finding the best combination for a given scenario, achieving additional savings due to the combination, besides ensuring a conflict-free operation.

A career in (mRNA) decay.

A career in (mRNA) decay.

Special Section on the 13th International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering 2010

The papers included in this special section are new and extended contributions related to work that was presented at the 13th International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (ICCCBE 2010) that was jointly held with the 17th International Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering (ICE10) between June 30 and July 2, 2010, at the University of Nottingham, UK. The ICCCBE conference is part of the biannual ICCCBE conference series, the organization of which is overseen by the International Society for Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (ISCCBE). The organization of the ICE Workshop series is overseen by the European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering, the EG-ICE. The 13th ICCCBE Conference and the 17th ICE Workshop were jointly held in Nottingham, UK, hosted by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Nottingham. The conference focused on the advances, innovations, and future challenges of the application of computing in engineering in general, and civil and building engineering in particular. The program included 303 paper presentations, 20 of which were posters. These papers have undergone a two-stage peer-review process and were drawn from a total of 422 submissions. The accepted papers have been contributed to by 532 different authors, including researchers and practicing experts from 40 countries and 253 organizations. The conference attracted 354 delegates. The activities were organized into 47 technical sessions, of which two were plenary and 45 were run in five parallel sessions. The conference fringe hosted a number of official meetings, including those of the ISCCBE and the EG-ICE, the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering editorial board, and the ASCE Executive, TCCIT, and Intelligent Computing Committees. The conference was also accompanied by an industrial exhibition. The exhibition included mainly construction industry software vendors. The conference was sponsored by Tekla, Autodesk, AceCAD, SOFiSTiK, and Acumen. It was supported by ASCE, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers, and the Spencer Institute. The proceedings were published in two forms. The hard copy publication included the two-page extended abstracts (Tizani 2010). The full-paper versions were included on electronic media and are presently available online for open access at http:// www.engineering.nottingham.ac.uk/icccbe. The keynote lectures focused on the future challenges for infrastructure provision and management, the information modeling needs of the digital building, and the issue of sustainability. The role that information technologies can play in tackling these challenges and the technological advances that are needed for this purpose were also covered. A plenary session dedicated to industrial speakers was held on the second day of the conference. The session presented future plans and aspirations from the point of views of construction and software companies. The other 45 sessions covered the breadth and depth of computing in engineering, including advances in information technologies and novelty in applications. One possible grouping of the paper contributions can be as follows: simulation and automation (65 papers); information modeling and knowledge management (35 papers); construction and management (46 papers); design support and architecture and planning (47 papers); evolutionary and adaptive methods (15 papers); infrastructure monitoring, maintenance, and management and active control of structures (16 papers); computational mechanics (50 papers); and engineering education (24 papers). The proceedings cover advances and innovations in information technologies as applied to engineering problems. They also include new approaches and methodologies to tackle engineering problems and provide insightful looks at the challenges and the information needs of the future. The proceedings include considerable focus on information modeling for ever-more digital representation of the world encompassing more aspects and more complex domains, life-cycle and sustainability issues responding to the global climate challenges, and automation in construction for improved accuracy and productivity. The contributions at the conference proposed future directions and challenges related to computing in civil and building engineering. These included better exploitation of digital information modeling and extending the standardized product and process modeling technologies; improving decision-support capabilities and decision-implication analysis through integrating wider aspects of the problem space; embedding optimization techniques more holistically; and integrating all of these by making more use of virtualization in an attempt to simplify the use of the output technologies. It could be argued that the high-level directions and challenges previously mentioned are not very different from those that could have been predicted many years ago. However, it is worth stressing that, with the increased capabilities and reach of information technologies and the greater expectations of users, the current ambitions are an order of magnitude greater.

Trellis: Portability across architectures with a high-level framework

The increasing computational needs of parallel applications inevitably require portability across parallel architectures, which now include heterogeneous processing resources, such as CPUs and GPUs, and multiple SIMD/SIMT widths. However, the lack of a common parallel programming paradigm that provides predictable, near-optimal performance on each resource leads to the use of low-level frameworks with architecture-specific optimizations, which in turn cause the code base to diverge and makes porting difficult. Our experiences with parallel applications and frameworks lead us to the conclusion that achieving performance portability requires a common set of high-level directives and efficient mapping onto each architecture.In order to demonstrate this concept, we develop Trellis, a prototype programming framework that allows the programmer to maintain only a single generic and structured codebase that executes efficiently on both the CPU and the GPU. Our approach annotates such code with a single set of high-level directives, derived from both OpenMP and OpenACC, that is made compatible for both architectures. Most importantly, motivated by the limitations of the OpenACC compiler in transforming such code into a GPU kernel, we introduce a thread synchronization directive and a set of transformation techniques that allow us to obtain the GPU code with the desired parallelization that yields more optimal performance.While a common high-level programming framework for both CPU and GPU is not yet available, our analysis shows that even obtaining the best-case GPU performance with OpenACC, state-of-the-art solution, requires modifications to the structure of codes to properly exploit braided parallelism, and cope with conditional statements or serial sections. While this already requires prior knowledge of compiler behavior the optimal performance is still unattainable due to the lack of synchronization. We describe the contributions of Trellis in addressing these problems by showing how it can achieve correct parallelization of the original codes for three parallel applications, with performance competitive to that of OpenMP and CUDA, improved programmability and reduced overall code length.

MediaBank: Keyword Search and Tag Cloud Functionalities for a Multimedia Content Authoring Web Platform

The composition of multimedia presentations is a timeand resource-consuming task if not afforded in a well-defined manner. This is particularly true when people having different roles and following different high-level directives, collaborate in the authoring and assembling of a final product. For this reason we adopt the Select, Assemble, Transform and Present (SATP) approach to coordinate the presentation authoring and a tag cloud-based search engine in order to help users in efficiently retrieving useful assets. In the first of this paper we present MediaPresenter, the framework we developed to support companies in the creation of multimedia communication means, providing an instrument that users can exploit every time new communication channels have to be created. In the second part we describe how we adopt keyword search techniques coupled with Tag Cloud in order to summarize the results over the stored data.

Advances and challenges in computing in civil and building engineering

This paper provides an overview of the advances presented in the manuscripts included in this issue. The authors of these manuscripts were asked to propose future directions and challenges in their respective research areas. This paper summarises these proposals and concludes with general directions and challenges related to computing in civil and building engineering. The suggested directions include enhancing digital information modelling and extending the standardised product and process modelling technologies; improving decision-support capabilities and decision–implication analysis through integrating wider-aspects of the problem space; embedding optimisation techniques more holistically; and integrating all of these by making more use of virtualisation in an attempt to simplify the use of the output technologies. The challenges that will arise as a consequence will inevitably include reducing the inherent complexity in such a manner that the resulting models are both realistic and useable by all of the disciplines involved. Another main challenge is the inclusion of concepts that are significant but less readily formalised than traditional engineering ones. It could be argued that the high-level directions and challenges mentioned above are not very different from those that could have been predicted a considerable number of years ago. However, it is worth stressing that, with increased capabilities and reach of information technologies and greater expectations of decision makers, the current ambitions are an order of magnitude greater. The proposed directions and the resulting challenges are now much greater in both scale and breadth.

Philosophy and the Rationalisation of Educative Action: The Example of Personal Autonomy

In France, the philosophy of education is not accustomed to reflect on the concept of the ‘education system’. Often, the ‘humanistic’ purposes that it gives to education are far away from the real goals of a systematic education. Often also, it is confined to a critical attitude, whose constructive side is missing. Which form of philosophical practice is desirable vis-à-vis the transformations of the education systems? How to develop an at the same time normative and critical thought, which take account of the current evolutions? This is what this contribution is concerned with, using the limited example of personal autonomy. In this reply to Philippe Foray's article ‘Philosophy and the Rationalisation of Educative Action’, the author salutes Foray's call to anchor the project of articulating aims of education in the realities of contemporary education but claims that Foray's plea to re-imagine the philosophy of education is arbitrarily restricted. The notion that defending high-level directives should preoccupy educational philosophy is rejected. Far from characterising educational philosophy prior to mass, state-managed educational systems, the author argues, a more faithful rendering of the history of the field demonstrates that the responsibility of stating education's ends was largely imposed on educational philosophy by the rationalisation of educational systems itself. In conclusion, contemporary practical ethics is advanced as a model for a more expansive conception of educational philosophy's potential contribution to educational research, policy and practice.

Setting directions for nanotechnology in New Zealand

In 2007 the New Zealand government released a Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies Roadmap, it provides a summary of international and national research and places nanotechnology in the context of the government's strategic priorities. The Roadmap sets high level directions for nanotechnology-related research and policy in New Zealand. This paper provides an overview of these directions. Nanotechnology is currently not an area of substantial government investment. The key message in the Roadmap is that New Zealand needs to take a considered approach to nanoscience and nanotechnologies (both at a research and policy level) so that maximum benefit can be derived from investments and the country is well placed to appropriately adapt or adopt nanotechnologies developed elsewhere.

Planning biped locomotion using motion capture data and probabilistic roadmaps

Typical high-level directives for locomotion of human-like characters are useful for interactive games and simulations as well as for off-line production animation. In this paper, we present a new scheme for planning natural-looking locomotion of a biped figure to facilitate rapid motion prototyping and task-level motion generation. Given start and goal positions in a virtual environment, our scheme gives a sequence of motions to move from the start to the goal using a set of live-captured motion clips. Based on a novel combination of probabilistic path planning and hierarchical displacement mapping, our scheme consists of three parts: roadmap construction, roadmap search, and motion generation. We randomly sample a set of valid footholds of the biped figure from the environment to construct a directed graph, called a roadmap, that guides the locomotion of the figure. Every edge of the roadmap is associated with a live-captured motion clip. Augmenting the roadmap with a posture transition graph, we traverse it to obtain the sequence of input motion clips and that of target footprints. We finally adapt the motion sequence to the constraints specified by the footprint sequence to generate a desired locomotion.

Parallel object allocation via user-specified directives: A case study in traffic simulation

Predefined and automatic approaches to allocation cannot always achieve satisfactory results, due to the very different behaviours in the dynamic need of resources of parallel applications. This paper presents the approach adopted in the Parallel Objects (PO) environment to let users drive object allocation in parallel/distributed architectures. A set of high-level directives permits users to specify the allocation needs of application objects; a dynamic load-balancing tool – part of the environment run-time support – uses the user-level allocation directives to tune its behaviour. This paper presents the PO implementation of an application example in the field of traffic simulation. The goal is to show the ease of use and the flexibility of the allocation directives, together with the effectiveness of the approach in improving the performances of dynamic object-oriented parallel applications.

Standard based framework for the of manufacturing control development systems

A Manufacturing Control Systems CASE tool, called MCSTOOLS, has been developed with the aim of reducing the effort needed to produce this kind of software. The control systems developed by means of this tool follow the Control Systems for Integrated Manufacturing (COSIMA conceptual model (ESPRIT 477 project). In order to minimize the development time of Manufacturing Control Systems (MCS), this CASE tool automatically generates as much software as possible . In addition, the software produced by the MCSTOOLS is highly reusable, as it conforms to a widely accepted software engineering method- Object Oriented Analysis/ Design/ Programming (OOA/ D/ P- and several manufacturing and communications standards. Among these standards the most relevant are; Product Data Representation and Exchange (also known as STEP, ISO 10303), Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS, ISO 9506) and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). In order to achieve the objective of producing MCSs able to be adapted to a wide range of manufacturing environments, seve ral techniques have been incorporated into the software generated by the CASE tool. The most important of these techniques are: Object oriented distributed computing, object oriented multithreading computing and object persistence. In addition, the software produced includes a Coloured Petri Net based state control module and a generic user interface written in Java. The MCS CASE tool developed can be used in different ways depending on the number of new system elements to be controlled and the complexity of this system. So in some situations it is possible to generate the control software automatically without manual assistance by using the graphical user interface of MCSTOOLS. In other cases it is also necessary to modify or to develop software using high level directives and macro language constructs included in the CASE tool. Whereas for the remainder of cases, as for other systems, it is necessary to modify or develop C++ software. When needed, new source code is developed out of a skeleton generated by the CASE tool.

Planning systems in the next century (I)

This document is the first part of two articles that present a vision on planning systems in the next century. It is mostly concerned with the medium- and long-term planning levels, whereas the second paper is much more focused on the short-term planning level, e.g., shopfloor control. First, a brief overview is given of problems that exist in current planning concepts and planning systems. The general statement is that current planning concepts and systems are often too simple in their modelling of the real world. This is illustrated using the example of Material Requirements Planning (MRP). The next section describes five ‘vision statements’ that have been setup to present a vision on future planning systems. These statements describe a number of aspects of planning systems and should be seen as high-level directions in future developments. The most important thought presented here is that a transition will take place from one centralized planning environment into an environment that contains multiple autonomous planning systems, where planning systems are able to cooperate with other planning systems based on defined protocols. Furthermore, the role of the human planner will focus much more on control instead of execution. The last section describes a number of barriers that must be overcome to realize the presented vision.

Planning for information systems resources?

Increasingly, organizations are looking towards IS planning in an effort to force information technology to live up to its heralded promise. Many of these are finding that their efforts are resulting more in disappointment than in organizational advantage. This article reviews the principles of information systems planning and reports the practices found in organizations. The authors argue that these practices lack the high level direction required to achieve mastery in the area. To rectify this, they propose a four-tier planning framework for information technology, information systems, and information management. This framework provides guidance for an integrated approach to the management of an organization's information and technology resources by promoting the development of a planning platform from which consolidated planning can take place at operational, tactical, and strategic levels.