Pervasive Adaptation Research Articles

Ad Hoc Adaptations to Climate Change in Coastal Communities

Climate change disproportionately impacts coastal residents in the United States. Existing studies document institutional efforts to adapt to sea level rise through projects like seawalls, beach nourishment, and property acquisitions to protect communities from rising seas. Such studies capture institutional adaptations, but do not include ad hoc adaptations by homeowners impacted by climate change. How are homeowners adapting to climate hazards? This paper analyzes ethnographic and interview data from 100 households in two coastal counties in North Carolina, a state with one of the most climate vulnerable shorelines in the country. This analysis of homeowner response considers ad hoc adaptations along the North Carolina coast. Results show that homeowners recognize climate hazards and regularly adapt on their own within the context of institutionally maintained flood protection infrastructure and transportation access to the places where they live. Residents are aware of and attempt to access support for home adaptations when programs or funds are available to them after disasters and do so with varying levels of success, though the more pervasive adaptations to chronic stress are not supported by government programs or insurance mechanisms. Ad hoc adaptations may provide short-term protection from climate hazards but have questionable long-term efficacy as sea levels rise and storm strength and frequency increases. Leaving communities and households to adapt on their own as chronic climate hazards outpace institutional response exacerbates existing inequalities by relying on residents with different levels of resources and agency to adapt.

Genes and sites under adaptation at the phylogenetic scale also exhibit adaptation at the population-genetic scale

Adaptation in protein-coding sequences can be detected from multiple sequence alignments across species or alternatively by leveraging polymorphism data within a population. Across species, quantification of the adaptive rate relies on phylogenetic codon models, classically formulated in terms of the ratio of nonsynonymous over synonymous substitution rates. Evidence of an accelerated nonsynonymous substitution rate is considered a signature of pervasive adaptation. However, because of the background of purifying selection, these models are potentially limited in their sensitivity. Recent developments have led to more sophisticated mutation-selection codon models aimed at making a more detailed quantitative assessment of the interplay between mutation, purifying, and positive selection. In this study, we conducted a large-scale exome-wide analysis of placental mammals with mutation-selection models, assessing their performance at detecting proteins and sites under adaptation. Importantly, mutation-selection codon models are based on a population-genetic formalism and thus are directly comparable to the McDonald and Kreitman test at the population level to quantify adaptation. Taking advantage of this relationship between phylogenetic and population genetics analyses, we integrated divergence and polymorphism data across the entire exome for 29 populations across 7 genera and showed that proteins and sites detected to be under adaptation at the phylogenetic scale are also under adaptation at the population-genetic scale. Altogether, our exome-wide analysis shows that phylogenetic mutation-selection codon models and the population-genetic test of adaptation can be reconciled and are congruent, paving the way for integrative models and analyses across individuals and populations.

Intention as a Context: An Activity Intention Model for Adaptable Development of Applications in the Internet of Things

End-users, such as aging people, look for dynamic applications to help them in their daily activities while usually assisted by domain experts (e.g., physicians) in performing these activities. Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) augments applications with a changing context based on the activities, environments, and services. Unfortunately, most IoT application development tools are restricted to specific scenarios or involve technical challenges. We propose an activity intention model for quick application development, targeting domain experts who are not traditional software developers. Our model is based on the ContextAA micro context-awareness approach with autonomic computing-based components providing pervasive adaptations. Unlike other Internet of Things application definitions, our model promotes elicitation of the activity semantics and provides mechanisms to compute the semantics. We then generate intention as a context (IaaC), which contains a self-described activity intention context with compiled knowledge ready to be assessed in pervasive smart environments for augmented adaptations. Experimental results show a potential resource optimization for dynamic Internet of Things applications in smart homes and smart cities.

Design, Implementation and Power Analysis of Pervasive Adaptive Resourceful Smart Lighting and Alerting Devices in Developing Countries Supporting Incandescent and LED Light Bulbs.

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for energy saving techniques in residential, industrial, institutional, clinical and other multipurpose indoor and outdoor applications. Lights play an ubiquitous role around the Earth in all types of structures and outdoor surroundings. Hence, the authors propose a universal lighting control device—named Pervasive Adaptive Resourceful Smart Lighting and Alerting Device—accomplished mainly by the use of Arduino UNO R3. The Pervasive Adaptive Resourceful Smart Lighting and Alerting Device works in two modes, namely, light control and alert, by deploying the perceptive light automation and perceptive light automation with buzzer activation algorithms, respectively. The contributions of the paper are: a common lighting control solution for both incandescent and light emitting diode light bulbs for all indoor and outdoor environments. A profound power consumption analysis, and investigation of the proposed device by estimating the Energy Consumption Ratio (ECR) and Relative Energy Saving Ratio (RESR) through the real time deployment in diverse circumstances with 60 W incandescent, 8 W and 0.5 W LED light bulbs is executed. In addition to the evaluation of RESR and ECR characteristics the power consumption of light bulbs in terms of scalable conditions of number of light bulbs is also analyzed. The proposed model is proved to work efficiently for both incandescent and LED light bulbs.

The VidaSana Study: Recruitment Strategies for Longitudinal Assessment of Egocentric Hispanic Immigrant Networks.

We disseminate the recruitment strategies used in the five-year VidaSana study (started in 2017) in the Midwest region of the United States, targeting recently arrived Hispanic immigrants. VidaSana aims to follow immigrants within six months of arrival for 24 months to (1) characterize features of networks (personal and community) that improve or undermine dental health; and (2) further refine methods to quantify the evolution of egocentric networks, using social network methodology. We implemented several strategies to promote and recruit potential participants into the study. We collaborate with agents serving Indiana’s Hispanic communities using three levels of visibility. The broad level includes radio advertisements, TV interviews, newspaper advertisements, and targeted Facebook advertisements. Intermediate level visibility includes posting flyers in schools, employment agencies, immigrant welcome centers, and Hispanic businesses; making announcements at church/temple and school events; tabling at community, church and school events; and a pervasive adaptation of our strategies to the requirements of our partners. Lastly, the individualized level includes direct referrals by partners through word of mouth. From the initial 13 months of recruitment (494 screened contacts and 202 recruited participants), the most successful recruitment strategies appear to be a combination of intermediate- and individual-level strategies; specifically, face-to-face recruitment at school events, direct referrals from our community partners, and tabling at community/school/church events. The current interim findings and future final findings will help guide recruitment and retention strategies for studies focused on immigrants in the current climate of heightened immigration regulations and enforcement.

Has adaptation occurred in males and females since separate sexes evolved in the plant Silene latifolia?

The evolution of separate sexes may involve changed expression of many genes, as each sex adapts to its new state. Evidence is accumulating for sex differences in expression even in organisms that have recently evolved separate sexes from hermaphrodite or monoecious (cosexual) ancestors, such as some dioecious flowering plants. We describe evidence that a dioecious plant species with recently evolved dioecy, Silene latifolia, has undergone adaptive changes that improve functioning in females, in addition to changes that are probably pleiotropic effects of male sterility. The results suggest pervasive adaptations as soon as males and females evolve from their cosexual ancestor.

Communicative knowledge pervasively influences sensorimotor computations

Referential pointing is a characteristically human behavior, which involves moving a finger through space to direct an addressee towards a desired mental state. Planning this type of action requires an interface between sensorimotor and conceptual abilities. A simple interface could supplement spatially-guided motor routines with communicative-ostensive cues. For instance, a pointing finger held still for an extended period of time could aid the addressee’s understanding, without altering the movement’s trajectory. A more complex interface would entail communicative knowledge penetrating the sensorimotor system and directly affecting pointing trajectories. We compare these two possibilities using motion analyses of referential pointing during multi-agent interactions. We observed that communicators produced ostensive cues that were sensitive to the communicative context. Crucially, we also observed pervasive adaptations to the pointing trajectories: they were tailored to the communicative context and to partner-specific information. These findings indicate that human referential pointing is planned and controlled on the basis of partner-specific knowledge, over and above the tagging of motor routines with ostensive cues.

Capacity for public service delivery: a cross-case analysis of ten small faith-related non-profit organisations

Government-funded contracts are widely known to test the internal capacity of non-profit organisations (NPOs). Smaller faith-related NPOs are considered to be particularly lacking in the capacity needed to manage such contracts. Based on the uneven experiences of ten small faith-related non-profit organisations in a federal initiative in the United States, this article details four capacity areas critical to effective adaptation to the demands of government contracts: professional leadership, human resource management, strategy development and organisational alignment, and prior contract experience. Besides these internal organisational capacities, a key external factor found to predict effective adaptation is the capacity building given by support organisations that share the same faith orientation. However, two other factors explain the lack of pervasive adaptation, namely the financial strength of support organisations and funder perception of effective performance. The research contributes to neo-institutionalist arguments that attention to capacity and capacity builders may explain variations in adoption of practices that support public service delivery among small faith-related NPOs.

Cloud Computing: Security and Reliability Issues

Security and reliability of cloud computing services remain among the dominant concerns inhibiting their pervasive adaptation. The distributed and the multi-tenancy nature of the cloud computing paradigm can be considered as the root causes for their increased risks and vulnerabilities. Resource sharing and virtualization can also be mentioned as additional main factors contributing to or augmenting cross-site scripting and other cloud vulnerabilities. Cloud are also exposed to the risks and liabilities faced by other networked systems. Poorly designed APIs that may cause security problems or distributed denial of services attacks are the examples of this category that are considered in this paper. Public key infrastructure provides the foundations for provision of some essential security services. These include services such as confidentiality, authentication, and privacy that are of vital importance for establishing trust and confidence between the cloud providers and their clients. In this work, we will discuss the potential flaws of this infrastructure and examine how they may deteriorate the security and reliability levels of the cloud environments. To enable a comprehensive study of the challenges in security and reliability of the cloud computing environments, we categorize the risks and vulnerabilities they face. Traditional techniques, based on cryptography, can address some of these challenges to a certain degree. We will argue that they may not be efficient for use in cloud environments. We then focus on data-centric and homomorphic encryption methods that may provide more appropriate solutions in addressing the challenges in cloud computing security and reliability.

New Directions for Pervasive Computing in Logistics

This paper investigates the new trends in the field of “pervasive” or “ubiquitous” computing in logistics. Over the past two decades, research challenges in pervasive computing have evolved following the rapid progress of information and communication technology. Researchers are working to create an “Internet of Things” that globally interconnects smart devices and sensor networks. Technologies such as wireless communication, ubiquitous sensors, and passive or semi-passive RFID, are essential to monitor the transport chain. “Pervasive adaptation” is a new research challenge that has been recently introduced to describe system's ability to autonomously recognize the situation and adapt to situational changes. For example, it is expected that intelligent parcels that can observe and evaluate current environmental conditions including traffic information, velocity, new orders, temperature, or storage conditions, and decide adaptations such as changing transport route or destination and swapping vehicle. In order modern ubiquitous computing devices to become fully functional they need to overcome compatibility and security problems; these issues as well as potential solutions are explored in this paper. On the other hand, as new technology such as Ultra High Frequency RFID becomes more mature, it is launching into ubiquitous status in commerce and society.

Was autotomy a pervasive adaptation of the crinoid stalk during the Paleozoic?

The crinoids were the most diverse and numerically most common echinoderms in the Paleozoic, as well as being one of the most important groups of sessile invertebrates. Autotomy (self-mutilation) in the stem, that is, the casting off of the more distal part, is only known to occur in one extant group of crinoids, the post-Paleozoic isocrinine sea lilies. These crinoids have a long distal stalk with regularly spaced articulations (i.e., cryptosymplexies) adapted for autotomy. They are connected together by short, mutable collagenous tissues that undergo irreversible destabilization during autotomy; the distal opening of the axial canal is then sealed by new growth of calcite. Paleozoic crinoids lacked cryptosymplectial articulations, but have other adaptations that may have singly or collectively facilitated autotomy. These include the linking of adjacent short lengths of stalk (i.e., noditaxes) by short ligaments; the evolutionary trend to narrow the axial canal; occlusion of the axial canal in some species; and the ability to seal the axial canal. Other morphological features of relevance to autotomy include the common division of the stem into morphologically distinct regions and attachment by a distal, recumbent radicular runner. The ability to autotomize the distal stem in many Paleozoic crinoid clades was, at the very least, latent; if overt, it would have facilitated escape from environmental disturbance. It may, in part, explain the great abundance of disarticulated crinoid stem fragments in many Ordovician to Permian sedimentary deposits.

Introduction to the special section on pervasive adaptation

Introduction to the special section on pervasive adaptation

This Pervasive Day: Creative, Interactive Methods for Encouraging Public Engagement with FET Research

This paper describes a case study of a programme of interactive public engagement activities presented by the PerAda Co-ordination Action project (FET Proactive Initiative on Pervasive Adaptation) [1] in 2011. The intention behind these events was to inform an interested public audience about the technology and design of pervasive and adaptive computing systems in general, and PerAda research in particular. Additional explicit aims were to widen debate about the socio-technical implications of this research, and to assess public attitudes to its potential applications in an accessible, engaging and creative manner.

Reflective Assistance—Pervasive Adaptation in Real Life Computing

The ultimate goal of the reflective assistance control system is to observe people in a specific real-life situation, diagnose their psychological and behavioral state and influence the ambient accordingly. The system uses reflective technology to exercise pervasive adaptation through non explicit man-machine interaction based on context awareness. Recent results show effective use in vehicular domain and promise further applications in environmental, ambient assisted living and health care areas.

Pervasive Socio-Technical Fabric

In 2011, now 20 years after M. Weiser's “The Computer for the 21st Century” (1991), the vision impacting the evolution of Pervasive Computing is still the claim for an intuitive, unobtrusive and distraction free interaction with omnipresent, technology-rich environments. In an attempt of bringing interaction “back to the real world” after an era of keyboard and screen interaction (Personal computing), computers are being understood as secondary artefacts, embedded and operating in the background, whereas the set of all physical objects present in the environment are understood as the primary artefacts, the “interface”. Over it's more than two decades of evolution, the field has been undergoing three generations of research challenges fertilizing Pervasive Computing: The first generation aiming towards autonomic systems and their adaptation was driven by the availability of technology to connect literally everything to everything (Connectedness, 1991-2005). The second generation inherited from the upcoming context recognition and knowledge processing technologies (Awareness, 2000-2007), e.g. context-awareness, self-awareness, resource-awareness, etc. Finally, a third generation, building upon connectedness and awareness, attempts to exploit the (ontological) semantics of Pervasive Computing systems, services and interactions (i.e. giving meaning to situations and actions, and “intelligence” to systems) (Smartness, 2004-). While Pervasive Computing research has its success in the first, partly also in the second generation, the third generation is evolving as we speak.The FP7 FET proactive project PANORAMA (FET proactive/Goal 8.3: Pervasive Adaptation) picked up on the challenge of identifying the new trails of Pervasive Computing research, involving some 240 of the most distinguished researchers in the field in a solicitation process that lasted for about three years. The result of this process is manifested in the Pervasive Adaptation Research Agenda Book (www.perada.eu/research-agenda), which is presented in this article and the respective fett11 session.

Emergent engineering: a radical paradigm shift

We shed light on the disruptive advances brought by the ubiquity of computing and communication environments, which link devices and people in unprecedented ways into a new kind of techno social systems and infrastructures recently named 'cyber-physical ecosystems' (CPE). While pointing to fundamental biases that prevent the traditional engineering school of thought from coping with the magnitude in scale and complexity of these new technological developments, we attempt to lay out the foundation for a new way of thinking about systems design, referred to as emergent engineering. One major characteristic of CPE is that, given their very nature, they cannot be a priori defined but rather emerge from the interactions among a myriad of elementary components. We show how this emergence can be guided by balancing positive and negative feedback, which tunes the growth of new configurations and adapts the system to sharp and unexpected changes. Rather than attempting to design the system as a whole, the components of the system are endowed with capabilities of dynamic self-assembly, disassembly and re-assembly to enable 'evolve-ability'. As paradoxical as it may seem to the classically trained systems engineer, this new attitude of the designer as an 'enabler' (vs. 'dictator' of a system's blueprint) allows the system to seamlessly adapt its development and evolve to meet dynamic goals and unexpected situations in an anticipative manner – an impossible feat under the traditional approach. To the extent that it produces new functionality, the proposed method enables a system to evolve via its ability of pervasive adaptation. Emergent engineering lies at a boundary where theoretical discovery meets systems engineering, computing and communications into a new convergent science of complex systems design. It currently transforms systems and software engineering by embracing various highly interdisciplinary perspectives.

Recent evidence for pervasive adaptation targeting gene expression attributable to population size change

Addressing the current interest in the role of selection in the evolution of gene regulation, the study by Fraser et al. (1) proposes a test based on coherent effects of cis and trans expression quantitative trait loci to detect lineage-specific selection on gene expression using genome-wide data from Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Based on both this test statistic (a modification of the standard McDonald–Kreitman 2 × 2 contingency table) and population genetic analyses, the authors claim evidence for widespread selective sweeps—concluding that S. cerevisiae is evolving primarily through adaptive modification of expression levels.

Pervasive Model Adaptation: The Integration of Planning and Information Gathering in Dynamic Production Systems

Model-based planning often presumes a static system model, while in a practice physical system may evolve or drift over time. This paper proposes the idea of pervasive model adaptation in a production system, where the model is dynamically updated using observation of production output. The core idea is the interplay between model adaptation and production planning. We seek plans which simultaneously serve the goals of achieving high productivity for production, and information gathering for model adaptation. We use a modular printing example to illustrate issues such as formulation of the information criterion and search strategy for informative plans. The idea of pervasive adaptation can be further extended to improve long term productivity in production systems.

Dissection of a Hypoxia-induced, Nitric Oxide–mediated Signaling Cascade

Befitting oxygen's key role in life's processes, hypoxia engages multiple signaling systems that evoke pervasive adaptations. Using surrogate genetics in a powerful biological model, we dissect a poorly understood hypoxia-sensing and signal transduction system. Hypoxia triggers NO-dependent accumulation of cyclic GMP and translocation of cytoplasmic GFP-Relish (an NFkappaB/Rel transcription factor) to the nucleus in Drosophila S2 cells. An enzyme capable of eliminating NO interrupted signaling specifically when it was targeted to the mitochondria, arguing for a mitochondrial NO signal. Long pretreatment with an inhibitor of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), L-NAME, blocked signaling. However, addition shortly before hypoxia was without effect, suggesting that signaling is supported by the prior action of NOS and is independent of NOS action during hypoxia. We implicated the glutathione adduct, GSNO, as a signaling mediator by showing that overexpression of the cytoplasmic enzyme catalyzing its destruction, GSNOR, blocks signaling, whereas knockdown of this activity caused reporter translocation in the absence of hypoxia. In downstream steps, cGMP accumulated, and calcium-dependent signaling was subsequently activated via cGMP-dependent channels. These findings reveal the use of unconventional steps in an NO pathway involved in sensing hypoxia and initiating signaling.

Pervasive Adaptive Evolution among Interactors of the Drosophila Hybrid Inviability Gene, Nup96

Nup96 is involved in a lethal hybrid incompatibility between 2 fruit fly species, Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans. Recurrent adaptive evolution drove the rapid functional divergence of Nup96 in both the D. melanogaster and the D. simulans lineages. Functional divergence of Nup96 between these 2 species is unexpected as Nup96 encodes part of the Nup107 subcomplex, an architectural component of nuclear pore complexes, the macromolecular channels in nuclear envelopes that mediate nucleocytoplasmic traffic in all eukaryotes. Here we study the evolutionary histories of 5 of Nup96's protein interactors--3 stable Nup107 subcomplex proteins (Nup75, Nup107, and Nup133) and 2 mobile nucleoporins (Nup98 and Nup153)--and show that all 5 have experienced recurrent adaptive evolution. These results are consistent with selection-driven coevolution among molecular interactors within species causing the incidental evolution of incompatible interactions seen in hybrids between species. We suggest that genetic conflict-driven processes may have contributed to the rapid molecular evolution of Nup107 subcomplex genes.