A large body of research describes the importance of adaptability for systems to be resilient in the face of disruptions. However, adaptive processes can be fallible, either because systems fail to adapt in situations requiring new ways of functioning, or because the adaptations themselves produce undesired consequences. A central question is then: how can systems better manage their capacity to adapt to perturbations, and constitute intelligent adaptive systems? Based on studies conducted in different high-risk domains (healthcare, mission control, military operations, urban firefighting), we have identified three basic patterns of adaptive failures or traps: (1) decompensation – when a system exhausts its capacity to adapt as disturbances and challenges cascade; (2) working at cross-purposes – when sub-systems or roles exhibit behaviors that are locally adaptive but globally maladaptive; (3) getting stuck in outdated behaviors – when a system over-relies on past successes although conditions of operation change. The identification of such basic patterns then suggests ways in which a work organization, as an example of a complex adaptive system, needs to behave in order to see and avoid or recognize and escape the corresponding failures. The paper will present how expert practitioners exhibit such resilient behaviors in high-risk situations, and how adverse events can occur when systems fail to do so. We will also explore how various efforts in research related to complex adaptive systems provide fruitful directions to advance both the necessary theoretical work and the development of concrete solutions for improving systems’ resilience.

In this paper, we present a method for isometric correction of manifold learning techniques. We first present an isometric nonlinear dimension reduction method. Our proposed method overcomes the issues associated with well-known isometric embedding techniques such as ISOMAP and maximum variance unfolding (MVU), i.e., computational complexity and the geodesic convexity requirement. Based on the proposed algorithm, we derive our isometric correction method. Our approach follows an isometric solution to the problem of local tangent space alignment. We provide a derivation of a fast iterative solution. The performance of our algorithm is illustrated on both synthetic and real datasets compared to other methods.

The paper uses the SCOP theory of concepts to model the role of environmental context on three levels of entrepreneurial opportunity: idea generation, idea development, and entrepreneurial decision. The role of contextual-fit in the generation and development of ideas is modeled as the collapse of their superposition state into one of the potential states that composes this superposition. The projection of this collapsed state on the socio-economic basis results in interference between the developed idea and the perceptions of the supporting community, undergoing an eventual collapse for an entrepreneurial decision that reflects the shared vision of its stakeholders. The developed idea may continue to evolve due to continuous or discontinuous changes in the environment. The model offers unique insights into the effects of external influences on entrepreneurial decisions.

In this paper we propose a middleware to reuse multimedia resources in order to produce new types of multimedia artifacts. In this work we adopt some basic concepts of film theory, such as the notions of plot, fabula and, in particular, diegetic time. The techniques we use are located within the area of artificial intelligence, using an explicit representation of time. The middleware consists of several modules, some devoted to the semantic annotation of multimedia components, and others to their visualization. Some modules regard the analysis of temporal connectivity and consistency of events. From a methodological point of view, an important module of the middleware contains the representation of a story (time of the narration and time of the story) and the temporal reasoning services, which are both implemented using a logic programming language (Flora2). Finally, there is a module in the middleware that translates the logical representation (in Flora2 language) into SMIL language, which allows the use of the final composition by a standard player.

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that the resulting discourse is represented hierarchically. Two experiments examine some of the implications of these hierarchical structures on the perceived coherence of texts. Experiment 1 shows that texts with more levels to their hierarchical structure are judged to be more coherent. Experiment 2 demonstrates that these effects are sensitive to the genre of the text. Specifically, narratives seem to be more affected by manipulation of the discourse structure than procedural texts.

Using computational intelligence, our ultimate goal is to self-regulate systems composed of humans, machines and robots. Self-regulation is important for the control of mixed organizations and systems. An overview of self-regulation for organizations and systems, characterized by our solution of the tradeoffs between Fourier pairs of Gaussian distributions that affect decision-making differently, is provided. A mathematical outline of our solution and a sketch of future plans are provided.

In order to design robots suited to engage in cooperative manipulation tasks with humans, we study human-human teams as they work together to move a heavy object across a room. We are interested in several questions. First, do two person, gross motion tasks follow the same sinusoidal pattern, one person fine motion tasks do? Does performance improve when audio or visual communication is permitted? How does performance correlate with an individual's perception of performance? Non-physiological, or performance based, studies of human-human cooperation can be divided into two categories: Haptic and Non-Haptic (audio, visual, etc). The first category, involves physical interaction through the object being manipulated via force, pressure, and tactile sensations (Jones and Sarter 2008), (Reed and Peshkin 2008). Most of the non-haptic experiments are virtual setups where individuals are moving an object together on a computer screen via two controllers (Basdogan, Ho, and Srinivasan 2000), (Sallnas and Zhai 2003). A survey on the role of communication between people appears in (Whitaker, 2003). The novelty of our work is to investigate non-haptic communication in haptic manipulation tasks.

This paper is part of a larger project to determine how to build agent-based cognitive models capable of initial associative intelligence. Our method here is to take McClelland’s 1981 “Jets and Sharks” dataset and rebuild it using a nonlinear dynamic system with an eye toward determining which parameters are necessary to govern the interactivity of agents in a multi-agent cognitive system. A few number of parameters are suggested concerning diffusion and infusion values, which are basically elementary forms of information entropy, and multi-dimensional overlap from properties to objects and then from objects back to the properties that define them. While no agent-based model is presented, the success of the dynamic systems that are presented here suggest strong starting points for further research in building cognitive complex adaptive systems.

Compressive spectral clustering combines the distance preserving measurements of compressed sensing with the power of spectral clustering. Our analysis provides rigorous bounds on how small errors in the affinity matrix can affect the spectral coordinates and clusterability. This work generalizes the current perturbation results of two-class spectral clustering to incorporate multiclass clustering using k eigenvectors.

The useful This paper reports on the ongoing work done in the information is obviously multilevel. In this work we are GVLEX project. The aim of this multidisciplinary project not willing to design complete analysis for each level of is to design and test a storytelling humanoid robot. Ideally, interest but rather to design a multilevel analysis able to the robot would be able to process automatically a given point out the interesting parts of the tale. Based on the tale or short story, and to play it for a children audience.