Human control of vehicle swarms faces a dilemma: an operator must be able to exercise precise control over how a mission is executed, but controlling individual vehicles is not scalable. The Proto spatial computing lan- guage offers an intermediate representation, where the motion of a swarm is specified as a vector field, which is then approximated by the movement of individual members (Bachrach, Beal, and McLurkin 2010). I propose that this can be exploited to build a “tactical command” model of swarm control, whereby human “officers” dynamically decompose a swarm into units and task those units to carry out geometric and topological maneuvers under the constraints imposed by the platform. This abstraction may also allow situation awareness interfaces for individual agents to be extended to apply to swarm units.

There have been significant advances in developing each phase of the mission. Secondly, based on our everyday algorithms that allow researchers to examine these experience with physical objects in our environment, behaviors in simulation (Luke et al. 2005), generally assuming the three major physical states of matter, solid, liquid and noise-free estimates of the agents' own, neighbors' and gas, represent a natural and intuitive means of describing the targets' positions. However, the actual information flow into types of motions a swarm of mobile robots can perform as biological agents' in terms of the sensing, processing and they cluster, transit or wander (Gage 1992).

Robots are envisioned to play an increasingly important It is a big challenge for a human to control or manage role in applications such as search, rescue, surveillance, swarms because of the limitations of each individual robot and reconnaissance operations. Nowadays, the majority of and the sheer number of robots that need to be coordinated mobile robots developed and deployed for such applications to successfully complete a mission. Autonomous algorithms are (a) individually very capable both in terms of autonomy may mitigate some of the complexity an operator faces in and sensor, and (b) are teleoperated or otherwise managed controlling such swarms, but resolving how authority and by a single or multiple operators. In contrast to the sophisticated influence should be shared poses a significant new research robots currently used for these applications, the development problem. of cheaper hardware allows the creation of swarm systems composed of many more robots but with each individual being far less powerful.

Knowledge engineering from experimental design (KEfED) is a novel approach based on the dependency relationships that occur between the variables of a scientific study. We used this approach to curate the experimental designs of ten scientific papers from a well-established database of HIV vaccine trials in non-human primates. The KEfED models provide a characteristic, data-oriented signature for each measurement made in the study. We present preliminary analysis of these manually-curated, detailed representations using our own open-source curation tools and show the multi-variate statistical analyses on the resultant models of experimental design. The analyses produced a visualization of the similarities between studies and an account of the dependency relationships across studies. We describe our approach in the context of a knowledge engineering strategy based on creating large-scale domain-independent repositories of experimental observatio

In the context of science, abstract workflows can bridge the gap between scientists and technologists towards using computer systems to carry out scientific processes. Provenance traces provide evidence required to validate scientific products and support their use by others. With abstract workflows and provenance traces based on formal semantics, a knowledge-based framework that merges both technologies are devised, allowing scientists to formally document their processes of data collection and transformation and allowing others to use semantic-based technologies to discover and assess data, processes, and derived data products. This paper presents an approach for evaluating the level of scientist support in frameworks that integrate abstract workflows and provenance traces. In order to support discovery of scientific results, it is essential to provide tools for scientists to document the processes they use to obtain the results. The claim is that the complementary technologies of abstract workflows and provenance traces need to be flexible enough to support a scientist’s perspective and minimize imposition of technically-oriented abstractions that may be extraneous to them. The evaluation approach uses criteria that are derived from tasks performed by scientists using both technologies, i.e., process authoring, process analysis, process interoperability, provenance capturing, provenance analysis, and provenance interoperability.

We explore applicability of the situation calculus, the well-known logical framework developed in Artificial Intelligence for representation of dynamic systems, to the task of representing knowledge about processes, actions and events in the natural sciences. In this paper, we concentrate on a case study in the area of organic chemistry. More specifically, we adapt the situation calculus to the task of automating organic synthesis planning on a qualitative level, where the objective is to identify a chain of chemical reactions transforming the given initial molecules into the desired goal molecule. We present two approaches for reasoning about reactions in organic chemistry: a “micro” approach and a “macro” approach. The “micro” approach is a low level approach that explicitly represents the most elementary interactions between molecules during a single chemical reaction, namely the splitting and forming of bonds between atoms. In contrast, the“macro” approach is a higher level approach that treats each chemical reaction (a set of splits and formation of bonds) as an elementary action. Both approaches are implemented in PROLOG. Declarative heuristics are defined to reduce the search space and help the program to find the correct synthesis routes more quickly. We hope that the lessons learned from our successful case study can have discovery potential in other bio-medical sciences. We discuss briefly how the proposed approaches can contribute to solving other research problems and to communicating pathways.

In this paper, we describe an interactive environment for the representation, interpretation, and revision of explanatory biological models. We illustrate our approach on the systems biology of aging, a complex topic that involves many interacting components, and discuss our experiences using this environment to codify an informal model of aging. We close by discussing related efforts and directions for future research.

As biological data about genes and their interactions proliferates, scientists have the opportunity to identify sets of proteins whose interactions make them worthy of further investigation. This paper reports on a knowledge discovery technique to support that work. Foretell is an algorithm originally designed to support search for solutions to constraint satisfaction problems. Recent adaptations enable Foretell to detect sets of genes that interact heavily with one another. We provide empirical results, and describe ongoing work on biological meaning and knowledge infusion from the user.

When constructing visualization pipelines using toolkits, developers must understand what sequencing of operators will transform their data from its raw state to some requested visual representation. In some cases, the requested visual representation must be generated from hybrid pipelines, composed of both toolkit-based and custom operators. Traditionally, developers learn about how to construct these visualization pipelines by word of mouth, by reading documentation and by inspecting code examples, all of which can be costly in terms of time and effort expended. The Visualization Knowledge Project (VisKo) is built on a knowledge base of visualization toolkit operators including rules for how operators are chained together to form pipelines. VisKo helps scientists by automatically generating and suggesting fully functional visualization pipelines, alleviating scientists from having to write any pipeline code. This paper reports on the kinds of knowledge required to support automatic pipeline generation as well our successes when applying VisKo to a number of visualizations scenarios spanning geophysics, environmental and materials science.

Causality discovery has been one of the core tasks in scientific research since the beginning of human scientific history. In the age of data tsunami, the causality discovery task involves identification of causality among millions of variables which cannot be done manually by humans. However, the identification of causality relationships using artificial intelligence and statistical techniques in non-experimental settings faces several challenges. In this work, we address three of the challenges regarding Granger causality, one of the most popular causality inference techniques. First, we analyze the consistency of two most popular Granger causality techniques and show that the significance test is not consistent in high dimensions. Second, we review our nonparametric generalization of the Lasso-Granger technique called Generalized Lasso Granger (GLG) to uncover Granger causality relationships among irregularly sampled time series. Finally, we describe two techniques to uncover the casual dependence in non-linear datasets. Extensive experiments are provided to show the significant advantages of the proposed algorithms over their state-of-the-art counterparts.