Cognitively-inspired Agent-based Service Composition for Mobile & Pervasive Computing

Automatic service composition in mobile and pervasive computing faces many challenges due to the complex and highly dynamic nature of the environment. Common approaches consider service composition as a decision problem whose solution is usually addressed from optimization perspectives which are not feasible in practice due to the intractability of the problem, limited computational resources of smart devices, service host's mobility, and time constraints to tailor composition plans. Thus, our main contribution is the development of a cognitively-inspired agent-based service composition model focused on bounded rationality rather than optimality, which allows the system to compensate for limited resources by selectively filtering out continuous streams of data. Our approach exhibits features such as distributedness, modularity, emergent global functionality, and robustness, which endow it with capabilities to perform decentralized service composition by orchestrating manifold service providers and conflicting goals from multiple users. The evaluation of our approach shows promising results when compared against state-of-the-art service composition models.Comment: This paper will appear on AIMS'19 (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Services) on June 2

Finnish Children Producing English Vowels — Studying in an English Immersion Class Affects Vowel Production

The aim of this study was to examine how earlier second language teaching affects Finnish school children’s pronunciation of British English vowels. Two groups of Finnish children between the ages of eleven and thirteen were tested. The early learners studied in an English immersion class in a Finnish elementary school while the control group attended a regular Finnish speaking class at the same school. The task consisted of twenty three English stimulus words which included the twelve monophthong English target vowels in voiced and voiceless environments. The words were repeated seven times during the task. The participants produced the words after a native model and the target vowel qualities were then acoustically analysed. Statistical analysis revealed a group main effect. More specifically the analysis showed that the groups differed significantly in the way they produced target vowel second formant (F2) values. The F2 difference was only significant in the voiced context. Closer examination of the groups’ vowel qualities revealed that the control group tended to produce the F2 values higher than the early learner group in most of the target vowels. The higher F2 values can be an indication of more frontal tongue position or less lip rounding during vowel production

Reliability Analysis of Component-Based Systems with Multiple Failure Modes

This paper presents a novel approach to the reliability modeling and analysis of a component-based system that allows dealing with multiple failure modes and studying the error propagation among components. The proposed model permits to specify the components attitude to produce, propagate, transform or mask different failure modes. These component-level reliability specifications together with information about systems global structure allow precise estimation of reliability properties by means of analytical closed formulas, probabilistic modelchecking or simulation methods. To support the rapid identification of components that could heavily affect systems reliability, we also show how our modeling approach easily support the automated estimation of the system sensitivity to variations in the reliability properties of its components. The results of this analysis allow system designers and developers to identify critical components where it is worth spending additional improvement efforts

Tietomallintaminen osana arkkitehdin työnkuvaa ja koulutusta:rakennusalan digitalisaation vaikutus arkkitehdin työhön

Tiivistelmä. Tämän diplomityön tavoitteena on tarkastella rakennusalan digitalisaatiota suomalaisesta näkökulmasta ja miten tietomallintamisen yleistyminen vaikuttaa arkkitehdin työnkuvaan ja koulutukseen. Työssä tehdään ensin katsaus tietomallintamisen historiaan ja nykytilanteeseen. Osio käy läpi mitä tietomallintaminen on ja minkälaisia vaikutuksia ja tulevaisuudenkuvia sillä on rakennushankkeen eri vaiheisiin. Samalla esitellään tietomallintamiseen liittyvät standardit ja yhteiset toimintatavat ja käydään läpi tietomallintamiseen käytettäviä työkaluja. Arkkitehdin koulutusta tarkastelevaa osiota varten on haastateltu Suomen arkkitehtikoulujen digitalisten työkalujen opetushenkilökuntaa ja kartoitettu opetuksen nykytilaa ja tavoitteita. Tarkoituksena on muodostaa käsitys tietomallintamisen asemasta osana arkkitehtikoulutusta ja millaisia taitoja arkkitehtiopiskelijoilla on opintojen aikana ja valmistuessa. Tietomallintaminen on Suomessa yleistyvä toimintatapa rakennusalalla. Tämä kasvattaa kysyntää arkkitehtien tietomalliosaamiselle. Oulun ja Tampereen arkkitehtuurin osastot ovat reagoineet alalla tapahtuvaan muutokseen ja sisällyttäneet tietomallintamista opetukseen.BIM as a part of the architectural profession and education : the effects of the digitalization of the construction industry on the architectural profession. Abstract. The purpose of this diploma thesis is to examine the digitalization of the construction industry from a Finnish point of view and how growing demand for building information modeling (BIM) is affecting the architectural profession. At first the study takes a look at the history and the current state of BIM. This part explains what BIM is and how it is affecting the construction industry and what to expect from it in the future. It also goes through the standards, workflows and tools related to creating and using BIM. The computer aided design teachers of all three architecture schools in Finland were interviewed for the portion that discusses the architectural education’s current situation and goals for computer aided design. The goal is to form a picture of how BIM is discussed as a part of the architectural studies and what type of skills can be expected from students during studies and after graduation. BIM is gaining popularity in the Finnish construction industry. This raises the demand for skills to work with BIM for architects. The architecture schools in Tampere and Oulu have reacted to the changes in the industry and have included BIM as a part of architectural studies

A Coordinated Approach to Control Mechanical and Computing Resources in Mobile Robots

Energy management of mechanical and cyber parts in mobile robots consists of two processes operating concurrently at runtime. Both the two processes can significantly improve the robots’ battery lifetime and further extend mission time. In each process, information on energy consumption of one of the two parts is captured and analyzed to manipulate various mechanical/computational actuators in a robot, such as motor speed and CPU voltage/frequency. In this paper, we show that considering management of mechanical and computational segments separately does not necessarily result in an energy-optimal solution due to their co-dependence; as a consequence, a runtime co-management scheme is required. We propose a proactive energy optimization methodology in which dynamically-trained internal models are utilized to predict the future energy consumption for the mechanical and computational parts of a mobile robot, and based on that, the optimal mechanical speed and CPU voltage/frequency are determined at runtime. The experimental results on a ground wheeled robot show up to 36.34% reduction in the overall energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art methods

Female responses to experimental removal of sexual selection components in Drosophila melanogaster

Despite the common assumption that multiple mating should in general be favored in males, but not in females, to date there is no consensus on the general impact of multiple mating on female fitness. Notably, very little is known about the genetic and physiological features underlying the female response to sexual selection pressures. By combining an experimental evolution approach with genomic techniques, we investigated the effects of single and multiple matings on female fecundity and gene expression. We experimentally manipulated the opportunity for mating in replicate populations of Drosophila melanogaster by removing components of sexual selection, with the aim of testing differences in short term post-mating effects of females evolved under different mating strategies

Finnish children producing English vowels - Studying in an English immersion class affects vowel production

The aim of this study was to examine how earlier second language teaching affects Finnish school children’s pronunciation of British English vowels. Two groups of Finnish children between the ages of eleven and thirteen were tested. The early learners studied in an English immersion class in a Finnish elementary school while the control group attended a regular Finnish speaking class at the same school. The task consisted of twenty three English stimulus words which included the twelve monophthong English target vowels in voiced and voiceless environments. The words were repeated seven times during the task. The participants produced the words after a native model and the target vowel qualities were then acoustically analysed. Statistical analysis revealed a group main effect. More specifically the analysis showed that the groups differed significantly in the way they produced target vowel second formant (F2) values. The F2 difference was only significant in the voiced context. Closer examination of the groups’ vowel qualities revealed that the control group tended to produce the F2 values higher than the early learner group in most of the target vowels. The higher F2 values can be an indication of more frontal tongue position or less lip rounding during vowel production.</p

Jäitä koppalakkiin

Kommentti kirja-arvosteluun: Taiteenfilosofian klassikko raakakäännöksenä / Pentti Määttänen (Tieteessä tapahtuu 1/2011)

Evolution of sex-specific pace-of-life syndromes: genetic architecture and physiological mechanisms

Sex differences in life history, physiology, and behavior are nearly ubiquitous across taxa, owing to sex-specific selection that arises from different reproductive strategies of the sexes. The pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) hypothesis predicts that most variation in such traits among individuals, populations, and species falls along a slow-fast pace-of-life continuum. As a result of their different reproductive roles and environment, the sexes also commonly differ in pace-of-life, with important consequences for the evolution of POLS. Here, we outline mechanisms for how males and females can evolve differences in POLS traits and in how such traits can covary differently despite constraints resulting from a shared genome. We review the current knowledge of the genetic basis of POLS traits and suggest candidate genes and pathways for future studies. Pleiotropic effects may govern many of the genetic correlations, but little is still known about the mechanisms involved in trade-offs between current and future reproduction and their integration with behavioral variation. We highlight the importance of metabolic and hormonal pathways in mediating sex differences in POLS traits; however, there is still a shortage of studies that test for sex specificity in molecular effects and their evolutionary causes. Considering whether and how sexual dimorphism evolves in POLS traits provides a more holistic framework to understand how behavioral variation is integrated with life histories and physiology, and we call for studies that focus on examining the sex-specific genetic architecture of this integration