Cesar Analide

Establishing the Foundation of Collaborative Networks

The need for computer-assisted collaboration, which originally manifested decades ago in manufacturing to establish small business-oriented networks of organizations in forms of supply chains or extended enterprises, is by now extended into a large number of other areas. While today production and service provision constitute the main areas of application for Collaborative Networks (CNs) worldwide, during the last decade virtual scientific laboratories, inter-enterprise collaborative engineering, crisis management, virtual institutes and virtual learning communities among others, are also rising within the wide spectrum of application areas in need of CNs. These developments emphasize the urgency for establishing a sounder foundation for collaborative networks, namely in terms of theoretical principles and formal models, capturing the concepts, entities, behaviors, and operations of the CNs, and developing technology-independent infrastructure architecture, tools and methodologies..

The halt condition in genetic programming

In this paper we address the role of divergence and convergence in creative processes, and argue about the need to consider them in Computational Creativity research in the Genetic or Evolutionary Programming paradigm, being ones goal the problem of the Halt Condition in Genetic Programming. Here the candidate solutions are seen as evolutionary logic programs or theories, being the test whether a solution is optimal based on a measure of the quality-of-information carried out by those logical theories or programs. Furthermore, we present Conceptual Blending Theory as being a promising framework for implementing convergence methods within creativity programs, in terms of the logic programming framework.

Extended logic programming applied to the specification of multi-agent systems and their computing environments

The paper presents a logical framework to model some aspects of contextuality; i.e., generating contexts in a multi-context setting. Following the existing work on extended logic programming and multi-agent systems, a contextual reasoning procedure for a particular class of multi-context systems, the law ones, is proposed based on Grices maxims (1975), which in turn are used to support a larger set of contexts by combining contexts into compound structures, thus defining a logic of contexts. The notion of compound contexts reflects the beliefs, desires, intentions and obligations, among others, that depend on the problem, leading to a variety of dynamic context formations. In its applied form, the Portuguese Public Prosecution Service is considered, which is the state body entrusted with representing the state, bringing criminal cases to court, defending democratic legality, and any other interests that the law determines.

Evolutionary intelligence in asphalt pavement modeling and quality-of-information

The analysis and development of a novel approach to asphalt pavement modeling, able to attend the need to predict the failure according to technical and non-technical criteria in a highway, is a hard task, namely in terms of the huge amount of possible scenarios. Indeed, the current state-of-the-art for service-life prediction is at empiric and empiric–mechanistic levels, and does not provide any suitable answer even for a single failure criteria. Consequently, it is imperative to achieve qualified models and qualitative reasoning methods, in particular due to the need to have first-class environments at our disposal where defective information is at hand. To fulfill this goal, this paper presents a dynamic and formal model oriented to fulfill the task of making predictions for multi-failure criteria, in particular in scenarios with incomplete information; it is an intelligence tool that advances according to the quality-of-information of the extensions of the predicates that model the universe of discourse. On the other hand, it is also considered the degree-of-confidence factor, a parameter that measures one‘s confidence on the list of characteristics presented by an asphalt pavement, set in terms of the attributes or variables that make the argument of the predicates referred to above.

Ambient Intelligence and Simulation in Health Care Virtual Scenarios

The success of change depends greatly on the ability to respond to human needs and to bridge the gap between humans and machines, and understanding the environment. With such experience, in addition to extensive practice in managing change, knowledge sharing and innovation, it would be interesting in offering a contribution by facilitating a dialogue, knowledge cafe (i.e. bringing in knowledge) on these issues, and how to apply them to new and altering scenarios. When one comes into the area of health care, one major limitation felt by those institutions is in the selection process of physicians to undertake a specific task, where there is a lack of objective, of validated measures of human performance. Indeed, objective measures are necessary if simulators are to be used to evaluate the skills and training of medical practitioners and teams or to evaluate the impact of new processes or equipment design on the overall system performance. In this paper it will be presented a logical theory of Situation Awareness (SA) and discusses the methods required for developing an objective measure of SA within the context of a simulated medical environment, as the one referred to above. Analysis and interpretation of SA data for both individual and team performance in health care are presented.

Virtual enterprises–methods and approaches for coalition formation

The research community, focused on future forms of organisations, has been addressing the challenges involved in the establishment of future collaborative networks of organisations (CNOs). Effective configuration and formation of CNOs require on one hand understanding, detailed capturing, modelling, and design of the components, structure, and behaviour of these environments, and on the other hand analysing their operational functionality and development of needed governing and ICT-based support mechanisms, tools, and systems. Coalitions in forms of virtual enterprises (VEs) and virtual organisations (VOs) constitute special forms of CNOs, which are goal-oriented and have shorter life duration, as opposed to the VO breeding environments (VBEs). VO breeding environments are long term strategic associations aimed to prepare their member organisations for agile dynamic formation of VOs, in response to emerged opportunities in the market/society. Both research and practice have shown in recent times that, besides generating more profit for the organisations, involvement in VOs increases their survivability chance in turbulent markets. Nevertheless, dynamic configuration and formation of effective coalitions in the form of virtual enterprises and virtual organisations involve many unresolved challenges and still an open area of research in need of innovation. This special issue focuses specifically on topics related to methods and approaches for coalition formation, and comprises the extended version of a selection of papers from two prestigious international events of the PRO-VE’07 [www.di.uminho.pt/prove2007] conference held in Guimarães, Portugal in September 2007, and the BASYS’08 [www.basysconference.org] conference held in Porto, Portugal in June 2008. Both the PRO-VE series of conferences that are organised yearly, and the BASYS series of conferences that are organised every other year, are sponsored by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) [www.ifip.org/bulletin/bulltcs/memtc05.htm] and the SOCOLNET (International Society of Collaborative Networks) [www.uninova.pt/ socolnet/joomla]. The main reasons for selecting 12 papers from the above two events for this special issue are briefly summarised below. The PRO-VE conference was initiated in 1999, and today has established itself as the foremost scientific/technical event addressing both the research/academic innovations as well as the industrial business practices in the area of collaborative networks. The PROVE’07 was the 8th international conference of the series, out of which six papers are chosen and extended for this special issue. The BASYS series of conferences started in 1995, and cover a number of complementary topics in relation to collaborative networks, more focused on creating a balance between the human and computer aspects of collaboration. Six other papers selected and extended for this special issue, are from the proceedings of the BASYS’08 conference, the 8th international conference of the series. The BASYS’08 event also hosted and was encompassing a workshop organised by the large integrated project ECOLEAD [http://ecolead.vtt.fi] that was aimed as the final dissemination event

Ambient sensorization for the furtherance of sustainability

Energy efficiency is regarded as an important objective in a world of limited resources. The sustainable use of energy is necessary for the continuity of life styles that do not jeopardize the future. Nevertheless, due to poor information about the impact of human actions on the environment, it is hard to promote and warn for sustainability. This work focuses on the use of ambient intelligence as a mean to constantly revise sustainability indicators in a way they may be used for user awareness and recommendation systems within communities. The approach in this research makes use of sustainable indicators monitored through ambient sensors which enable user accountability concerning their actions inside each environment. Also, it is possible to compare the effect of user actions in the environment, enabling decision making based on such comparison factors.

Social Networks Gamification for Sustainability Recommendation Systems

Intelligent environments and ambient intelligence provide means to monitor physical environments and to learn from users, generating data that can be used to promote sustainability. With communities of intelligent environments, it is possible to obtain information about environment and user behaviors which can be computed and ranked. Such rankings are bound to be dynamic as users and environments exchange interactions on a daily basis. This work aims to use knowledge from communities of intelligent environments to their own benefit. The approach presented in this work uses information from each environment, ranking them according to their sustainability assessment. Recommendations are then computed using similarity and clustering functions ranking users and environments, updating their previous records and launching new recommendations in the process.

Decision Making and Quality-of-Information

In Group Decision Making based on argumentation, decisions are made considering the diverse points of view of the different partakers in order to decide which course of action a group should follow. However, knowledge and belief are normally incomplete, contradictory, or error sensitive, being desirable to use formal tools to deal with the problems that arise from the use of uncertain and even not precise information. On the other hand, qualitative models and qualitative reasoning have been around in Artificial Intelligence research for some time, in particular due the growing need to offer support in decision-making processes, a problem that in this work will be addressed in terms of an extension to the logic programming language and based on an evaluation of the Quality-of-Information (QoI) that stems out from those extended logic programs or theories. We present a computational model to address the problem of decision making, in terms of a multitude of scenarios, also defined as logic programs or theories, where the more appropriate ones stand for the higher QoIs values.

Quality of Information in the Context of Ambient Assisted Living

With the use of new computational technologies and novel methodologies for problem solving, recurring to the use of Group Decision Support Systems, normally the problem of incomplete information is marginalized as if we were living in an ideal world. Common sense tells us that in the precise time a decision is make it is impossible to know all the information regarding to it, however decisions must be made. What we propose is, in the ambit of the VirtualECare project, is a possible solution to decision making, through the use of Group Decision Support Systems, aware of incomplete information but, even so, able to make decisions based in the quality of the information and its source.