CIVIL TRANSPORT IN NATO

The current security and defence challenges require a new approach to the military logistics. To ensuring collective defence of the Alliance in the 21st century, additionally to the military, a wide range of civilian capabilities and active cooperation between public and private partners, government, science and the private sector is critical. Developing further arrangements to manage efficiently civil capabilities, particularly transport ones, in time of crisis and war and reducing dependency on commercial support will improve military mobility. The article presents current security environment, analysis of NATO civil transport task, structures, procedures and processes enabling civil transport support in crisis and war, including NATO Civil War Time Agencies. This article is related to the research on “Challenges and threats of security and defence of the Republic of Poland in the twenty first century”, which is carried out by the Institute of Security and Defence Systems of the Faculty of Logistics at the Military University of Technology in Warsaw.

ScientificWorkflows Applied to the Coupling of a Continuum (Elmer v8.3) and a Discrete Element (HiDEM v1.0) Ice Dynamic Model

Scientific computing applications involving complex simulations and data-intensive processing are often composed of multiple tasks forming a workflow of computing jobs. Scientific communities running such applications on distributed and heterogeneous computing resources find it cumbersome to manage and monitor the execution of these tasks. Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) can be used to automate and simplify complex task structures by providing tooling for the composition and execution of workflows across distributed and heterogeneous computing environments. As a case study, we apply the UNICORE workflow management system to a formerly hard-coded coupling of a glacier sliding and calving simulation that contains many tasks and dependencies, ranging from pre-processing and data management to repetitive executions in heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) resource environments. Using the UNICORE workflow management system, the composition, management, and execution of the glacier modelling workflow becomes easier with respect to usage, monitoring, maintenance, re-usability, portability, and reproducibility in different environments and by different user groups.

Learning from observation, feedback, and intervention in linear and non-linear task environments

This multiple-cue judgment study investigates whether we can manipulate the judgment strategy and increase accuracy in linear and non-linear cue–criterion environments just by changing the training mode. Three experiments show that accuracy in simple linear additive task environments are improved with feedback training and intervention training, while accuracy in complex multiplicative tasks are improved with observational training. The observed interaction effect suggests that the training mode invites different strategies that are adjusted as a function of experience to the demands from the underlying cue–criterion structure. Thus, feedback and the intervention training modes invite cue abstraction, an effortful but successful strategy in combination with simple linear task structures, and observational training invites exemplar memory processes, a simple but successful strategy in combination with complex non-linear task structures. The study discusses adaptive cognition and the implication of the different training modes across a life span and for clinical populations.

Automation and the Welfare State: Technological Change as a Determinant of Redistribution Preferences

Technological change is widely considered to be a key driver of the economic and occupational structure of affluent countries. Current advances in information technology have led to a significant substitution of routine work by capital, while occupations with abstract or interpersonal manual task structures are complemented or unaffected. We develop a simple theoretical framework for the reasons why individuals in routine task-intensive occupations would prefer public insurance against the increased risk of future income loss resulting from automation. Moreover, we contend that this relation will be stronger for richer individuals who have more to lose from automation. We focus on the role of occupational elements of risk exposure and challenge some general interpretations of the determinants of redistribution preferences. We test the implications of our theoretical framework with survey data for 17 European countries between 2002 and 2012. While up to now the political economy literature has emphasized other occupational risks, we find vulnerability to automation to be an important determinant of the demand for redistribution that should not be ignored.

Towards a Robot Task Ontology Standard

Ontologies serve robotics in many ways, particularly in describing and driving autonomous functions. These functions are built around robot tasks. In this paper, we introduce the IEEE Robot Task Representation Study Group, including its work plan, initial development efforts, and proposed use cases. This effort aims to develop a standard that provides a comprehensive ontology encompassing robot task structures and reasoning across robotic domains, addressing both the relationships between tasks and platforms and the relationships between tasks and users. Its goal is to develop a knowledge representation that addresses task structure, with decomposition into subclasses, categories, and/or relations. It includes attributes, both common across tasks and specific to particular tasks and task types.