TOWARDS A RESILIENCE ASSURANCE MODEL FOR ROBOTIC AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

Applications of autonomous systems are becoming increasingly common across the field of engineered systems from cars, drones, manufacturing systems and medical devices, addressing prevailing societal changes, and, increasingly, consumer demand. Autonomous systems are expected to self-manage and self-certify against risks affecting the mission, safety and asset integrity. While significant progress has been achieved in relation to the modelling of safety and safety assurance of autonomous systems, no similar approach is available for resilience that integrates coherently across the cyber and physical parts. This paper presents a comprehensive discussion of resilience in the context of robotic autonomous systems, covering both resilience by design and resilience by reaction, and proposes a conceptual model of a system of learning for resilience assurance in a continuous product development framework. The resilience assurance model is proposed as a composable digital artefact, underpinned by a rigorous model-based resilience analysis at the system design stage, and dynamically monitored and continuously updated at run time in the system operation stage, with machine learning based knowledge extraction and validation.

From automobile capitalism to platform capitalism: Toyotism as a prehistory of digital platforms

This article explores the automotive lineage and manufacturing origins of platforms. Challenging prevailing assumptions that the platform is a digital artefact, and platform capitalism a new era, this article traces crucial elements of platform capitalism to Toyotist automobile manufacture in order to rethink the relationship between technology and organization. Arguing that the very terminology and industry applications of the ‘platform’ emerge from the automobile industry over the course of the 20th century, this article cautions against the uncritical adoption of epochal paradigms, or assumptions that new technologies require new organizational forms. By parsing the platform into two types, the stack and the intermediary, this article demonstrates how the platform concept and data-driven production practice both develop out of the Toyota Production System in particular, and American and Japanese analyses of it. Toyotism, we show, is the unseen industrial and epistemological background against which the platform economy plays out. In making this case, this article highlights the crucial continuities between the data intensive production of companies like Uber and Amazon – emblematic of digital platform capitalism – and the organizational paradigms of the automobile industry. At a moment when the automobile returns to prominence amidst platforms such as Uber, Didi Chuxing, or Waymo, and as we find tech companies turning to automobile manufacturing, this automotive lineage of the platform offers a crucial reminder of the automotive origins of what we now call platform capitalism.

The pedagogy of experience complexity for smart learning: considerations for designing urban digital citizen learning activities

The Pedagogy of Experience Complexity for Smart Learning (PECSL) is a four-tier model of considerations for the design and development of learning activities situated in real world hyperlocal locations, mediated by smart enough technologies. Learner experience is placed at the centre of learning design, focusing on the complex interrelated experiences that may be possible. A wider awareness of types of learning may enhance potential for gaining value for learners and offer more flexibility for instructors or others. Learning is considered as any potential object of vital interest for the learner, and may include making connections with others, dialogic space expansion between learners and wider relevance of topic or location as much as any intended learning outcome.Taking inspiration from digital artefact user centred design, the PECSL adopts a position of flexible layers of considerations that impact stages of design for complex smart learning activities. Each tier being interrelated to the others, these iteratively adapting as a result of decisions being made throughout the design and development process. Categories of learner experience variation derived from a phenomenographic study of smart learning journeys inform the foundation of the PECSL, providing concepts of experience relevance structures leading to related pedagogies, further pedagogical relevance considerations and deeper epistemological reflections. Acknowledging significance of the context, process and content of learning in these activities, considerations expand to enable pragmatic support for much of value towards effective learning. This paper seeks to provide a means for learners to learn from each other as much as any specified learning goals or assessment.

Crafting research communication in building history

This research is presented through an interactive application. A virtual reconstruction based on the remains from a medieval stave church is used as a case study to re-establish the historic building as a tangible place and assemblage. Augmented by virtual reality, the research focuses on the sensuous aspects of the stave church as a whole—where architecture, artefacts, light, and materials interact—through the movements of approaching, entering, and dwelling. The research output is a virtual reconstruction, or a virtual diorama, that “re-members” the stave church elements and re-contextualises contemporaneous religious artefacts that have been dismembered and diffused in various exhibitions and deposits. The contribution in this research is methodological, seeking to test and provide a case to discuss how non-traditional research outcome can be crafted to elicit the sensuous aspects of research and still attend to the rigor of science. We seek to methodologise the digital artefact as a research output but also as a means for testing hypothesis and observing the effects when enacting the environment. The connection to the craft sciences concerns both the empirical material, the wooden stave church as a crafted object, and the exploration of an interactive application as a research output or hermeneutic device in the research process.

Students’ attitudes towards digital artefact creation through collaborative writing: the case of a Spanish for specific purposes class

Studies on collaborative writing practices are not new (Reynolds, Wooley, & Wooley, 1911), neither is the interest in collaborative writing supported by computers (Sharples, 1993). With the advent of Web 2.0, there has been an immense increase in research examining web-based collaborative writing, particularly in L2 contexts (Cho, 2017; Kessler, 2013; Sevilla-Pavón, 2015; Yim & Warschauer, 2017). The present study follows this research path by analysing perceptions of technology-assisted collaborative writing as well as collaborative writing processes in a Spanish for specific purposes class. Eight students from the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), Department of Communication and Internet Studies, participated in the study. The data were elicited over five collection times, which included two digital artefact creations (an out-of-class and an in-class collaborative writing task), a pre-Questionnaire (preQ) and post-Questionnaire (postQ), and a focus group interview. The analysis of the data revealed that the students’ perceptions are mediated by task type, which in turn also affects collaborative writing patterns being the out-of-class activity the one that presents a wider variety of writing styles as well as a more balanced participation among students.

Assessing the ‘impact’ of a media event: An Innisian appraisal of Al Jazeera’s Palestine Papers leak

This article considers the ‘Palestine Papers’ as both a major news story carried by Al Jazeera in 2011 and an enduring digital artefact. These leaked documents revealed that during peace talks, the Palestinian Authority offered concessions to Israel that went beyond the Palestinian national consensus, yet failed to advance the cause of statehood. While many predicted a third Palestinian uprising, the impact of this scandal appeared limited. However, by drawing upon Harold Innis’ insights concerning the time-binding versus space-binding ‘biases’ of media and institutions, a more complex picture is revealed, one unamenable to conventional understandings of media effects.

Documentación arqueológica tridimensional de la cultura material en la terraza sureste de la necrópolis de Qubbet el-Hawa (Asuán): potencial y difusión pública de resultados

Qubbet el-Hawa (Aswan): Potential and Public Dissemination of the Results The material culture found in the necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa stands out for its typological and chronological diversity and quality. It is possible to reconstruct different chapters of the history of the First Nome of Upper Egypt thanks to material culture studies. Furthermore, these studies allow us to detect changes in funerary rituals. Qubbet el-Hawa is an excellent archaeological site to be documented with the latest technologies, especially three-dimensional modelling. The updated work on the digital artefact collection from the Qubbet el-Hawa Project offers a three-dimensional open access library, which allows users to visit a virtual museum of the material culture recovered in the necropolis. This paper presents the methodology applied to maximize the potential of three-dimensional archaeological documentation for the public dissemination of the research results.