Emergence: From Chaos to Order by John H. Holland .

As designers conceive and implement what are commonly (but mistakenly) called autonomous systems, they adhere to certain myths of autonomy that are not only damaging in their own right, but also by their continued propagation. This article busts such myths and gives reasons why each of these myths should be called out and cast aside.

The Seven Deadly Myths of "Autonomous Systems"

Articulating the laws of cognitive work has been a continuing theme in this department. A number of the articles represent an effort to move toward a unified theory of "macrocognitive work systems." These are complex adaptive systems designed to support near-continuous interdependencies among humans and intelligent machines to carry out functions such as sensemaking, replanning, mental projection to the future, and coordination. The effort to identify empirical generalizations and use them to construct a formal theory has led us to the identification of a number of fundamental trade-offs that place boundary conditions on all macrocognitive work systems. This article presents five trade-offs identified to date that define these boundary conditions. It also illustrates how the known empirical generalizations about the performance of human work systems can be systematically organized by the trade-offs.

Beyond Simon's Slice: Five Fundamental Trade-Offs that Bound the Performance of Macrocognitive Work Systems

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

It is no exaggeration to say that all the major writers of early modern Korean literature were influenced by Western literary trends The 1930s literary critic Im Hwa went so far as to say that all modern Korean literature (in fact, all east Asian literature) had been imported and transplanted from the West If we locate the beginning of modern Korean literature in 1917 with the publication of Yi Gwangsu’s Mujeong (The Heartless), then the next decade and a half or so saw the importation and imitation of most of the major literary trends In fact, in the 1920s and early 1930s there was a concentrated effort to “import” Western literature mainly through translation in order to learn from it Until the early 1930s, socialist literature (especially that being promoted by KAPF) was the dominant paradigm, but with the disbanding of KAPF in 1934, this gave way to modernism that would dominate literary production for much of the rest of the decade A major writer producing modernist fiction during this time was Yi Hyoseok (1907-1942) One of the aspects of Yi’s modernism that has, as yet, received almost no critical attention was is use of the themes, myths, symbols, and even the titles of works of Western literature Yi, perhaps more than any other writer of this era, was actively syncretizing Western literature with Korean literature to create a new, modernist idiom This process was largely one of translation Not a literal translation as Yi Gwangsu appears to have done early in his career, but rather an adaptation of themes, symbol, and sensibilities After a discussion of the process of “transplantation” leading up to the advent of literary modernism in Korea, this paper will examine how Yi Hyoseok incorporated symbols, themes, and even personas from the works of William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Katherine Mansfield into his literature as part of his modernist oeuvre

A Rose by Any Other Name

In this article, we describe how we augment human perception and cognition through Sol, an agent-based framework for distributed sensemaking. We describe how our visualization approach, based on IHMC’s OZ flight display, has been leveraged and extended in our development of the Flow Capacitor, an analyst display for maintaining cyber situation awareness, and in the Parallel Coordinates 3D Observatory (PC3O or Observatory), a generalization of the Flow Capacitor that provides capabilities for developing and exploring lines of inquiry. We then introduce the primary implementation frameworks that provide the core capabilities of Sol: the Luna Software Agent Framework, the VIA Cross-Layer Communications Substrate, and the KAoS Policy Services Framework. We show how policy-governed agents can perform much of the tedious high-tempo tasks of analysts and facilitate collaboration. Much of the power of Sol lies in the concept of coactive emergence, whereby a comprehension of complex situations is achieved through the collaboration of analysts and agents working together in tandem. Not only can the approach embodied in Sol lead to a qualitative improvement in cyber situation awareness, but its approach is equally relevant to applications of distributed sensemaking for other kinds of complex high-tempo tasks.

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Sol: An Agent-Based Framework for Cyber Situation Awareness

In this article we describe how we apply the concept of coactive emergence as a phenomenon of complexity that has implications for the design of sensemaking support tools involving a combination of human analysts and software agents. We apply this concept in the design of work methods for distributed sensemaking in cyber operations. Sensemaking is a motivated, continuous effort to understand, anticipate, and act upon complex situations. We discuss selected results of a macrocognitive work analysis that informed our focus for design and development of support tools. In that analysis, we identified seven target topics that would be the focus of our research: engaging automation as a full partner, reducing the volume of uncorrelated events, continuous knowledge discovery, more effective visualizations, collaboration and sharing, minimizing tedious work, and architecting scalability and resilience. In addressing the first target topic, we show how coactive emergence inspires an agent-supported threat understanding process that is consistent with Klein’s Data/Frame theory of sensemaking. In subsequent sections, we describe our efforts to address the remaining six target topics as part of design and development of a cyber operations framework called Sol. Specifically, we describe the use of agents, policies, and visualization to enable coactive emergence for taskwork and teamwork. We also show how policy-governed agents working collaboratively with people can help in additional ways. We introduce the primary implementation frameworks that provide the core capabilities of our Sol cyber framework: the Luna Software Agent Framework, and the KAoS Policy Services Framework. We describe areas for future development of Sol, including the incorporation of the VIA Cross-Layer Communications Substrate. Finally, we describe recent results and current plans for empirical studies addressing some of the issues raised in this article.

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Dan Kidwell

Papers

Sol: An Agent-Based Framework for Cyber Situation Awareness

Coactive Emergence as a Sensemaking Strategy for Cyber Operations