[Book Review] Noel Starkey (ed), Connectionist Natural Language Processing: Readings from 'Connection Science'

Review of: Noel Starkey (ed), Connectionist Natural Language Processing: Readings from 'Connection Science'

Natural inspiration for self-adaptive systems

The emergent behaviour of autonomic systems, together with the scale of their deployment, impedes prediction of the full range of configuration and failure scenarios; thus it is not possible to devise management and recovery strategies to cover all possible outcomes. One solution to this problem is to embed self-managing and self-healing abilities into such applications. Traditional design approaches favour determinism, even when unnecessary. This can lead to conflicts between the non-functional requirements. Natural systems such as ant colonies have evolved cooperative, finely tuned emergent behaviours which allow the colonies to function at very large scale and to be very robust, although non-deterministic. Simple pheromone-exchange communication systems are highly efficient and are a major contribution to their success. This paper proposes that we look to natural systems for inspiration when designing architecture and communications strategies, and presents an election algorithm which encapsulates non-deterministic behaviour to achieve high scalability, robustness and stability.

Self-regulated learning and social media – a ‘natural’ alliance? Evidence on students’ self-regulation of learning, social media use and student-teacher relationship

Article is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2015.1064953.

Towards Cloud-Based Knowledge Capturing Based on Natural Language Processing

Paper presented at the Cloud Forward Conference 2015, October 6th-8th, Pisa

Digestion of natural food by larval and post-larval turbot Scophthalmus maximus

The digestion of natural, mainly crustacean zooplankton, by different age groups of turbot Scophthalmus maximus larvae was evaluated by comparisons of visual appearance, dry weight and carbon and nitrogen content of fresh food organisms with material recovered from faeces. Visually, the degree of digestion of food particles ranged from no discernible change of lamellibranch larvae, copepod eggs, intact copepod faecal pellets and some phytoplankton species, to varying degrees of removal of body constituents in copepods, cladocerans and decapod zoea. For crustaceans, the proportion of body constituents removed was related to the size and construction of their apparently indigestible exoskeleton. Uppon defaecation larger organisms showed the greatest percentage loss in dry weight and carbon. A high percentage of nitrogen was extracted from all organisms.