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****COST ARTS NEWS****  

 

 

************************ 2015: ISSUE 1 *************************

This year is the last of COST ARTS's run. The Action finishes in October.
In May, Fabio Galatioto and Nicolette Formosa organised a very successful Early Career Researchers event in Malta. By all accounts it was well received.
We have some exciting events to come, see below on how you might become involved.

ITEM 1. The COST ARTS Final Conference

6th/7th October, takes place at the Hotel Novotel Le Lac, Bordeaux, co-located with the 2015 ITS WORLD CONGRESS.
Organising Committee: Neila Bhouri, Florin Nemtanu, Keith McCable, Fabio Galatioto, Lee McCluskey

We need ALL those who want to present a talk and/or a poster on Day 1 regarding scientific developments, to return the form re: Call for Talks /Posters / Technology Demonstrations to Lee McCluskey by June 30th. In July the organising commitee will decide on a schedule / grouping of talks. We need all those who intend to demonstrate some ARTS technology to (similarly) supply details. It is estimated that there will be 10,000 people going to ITS World Congress, so there will be a great atmosphere at the event.

A special session of ITS was dedicated to COST ARTS technology and achievements: check it out from the ITS programme (here), session SIS37, page 35.

ITEM 2. 2nd ARTS Competition

5th October, Hotel Novotel le Lac, Bordeaux (SAME location as our final conference and the ITS World Congress). There is an updated call for contributions available here . Deadline for entry in *June 30th*.

ITEM 3. The "Eastern Europe" Dissemination workshop

The workshop is scheduled for September 24th in Warzaw. Prof Jacek Malacek is organising this. We encourage "stakeholders" (Transport authorities, industry, consultants etc) to attend. We have the backing of local national ITS representatives on this, who are intending to advertise the event. Meeting agenda can be found here.
[Note that while COST will pay for the venue / refeshments and speakers / demonstrators travel in the usual way, attendees who are "being disseminated to" are not entitled to travel re-imbursement].

ITEM 4. The "Western Europe" Dissemination workshop

The workshop will be held on Wednesday September 9th at Manchester, UK, in Manchester University's Science Park. Mr Keith McCabe (WG4 co-leader) is going to be the local organiser for this. As above, we encourage "stakeholders" (Transport authorities, industry, consultants etc) to attend.This will be similar event to item 3 above.

In relation to this, Mr Keith McCabe would like to extend an invitation to anyone interested in developing a targeted, financial business case model for ARTS technology, specifically in UTC, to join his company for a period of time over the summer in an STSM leading up to the mid September dissemination event. Please let Lee McCluskey know if anyone in interested, or you can approach Keith directly. Meeting agenda can be found here.

ITEM 5. Final Version of the ARTS Vocabulary

Florin Nemtanu is leading this development - we are relying on members to add definitions to the vocabulary, which should only take a few minutes. Here the link to the document

 

 

************************ 2014: ISSUE 4 *************************

This is indeed an exciting time to be working within ARTS, with many interesting applications of autonomy hitting the news!

Item 1. Reach Out with the Wider Community

I think its time that our Network members took advantage of new forms of media and opportunities for discusson. A great opportunity is via Muna Hamdi's Linkedin page on Intelligent Moblity which has 1000+ members:

https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=2511997

She has also created a subgroup for ARTS people (see bottom right of the page). We need to utilise this as an electronic discussion page for the group ! Please join it and start to use it. Let us start up some interesting online debates !

Item 2. Recent Events

The second training school of our Network took place on in Sofia between September 9- 12, 2014.

This focussed on "Behavioural Response and Impact" aspects of autonomic systems in transportation, specifically Working Group 3 and Working Group 4 subject areas. 25 students took parts from around Europe, in what was a well received and enjoyable workshop. Special thanks go to Krasimira Stoilova for doing the local organisation and Eric van Berkum for organising the technical programme.

As a result of the training school students from the group have launched an Early Career Research forum, using a Facebook page as a medium:

https://www.facebook.com/artscostaction?ref=hl

Please join if you are an ECR and would like to stay in touch with a dynamic group of individuals!

Item 3. Future Event: Meeting in November

The Network is having **another meeting** in a few weeks time (this was organised only recently) as we need to finish the first publishable versions of the roadmap sections of working groups 3 and 4, that is Sections 3 and 4. The meeting will be on 19th and 20th of November (next month) in The University of Delft. If you feel you can make a contribution to these sections of the Roadmap, and perhaps come to the Delft meeting, please get in touch with me.

As a reminder: Section 3 covers the scope of WG3 (see http://helios.hud.ac.uk/cost/wg.php for details), and considers the context within which ARTS systems will work, and the external factors with which they interact, as well as the business case for their implementation. It will explore related cases where autonomous systems have been embodied into existing, significant application areas, and the lessons learned from these for the purposes of external factors. It could also investigate how these issues have been addressed within some existing aspects of autonomy in RTS (e.g. self-driving cars). We need to map out all the external aspects that, potentially, need to be taken into consideration within an ARTS system, and the ways forward for the ARTS community to explore and investigate these aspects.

Section 4 follows the scope of WG4 (see http://helios.hud.ac.uk/cost/wg.php for details), and looks at human factors, human interaction and behaviour change – essential in an area where the human is in the loop, and where the human is very much the principal beneficiary in terms of Mobility. The section should consider current steps to introduce autonomy into both road and related transport and control applications, and draw lessons from these areas that can be applied to ARTS, in a similar fashion to Section 3.

4. Next Year

Next year is the last year of funding for the Network. We are looking for innovative ways of promoting the subject area, disseminating our research, holding events, and making the Network persist into the future, so you are welcome to contact me with any ideas.

 

 

************************ 2014: ISSUE 3 *************************

The COST ARTS action is running another Training School this year - this time concentrating
on Human Factors and related WG4/WG3 issues. For details and application form, please see the webpage. Feel free to circulate the call to your colleagues.

 

 

 

************************ 2014: ISSUE 2 *************************

Annual Meeting – Lisbon

The meeting attracted 36 members from over 20 countries in the Network. After having a brief overview of achievements of the Network in 2013, and plans for 2014, the meeting focussed on Road Map Development.

The purpose was to work on the Roadmap in four sections (as defined in the first 2014 issue of COST ARTS NEWS) and set a timetable and method for the completion of it. Section teams led by working group leaders had already produced detailed drafts of subsections, and distributed them before the meeting.

Most of the 2 day meeting was taken up by four parallel workshops developing each of the four sections.  In the workshops, individual authors explained what they had written, and colleagues in the team combined to help them develop, expand or improve the material.

At the culminating “plenary” sessions, it emerged that interaction between different sections was extremely important (in other words the process could not be parallelised completely). Knowledge in one part of the Roadmap may well affect or have a bearing on another part.

The following schedule was arranged:

April 15th – Complete draft of the Versions of Roadmap sections 1,2,3,4 sent to the Action Chair

April 15th – May 2nd  Each section draft will be sent to specific reviewers who are expert in that area, as well as being sent out to other section leaders. By May 2nd the reviewers will send to the Chair the expert reviews of the sections, and teams will feedback any changes required as a result of cross-section normalisation.

May – June 20th Final updating of the Roadmap Sections according to the reviews received.

July 1st The first version of the Roadmap will be disseminated publically, initially through the COST ARTS website.

STSMs – short term visits

We have budgeted for 15 short term visits this year, and encourage everyone, especially early career researchers, to take advantage of one. To qualify you need to visit another COST ARTS country for several weeks or months, in order to work on some problem related to the aims and objectives of COST ARTS – for more details see the COST or the COST ARTS website.

 Training School 2014 to be held in Sofia, Bulgaria

The Training School this year will concentrate on the areas of Working Groups 3 and 4 – in other words on the “softer” side of Autonomics and Road Traffic Support, such as human – system interaction, human behaviour change, and the introduction of autonomy within a bigger picture.  It will be held September 9th – 12th inclusive in Sofia. A call for applications to attend and win a bursary will be sent out at the end of March 2014.

Wiki for the COST ARTS Vocabulary

We are using a Wiki to build up a community-agreed vocabulary and term definition for technical terms in ARTS. This is on https://cost-arts.wikispaces.com/home, and permissions/instructions for editing it can be obtained from
Dr. Florin Nemtanu  (fnemtanu@yahoo.com ).

Progress on the COST ARTS Book

Many of you will have already seen the call for contributions to the proposed book “Autonomic Road Transport Support Systems” to be published by Birkhäuser/Springer, under the “Autonomic Systems” book series. Abstracts are due imminently, those interested should contact Jörg Müller (joergpmueller65@gmail.com) for further information.




************************   2014: ISSUE 1 ******************

THE ROAD MAP

Right now we are in the process of creating one of the major deliverables from the Network - the area's Roadmap. We have a draft structure, and already some content. The Roadmap is dynamic: it is a document which is regularly updated to reflect developing research areas. The purpose of the Roadmap is:


- to provide a focus for Network groups' research;

- to provide early career researchers with advice on directions in their research;

- to disseminate the results of our collaboration both inside and outside the Network;

- to represent a consensus understanding of the state of the art, challenges and needed actions among Network members;

- to act as a structured repository of knowledge for the Network, which members can use e.g. to provide material and references on which to base funding applications;

- to act as part of the legacy of the Network;

- to stimulate debate among members of the Network.


*** We would like volunteers to work on the Roadmap ***


Please contact me at lee@hud.ac.uk and identify parts of the Roadmap that you think you can contribute to, and I will connect you with the section editors.
As a co-author of the Roadmap, you will benefit from its high profile and help to make it a ground-breaking piece of work.



THE COST ARTS ROADMAP: Proposed Structure

SECTION 1:
Section 1 will investigate the area of autonomic system properties, and architectures and methods in which they are generally implemented. The “State of the art” (SoA) is then connected purely with (i) approaches to autonomic computing / autonomic systems themselves, with reference to how, in abstract, autonomic properties might be implemented (ii) key application systems from non-RTS areas in which autonomic properties have been, or are being, implemented, and an understanding of the techniques, methods and architectures used. Hence the SoA will contain material on current developments in the general area of autonomic computing, and on the state of the art in distributed and centralised AI, for example.  Under “Challenges”, the appropriateness for their (the techniques / methods /architectures discussed in SoA) use in systems implementing ARTS is reviewed, and “Actions for the ARTS community” provides a view on how to evaluate these ideas in RTS.



SECTION 2
Section 2 takes a complementary perspective to Section 1. It concerns transportation concepts, and the peculiarities of the major types of transportation support systems that we may consider, and investigates from a technical and application perspective how we might embody them with autonomic properties. For example, is it possible to take existing system components of RTS and embed them in a self-describing wrapper, so that higher level systems can reason with their capabilities and deploy them when necessary? Under “State of the art”, we have those systems that have been implemented and used with RTS which embody some autonomic prototypes. The recent ARTS competition and its entries provides a glimpse into the state of the art, and how far the area has travelled along the road to ARTS. Another (overlapping) area in SoA is the degree to which AI techniques have been adopted, and how many appear in deployed RTS. “Challenges” will include items such as the characteristics of RTS applications which make embedding them with autonomic properties difficult, what problems have to be solved to advance the ARTS vision, and what consequential infrastructural/data access challenges have to be overcome. The challenges could be considered on the basis of different areas of RTS. “Actions” contain ideas / vision, drawing on material from section 1, on how the community can move the area forward.


SECTION 3
Section 3 follows the scope of WG3 (see http://helios.hud.ac.uk/cost/wg.php for details), and considers the non-technical aspect of ARTS, in terms of the context within which such systems will work, and the external factors with which they interact, as well as the business case for their implementation. In this case, under “State of the art”, like in Section 1, we explore related cases where autonomous systems have been embodied into existing, significant application areas: however we consider the lessons learned from these for the purposes of external factors. We also investigate how these issues have been addressed within some existing aspects of autonomy in RTS (e.g. self-driving cars). Under “Challenges”, we map out all the external aspects that, potentially, need to be taken into consideration within an ARTS system, and in “Actions” list the ways forward for the ARTS community to explore and investigate these aspects.


SECTION 4
Section 4 follows the scope of WG4 (see http://helios.hud.ac.uk/cost/wg.php for details),  and looks at human factors, human interaction and behaviour change – essential in an area where the human is in the loop, and where the human is very much the principal beneficiary in terms of Mobility. Under “State of the art” the section looks into these issues as they concern current steps to introduce autonomy into both road and related transport and control applications, and draws lessons from these areas that can be applied to ARTS. The “Challenges” section draws from this current work and sets out a geographic view of the relevant areas that we need to consider, and what are the current limitations. Under “Actions”, methods for advancing the area forward are investigated and proposed, within a plan of action for the community.