MODELING A STRATEGIC HUMAN ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESS: HUMAN-INSPIRED HEURISTIC GUIDANCE THROUGH LEARNED VISUAL DESIGN AGENTS

Human designers often work in a visual design space, projecting step-by-step design progression through evolving mental images. The strategic evolution of that design leverages heuristics based on experience and domain knowledge. The methodology presented in this paper brings together the visual nature of design problem solving and design heuristics in a deep learning computational agent framework that emulates and enables human-mirrored design. When applied to a truss design task, results demonstrate superior results to those of human designers who provided the initial data.

Rhetorical Invention

Rhetorical invention is both a practice and its teaching—the capacity to create effective communication, and the instruction in this capacity. Teachers of rhetoric have provided over time a rich and durable supply of pedagogical resources for crafting communication in speech, writing, and multi-modal composition. These resources come down to us through traditions of teaching and practice, in handbooks, theoretical tracts, exemplary models, and heritable pedagogies. Such materials have sometimes succumbed but often resisted the temptation to standardize and systematize, since the art of rhetoric in its very nature speaks to each particular audience and occasion, a requirement that hinders efforts to give it rule-bound methods. The reasons for this resistance to standardization need to be explored as well as how invention has continued to provide heuristic guidance without prescriptive methodological tools. Lacking method, rhetoric is aided by the cultural support of convention, which in turn is modified for each new situation. Such a dialectic of convention and invention animates the ongoing registration of rhetoric to communicative practices and explains its durability as an unsystematic art.

STOCHASTIC OFFLINE PROGRAMMING

We propose a framework which we call stochastic off-line programming (SOP). The idea is to embed the development of combinatorial algorithms in an off-line learning environment which helps the developer choose heuristic advisors that guide the search for satisfying or optimal solutions. In particular, we consider the case where the developer has several heuristic advisors available. Rather than selecting a single heuristic, we propose that one of the heuristics is chosen randomly whenever the heuristic guidance is sought. The task of the SOP is to learn favorable instance-specific distributions of the heuristic advisors in order to boost the average-case performance of the resulting combinatorial algorithm. Applying this methodology to a typical optimization problem, we show that substantial improvements can in fact be achieved when we perform learning in an instances specific manner.

Die diskoers tussen Job en Cloete struktureelsemanties beskou

A structural-semantic view of the discourse between Job and Cloete This article examines an aspect of the interaction between linguistics and literature. It is argued that the structural-semantic theory as developed by A.J. Greimas provides a useful approach in guiding the reader towards a realisation of a coherent whole in literary texts. Possibilities for the application and amplification as well as the usefulness in literature are examined, resulting in the identification of isotopies by means of which cohesion can be attained. In structural semantics an isotopy is the backbone of textual analysis – an isotopy being constituted by sememes, compelled by nuclear and textual semes, within the topos alignment of classemes. The Job-texts written by T.T. Cloete in the “transkripsie” and “perifrase” section of Idiolek are used as sample texts. The article attemps to indicate that structural semantics as theory, and especially its amplification as put forward in this article, is able to provide heuristic guidance in tracing the Job/Cloete discourse.

Functionalism in Second Language Acquisition

This article examines the role played by functional approaches to linguistics in understanding second language acquisition (SLA). Central premises and tenets of functional approaches are described, and several key theoretical problems with functional efforts are detailed. The problem of referential management (the selection of nominal vs. pronominal NPs) in second language discourse production is examined. The general conclusions are drawn that (a) functional approaches to linguistics have a significant role to play in SLA studies, but (b) functional universals are insufficiently grounded theoretically and empirically at this point to contribute more than heuristic guidance to SLA theory.