the advent of cybertechnologies has led to radical paradigm shifts in our social, economic, cultural, and psychological conceptualizations. the paper investigates the advent of cyborgs, indeed our transformation into cyborgs, and the impact of this transformation upon identities and face management, which has an important social value since the late modernism. cyborg is a designation for the in...

Here we introduce one simulated and two physical three-dimensional stochastic modular robot systems, all capable of self-assembly and self-reconfiguration. We assume that individual units can only draw power when attached to the growing structure, and have no means of actuation. Instead they are subject to random motion induced by the surrounding medium when unattached. We present a simulation ...

The limited I/O bandwidth in reconfigurable devices results in a prohibitively high reconfiguration overhead for dynamically reconfigured FPGA-based platforms. Thus, the full potential of dynamic reconfiguration can not be exploited. Usually, any attainable speed-up by executing an application on hardware is diminished by the reconfiguration overhead. The self-reconfiguration concept aims at dr...

Run-time partial reconfiguration of programmable hardware devices can be applied to enhance many applications in high-end embedded systems, particularly those that employ recent platform FPGAs. Partial Reconfigurable FPGAs allow tasks to be placed and removed dynamically at runtime. These reconfigurable systems have a 2-layer hardware and software architecture that permits a variety of differen...

The advent of cybertechnologies has led to radical paradigm shifts in our social, economic, cultural, and psychological conceptualizations. The paper investigates the advent of cyborgs, indeed our transformation into cyborgs, and the impact of this transformation upon identities and face management, which has an important social value since the late modernism. Cyborg is a designation for the in...

Self-reconfiguration is a technique using which configured logic can quickly modify itself at runtime to suit application requirements. Although performance improvements using self-reconfiguration have been demonstrated, the technique itself has been only informally described. Based on an abstract reconfigurable device model, a precise definition of self-reconfiguration is presented in this pap...

Software systems are increasingly built to exhibit self-* properties (e.g. self healing or self optimization) which require reconfiguration and change at runtime. This is even true for embedded or mechatronic systems which are often used in safety critical environments. In those cases, the effects of the reconfiguration on the safety of the system must be carefully analyzed. We present an appro...

Mating success in plants depends largely on the efficiency of pollen dispersal. For hermaphrodite plants, self-pollination, either within or among flowers, can reduce mating opportunities because of pollen and ovule discounting and inbreeding depression. Self-pollination may be particularly detrimental in plants such as orchids and asclepiads that package each flower's pollen into one or more p...

Reconfiguration allows a self-reconfiguring modular robot to adapt to its environment. The reconfiguration planning problem is one of the key algorithmic challenges in realizing self-reconfiguration. Many existing successful approaches rely on grouping modules together to act as meta-modules. However, we are interested in reconfiguration planning that does not impose fixed meta-module relations...

Software self-reconfiguration is the capability of software systems to change autonomously their current configuration to a better one. This is a more and more requested feature, particularly for software systems that operate in critical domains when human intervention is not possible or not convenient. The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture proposes a structured Monitor-Diagnose-Compen...