A class of software is identified where a nondeterminism analysis is not inherently less safe than a deterministic analysis. Tools built for that class of software can be simple to build, fast to run, and scale to very large problems. An examples of one such tool is discussed here.

Ernest Sosa has argued that if someone knows that p, then his belief that p is “safe,” and Timothy Williamson has agreed. In this paper I argue that safety, as defined by Sosa, is not a necessary condition on knowledge—that we can have unsafe knowledge. In the next section I present Sosa’s definition of safety, and in section III I present a counterexample to it as a necessary condition on know...

Wandering is a difficult-to-manage behavior problem for individuals with cognitive impairments that can jeopardize safety if an individual enters a hazardous area or becomes lost. This study investigated the effects of a cloth barrier on entry into an unsafe area. The cloth barrier reduced entry into the restricted area and had high treatment acceptability.

We review at first the principal concepts of system safety. Then we analyze hazards of robot – human interactions – human injury and unsafe communication. We focus on hazard of collision with a human and an appropriate robot behavior mitigating this hazard. After reviewing the principal classes of robot control architectures, we evaluate their effectiveness in obstacle avoidance. Index terms – ...