We introduce a lattice model able to describe damage and yielding in heterogeneous materials ranging from brittle to ductile ones. Ductile fracture surfaces, obtained when the system breaks once the strain is completely localized, are shown to correspond to minimum energy surfaces. The similarity of the resulting fracture paths to the limits of brittle fracture or minimum energy surfaces is qua...

Brittleness is a common problem among AI systems. Autonomous systems, including those that learn, may be faced with unanticipated situations that cause decreased performance, or in the worstcase, catastrophic failures from which the system cannot recover. In this paper, we describe a construct called the metacognitive loop (MCL) that allows AI systems to monitor their own behavior, generate exp...

The effect of genetic operators other than selection, such as mutation and recombination, on the genotype-phenotype map is considered. In particular, when the genotypic fitness landscape exhibits a “symmetry”, i.e. many genotypes corresponding to the same phenotype have equal fitness values, it is shown that such operators can break this symmetry. The consequences of this “induced symmetry brea...

Ceramics suffer the curse of extreme brittleness and demand new design philosophies and novel concepts of manufacturing to overcome such intrinsic drawbacks, in order to take advantage of most of their excellent properties. This has been one of the foremost challenges for ceramic material experts. Tailoring the ceramics structures at nanometre level has been a leading research frontier; whilst ...

Most hard tissues have as their primary purpose to be stiff. Outside the arthropods, mineralisation of a soft organic matrix is the almost universal method of producing high stiffness. However, stiffening brings with it the undesirable mechanical result of brittleness (lack of toughness). The mineralisation of some tissues, such as bone and dentine, can be modified rather easily, in evolutionar...

High-Level Information Fusion (HLIF) utilizes techniques from Low-Level Information Fusion (LLIF) to support situation/impact assessment, user involvement, and mission and resource management (SUM). Given the unbounded analysis of situations, events, users, resources, and missions; it is obvious that uncertainty is manifested by the nature of application requirements. In this panel, we seek dis...