A Practically Implementable and Tractable Delegation Logic

A Declarative Approach to Business Rules in Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in XML

Binary logic programs can be obtained from ordinary logic programs by a binarizing transformation. In most cases, binary programs obtained by this way are less efficient than the original programs. Demoen [2] showed an interesting example of a logic program whose computational behavior was improved if it was transformed to a binary program and then specialized by partial deduction.The class of so called B-stratifiable logic programs is defined. It is shown that for every B-stratifiable logic program, binarization and subsequent partial deduction produce a binary program which usually has a better computational behavior than the original one. Both binarization and partial deduction can be automated.KeywordsLogic ProgramOriginal ProgramPredicate SymbolUnit ClausePartial EvaluatorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ecological models should be rooted in data derived from observation, allowing methodical model construction and clear accounts of model results with respect to the data. Unfortunately, many models are retrospectively fitted to data because in practice it is difficult to bridge the gap between concrete data and abstract models. Our research is on automated methods to support bridging this gap. The approach proposed consists of raising the data level of abstraction via an ecological metadata ontology and from that, through logic-based knowledge representation and inference, to automatically generate prototypical partial models to be further improved by the modeler. In this chapter we aim to: 1) give an overview of current automated modelling approaches applied to ecology, and relate them to our metadata-based approach under investigation; and 2) explain and demonstrate how it is realized using logic-based formalisms. We give the overview of current automated modelling approaches in the section “Ecological Modeling and Automation: Current Approaches,” focusing on compositional modelling and model induction. The contrast between these and our approach, where we adopt metadata descriptions through an ontology and logic-based modelling, is discussed in the section “Our Automated Ecological Modelling Avenue.” The next section, “Towards a System for Metadata–Supported Automated Modeling,” makes ideas more concrete, starting with further details on the Ecolingua ontology, followed by examples of automated model structuring and parameter estimation. In the concluding section, “A Look Ahead and Conclusion,” we comment briefly on the ontologies trend and on the outlook of our research.

The Web contains a lot of information but computers can't do very much with it. We have access to and a need for a lot of information (thanks to pervasive information devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, smart devices, TV, radio...) but we don't have time to find and make associations between information every time we want to. Given the need for quick, intuitive access to information, multimedia presentation is an effective form of communication - different media act as a better means to communicate dependant on the context, and synchronization (organisation of media in space and in time) can express non- verbally relationships between the content (e.g. linear presentation to represent a timeline of events). Appropriately delivering content in the form of synchronized multimedia is a complex task which needs to meet the requirements of the user, device, and actual context. This proves to be too complex to be fulfilled by manually authoring for all possibilities. This has lead to efforts in developing systems for (semi-)automatic multimedia generation. Knowledge representation techniques developed in earlier AI work are being applied to the World Wide Web. Through standards such as RDF and OWL, the so-called "Semantic Web" offers the potential of a large scale distributed knowledge repository built upon the existing Web infrastructure. This makes powerful amounts of knowledge available to Web-based applications as the basis for a new paradigm of Web-oriented services which are intelligent, dynamic, flexible and user-centred. Such services could find the information we need and present it to us in an effective manner. The current situation of Web content discovery and delivery displays significant disorder and inflexibility: natural language is problematically ambiguous and Web content is only adaptive to a limited extent. Using the Semantic Web, intelligent Web clients will be able to deliver the correct information every time by unambiguously understanding the meaning of queries and reasoning on them (through the knowledge available to them on the Web) to come to an answer. Likewise, Web resources will be described with metadata that supports their selection, adaptation and presentation to the needs of the client. Such a paradigm shift in Web-based systems (from content to knowledge-centred) requires a similar paradigm shift in system models, architectures, implementations and operations. This is equally the case for multimedia presentation systems. We propose a framework for a new type of multimedia presentation system in which the multimedia generation process is tightly integrated with the distributed knowledge of the Semantic Web. Unlike previous work in which knowledge is narrowly defined and used by the system, this approach is built with the scale and dynamics of the Web in mind. We name this framework SWeMPs - a Semantic Web-enabled Multimedia Presentation System. The key results of our research are the conceptual model for a multimedia presentation system and the generic rule base which interacts with that model (through querying, reasoning and deriving new knowledge) to realise individual multimedia generation tasks. These form the basis for an implementation of a multimedia presentation system which is fundamentally different from existing multimedia presentation systems in that it operates at the logical or conceptual level rather than the data or syntactic level. This reflects the reality that what users seek is information (knowledge about concepts) and effective communication of that information (respecting the relationships between concepts). It leverages the potential of the Semantic Web as a distributed, large scale, accessible repository of knowledge about the world of the user just as systems today use the Web as a repository of content. The implementation of this proposal serves as a 'proof of concept' and as a basis for the evaluation of the new approach through use cases.

Assisted specification of discrete choice models

Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) have been an increasing area of interest in the research arena. However, it seems that current literature is lacking application and implementation cases where RMS are simulated, tested, and evaluated as a feasible manufacturing concept. A Manufacturer of Consumer Goods identified the potential of the RMS concept and decided to investigate the concept in a real production installation. The result of this development is a proof of concept of a changeable and reconfigurable assembly and decoration system based on the principles of RMS. This proof of concept is meant primarily to show the physical feasibility of the system and provide a first-look into a real production application of the RMS ideas. The purpose of this paper is to present the design of the manufacturer’s RMS proof of concept, its implementation, and evaluation results.

Liquid biopsy, in particular circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analysis, has paved the way for a new noninvasive approach to cancer diagnosis, treatment selection and follow-up. As a crucial step in the analysis, the extraction of the genetic material from a complex matrix needs to meet specific requirements such as high specificity and low loss of target. Here, we developed a new generation of microfluidic fluidized beds (FBs) that enable the efficient extraction and preconcentration of specific ctDNA sequences from human serum with flow rates up to 15 µL/min. We first demonstrated that implementation of a vibration system inducing flow rate fluctuations combined with a mixture of different bead sizes significantly enhanced bead homogeneity, thereby increasing capture efficiency. Taking advantage of this new generation of high-throughput magnetic FBs, we then developed a new method to selectively capture a double-stranded (dsDNA) BRAF mutated DNA sequence in complex matrices such as patient serum. Finally, as proof of concept, ligation chain reaction (LCR) assays were performed to specifically amplify a mutated BRAF sequence, allowing the detection of concentrations as low as 6 × 104 copies/µL of the mutated DNA sequence in serum.

Semantic patient information aggregation and medicinal decision support

The average of life expectancy of the population and the prioritization of authorities in active and home aging has increased recently. This has led governments and private organizations to increase efforts in caring the elder and dependant segment of the population. The latest advances in technology and communications point out new ways to monitor those people with special needs at their own home, increasing their quality of life of the elderly or the dependant in a cost-affordable way. This same proposal can improve the quality of caring in retirement homes, giving support to the caring services. The purpose of this paper is to present an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) able to identify, analyze and detect specific events in the daily life environment—mostly, at home or in a residence—defined by medical and assistant staff that can be considered as an emergency situation. It is designed to be deployed in controlled environments, where social services or medical staff are thought to be nearby. This hybrid network service is intended activate several alarms in the central services when certain situations occur in the monitored place. This tele-care proposal for certain predefined risk situations is validated through a proof of concept that takes benefit of the high performance computing capabilities of a NVIDIA Graphical Processing Unit on an embedded system named Jetson TK1 to be able to process and detect the events locally, even the situations that last in time. This platform holds the basic implementation of the acoustic event detection system, for both in-home or residence-based caring service. The system is nowadays designed to identify eight different situations along time, and set the correspondent alarm when one of the situations is detected.

This paper describes the implementation of an agile autonomous agent-based manufacturing system based on a grid. This grid contains production machines, represented by agents, capable to perform certain production steps. Products to be made are also represented by agents. Many different products can be made in parallel, each product having its own sequence of production steps. The whole manufacturing is based on interaction of agents living in a distributed environment. This paper explains the basic design considerations and includes a simple example as a proof of concept.

An urban living lab monitoring and post occupancy evaluation for a Trombe wall proof of concept

This paper continued the study of the complexity behavior of the satisfiability analysis of hard random formulas given in the conjunctive normal form (CNF). In the 3-CNF formula, each clause contains three literals of logical variables. The number of logical variables in the formula is N. In this paper, the SAT solver is improved by introducing equality reduction and pure literal identification procedures. The solver improvement reduced the exponent (with base 2) from N/20.86 to N/21.41 with an R=4.6 ratio of the number of clauses to the number of variables. The results show that the efficiency of the pure literals identification procedure decreases as R increases. An important part of the study is an empirical estimation of the algorithmic complexity of the SAT problem with large number of variables. The proposed method gives a convenient lower bound on the complexity of analysis for random 3-CNF formulas. We estimated the algorithmic complexity for the range N=256÷8192. The exponential dependence of complexity on N for random 3-CNF formulas at a fixed value of R is demonstrated in this range.

Current implementations for aspect-oriented programming languages map the aspect-oriented concepts of source programs to object-oriented bytecode. This hinders execution environments with dedicated support for such concepts in applying their optimizations, as they have to recover the original aspect definition from bytecode. To address this representational gap we propose an architecture for implementations of pointcut-advice languages where aspect-oriented concepts are preserved as first-class entities. In this architecture, compilers generate a model of the crosscutting which is executed by virtual machines. In this paper we discuss a meta-model for aspect-oriented concepts and a virtual machine-integrated weaver for the meta-model. As a proof of concept, we also provide an instantiation of the meta-model with the AspectJ language and an AspectJ compiler complying with the proposed architecture. We also discuss how preexisting high-performance optimizations of aspect-oriented concepts benefit from the proposed architecture.

In this work, the Affective Logic (AFFLOG) Tutor is presented. An Affective Tutoring System that uses knowledge representation and reasoning tools such as Answer Set Programming and the Event Calculus (EC) in order to represent the main components of the tutor. AI Planning is used to select individual parts of a given course material (tutorials) in order to build a specific course tailored to the needs of each user according to the user’s learning preferences. This course can dynamically change during the teaching session responding to the user’s mental and emotional states, providing affective support by offering praise, consolation or encouragement depending on the current emotion of the user. The design and a functioning implementation of the system is presented. As a proof of concept, a course on how to play the Settlers of Catan(c) board game was designed and implemented.

Ucam is a user-centric, blockchain-based and end-to-end secure home IP camera system designed by IoTeX. In a Ucam system, all the video clips captured by the camera are encrypted using a user-controlled symmetric key before storing them in the cloud. In this demo paper, we describe the system architecture and implementation of a privacy-preserving object detection proof-of-concept (PoC) for the Ucam system using Veracruz, a confidential computing framework developed by Arm Research. The resulting PoC demonstrates the viability of bringing the object detection capability to the Ucam system without leaking users sensitive information.