bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Altitude, Hypoxia and Exercise
Authors: Richalet Jean-Paul
Published: February 2025

Maximal aerobic performance progressively decreases with increasing levels of hypoxia, because of a reduction in arterial oxygen content (CaO2) due to both hypoxia and exercise. Hypoxia limits the oxygen transfer between the lung alveoli and the capillary which results in a drop in CaO2. The successive steps of oxygen transport from the ambient air to the tissues are greatly affected by this drop. Endurance trained athletes are known to undergo a more drastic decrease in maximal oxygen consumption compared with sedentary subjects in hypoxic conditions. Although the facts have been extensively reported, it remains paradoxical and no clear explanation is available. Given a great amount of observations about the impact of acute hypoxia on aerobic performance in trained athletes, a great attention should be paid to the conditions of training in athletes exposed to continuous or intermittent hypoxia. Since the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968, the increase in oxygen transport elicited by exposure to high altitude is used to increase physical performance when returning to sea level. The rationale is that the greater the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, the greater the ability of the muscle to consume oxygen and produce energy. However, many studies have shown that aerobic performance may not increase at sea level after a training session at high altitude, due to the initial symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness, the altitude-induced decrease in maximal oxygen consumption and the individual variability of physiological responses to hypoxia. The athletes are now using more sophisticated methods to improve performance through the effects of hypoxia. The development of the “Living high - training low” methods has open new frontiers in the field of training physiology. Subjects live and sleep in normobaric hypoxic conditions and train in normoxic conditions that may, at least partly, suppress the drawbacks of high altitude training.
The Case of Sickle Cell Trait Carriers
Authors: Connes Philippe  , Reid Harvey  , Martin Cyril  , Hue Olivier  , Hardy-Dessources Marie-Dominique  , Bergeron Michael F.
Published: February 2025

Sickle cell trait (SCT) is usually considered a benign disorder, in contrast to sickle cell anemia (SS hemoglobinopathy). However, increasing evidence suggests that SCT carriers could be at risk for developing medical complications, such as hyposthenuria, hematuria and renal medullary carcinoma. In addition, several studies underscore a greater risk for developing cardiovascular complications in this population. Although carriers of SCT often participate in exercise and sports successfully and without any apparent distinguishing symptoms or performance limitations, a hotly debated issue continues to be whether SCT may be an independent risk factor (or not) for exercise sudden-death. This chapter reviews the reported cases of exercise sudden-death in SCT carriers and the proposed contributing physiological mechanisms responsible for these incidents (i.e., blood rheological disorders, inflammatory responses and hemostatic perturbations) that may be particularly prompted by environmental stress (heat and high altitude) and related responses (dehydration, thermal strain, and humoral changes in osmolality and pH). Finally, recommendations and guidelines to reduce the risk of exercise-related vascular dysfunction and sudden-death that would allow SCT carriers to safely undertake exercise, sport training and competition are presented.
E-government, ICT Procurement and Innovation
Authors: Parlade Claro V.
Published: February 2025

This paper looks at the dual role of government as ICT policy maker and user of ICT. While each of these roles need different responses from the government, the author's main point is that governments should refrain from imposing standards and, in any case, ensure interoperability as a way to strengthen continuous innovation.
Ontology Verification with Repositories
Authors: Grüninger Michael  , Hahmann Torsten  , Hashemi Ali  , Ong Darren
Published: February 2025

In this paper we show how the relationships between first-order ontologies within a repository can be used to support ontology verification. We discuss the use of representation theorems and classification theorems to characterize the models of an ontology, and then show how such results can be obtained from notions such as relative interpretation.
Evaluating Ontologies with NLP-Based Terminologies – A Case Study on ACGT and Its Master Ontology
Authors: Grigonytė Gintarė  , Brochhausen Mathias  , Martín Luis  , Tsiknakis Manolis  , Haller Johann
Published: February 2025

Natural language processing (NLP) plays a major role in knowledge engineering. However, NLP's usage is traditionally being seen as a means of extracting knowledge required for building knowledge resources, i.e. ontologies, knowledge bases. When it comes to the evaluation of these knowledge artefacts, then general trends are: expert reviewing, evaluating against existing ontologies and democratic ranking. We propose a new approach for evaluating domain coverage of application ontologies which is based on NLP techniques. The latter can be seen as one way of bridging the gap between terminologies and ontologies in order to create user-understandable expert systems.
A Network Flow Approach to Coalitional Games
Authors: Rahwan Talal  , Michalak Tomasz  , Croitoru Madalina  , Sroka Jacek  , Jennings Nicholas R.
Published: February 2025

In this paper we propose a novel approach to represent coalitional games, called a Coalition-Flow Network (CF-NET), that builds upon a generalization of the network flow literature. Specifically, this representation is based on our observation that the coalition formation process can be viewed as the problem of directing the flow through a network where every edge has certain capacity constraints.
Complexity of Merging and Splitting for the Probabilistic Banzhaf Power Index in Weighted Voting Games
Authors: Rey Anja  , Rothe Jörg
Published: February 2025

The Banzhaf power index is a prominent measure of a player's influence for coalition formation in weighted voting games, an important class of simple coalitional games that are fully expressive but compactly representable. For the normalized Banzhaf index, Aziz and Paterson [1] show that it is NP-hard to decide whether merging any coalition of players is beneficial, and that in unanimity games, merging is always disadvantageous, whereas splitting is always advantageous. We show that for the probabilistic Banzhaf index (which is considered more natural than the normalized Banzhaf index), the merging problem is in P for coalitions of size two, and is NP-hard for coalitions of size at least three. We also prove a corresponding result for the splitting problem. In unanimity games and for the probabilistic Banzhaf index (in strong contrast with the results for the normalized Banzhaf index), we show that splitting is always disadvantageous or neutral, whereas merging is neutral for size-two coalitions, yet advantageous for coalitions of size at least three.
Selecting Information based on Artificial Forms of Selective Attention
Authors: Macedo Luis
Published: February 2025

We describe an approach based on artificial forms of selective attention for overcoming the problem of information and interruption overload of intelligent agents so that these can autonomously select relevant information of the environment while ignoring other less relevant information in order to allocate processing resources on it.
Towards Argumentation-based Multiagent Induction
Authors: Ontañón Santiago  , Plaza Enric
Published: February 2025

In this paper we propose an argumentation-based framework for multiagent induction, where two agents learn separately from individual training sets, and then engage in an argumentation process in order to converge to a common hypothesis about the data. The result is a multiagent induction strategy in which the agents minimize the set of cases that they have to exchange (using argumentation) in order to converge to a shared hypothesis. The proposed strategy works for any induction algorithm which expresses the hypothesis as a collection of rules. We show that the strategy converges to a hypothesis indistinguishable in training set accuracy from that learned by a centralized strategy.
Variable Level-Of-Detail Motion Planning in Environments with Poorly Predictable Bodies
Authors: Zickler Stefan  , Veloso Manuela
Published: February 2025

Motion planning in dynamic environments consists of the generation of a collision-free trajectory from an initial to a goal state. When the environment contains uncertainty, preventing a perfect predictive model of its dynamics, a robot ends up only successfully executing a short part of the plan and then requires replanning, using the latest observed state of the environment. Each such replanning step is computationally expensive. Furthermore, we note that such sophisticated planning effort is unnecessary as the resulting plans are not likely to ever be fully executed, due to an unpredictable and changing environment. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variable Level-Of-Detail (VLOD) planning, that is able to focus its search on obtaining accurate short-term results, while considering the far-future with a different level of detail, selectively ignoring the physical interactions with poorly predictable dynamic objects (e.g., other mobile bodies that are controlled by external entities). Unlike finite-horizon planning, which limits the maximum search depth, VLOD planning deals with local minima and generates full plans to the goal, while requiring much less computation than traditional planning. We contribute VLOD planning on a rich simulated physics-based planner and show results for varying LOD thresholds and replanning intervals.
LP Solvable Models for Multiagent Fair Allocation Problems
Authors: Lesca Julien  , Perny Patrice
Published: February 2025

This paper proposes several operational approaches for solving fair allocation problems in the context of multiagent optimization. These problems arise in various contexts such as assigning conference papers to referees or sharing of indivisible goods among agents. We present and discuss various social welfare functions that might be used to maximize the satisfaction of agents while maintaining a notion of fairness in the distribution. All these welfare functions are in fact non-linear, which precludes the use of classical min-cost max-flow algorithms for finding an optimal allocation. For each welfare function considered, we present a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation of the allocation problem that can be efficiently solved using standard solvers. The results of numerical tests we conducted on realistic cases are given at the end of the paper to confirm the practical feasibility of the proposed approaches.
On the (Un-)Decidability of Model Checking Resource-Bounded Agents
Authors: Bulling Nils  , Farwer Berndt
Published: February 2025

The verification and modelling of multi-agent systems is an important topic that has attracted much attention in recent years. Resources, however, have only recently been studied as simple extensions to well-known logics. Trying to find a set of useful features while retaining essential properties for practical use, we explore the question: Where are the limits of what can be verified about resource-bounded agents? We try to answer this question by considering several natural logic-based settings that may arise and prove that verification is usually undecidable apart from bounded or otherwise restrictive settings. Most interestingly, we identify various factors that influence the (un-)decidability and provide grounds for future research on more promising constraints leading to decidable fragments.
Symmetries of Symmetry Breaking Constraints
Authors: Katsirelos George  , Walsh Toby
Published: February 2025

Symmetry is an important feature of many constraint programs. We show that any problem symmetry acting on a set of symmetry breaking constraints can be used to break symmetry. Different symmetries pick out different solutions in each symmetry class. This simple but powerful idea can be used in a number of different ways. We describe one application within model restarts, a search technique designed to reduce the conflict between symmetry breaking and the branching heuristic. In model restarts, we restart search periodically with a random symmetry of the symmetry breaking constraints. Experimental results show that this symmetry breaking technique is effective in practice on some standard benchmark problems.
An Argumentation-Based Dialog for Social Evaluations Exchange
Authors: Pinyol Isaac  , Sabater-Mir Jordi
Published: February 2025

In open multiagent systems, agents depend on reputation and trust mechanisms to evaluate the behavior of potential partners. Often these evaluations (social evaluate) are associated with a measure of reliability that the source agent computes. When considering communicated social evaluations, this may lead to serious problems due to the subjectivity of reputation-related information. In this paper, instead of considering only reliability measures computed from the sources, we provide a mechanism that allows the recipient according to its own knowledge, decide whether the piece of information is reliable. We do this by allowing the agents engage in an argumentation-based dialog
Pitfalls in Practical Open Multi Agent Argumentation Systems: Malicious Argumentation
Authors: Kuipers Andrew  , Denzinger Jörg
Published: February 2025

When an interaction mechanism such as argumentation is considered for use in open multi agent domains, such as E-Commerce or other business applications, it is necessary to consider the possibility of agents performing malicious actions. Common themes when studying malicious actions in communication protocols are that of withholding information and misrepresenting information. In argumentation, however, the use of a complex underlying formal logic allows for the possibility of another type of malicious action: the introduction of superfluous complexity into information, designed to overwhelm the reasoning capacity of another agent. We examine a malicious strategy in open multi agent systems based on exploiting the complexity of the formal logic underlying argumentation in order to manipulate the outcome of argument acceptability evaluation. Further, we briefly discuss the general problem of defensive strategies against this type of malicious argumentation, and the inherent difficulty in detecting occurrences of it.
Building arguments with argumentation: the role of illocutionary force in computational models of argument
Authors: Reed Chris  , Wells Simon  , Budzyńska Katarzyna  , Devereux Joseph
Published: February 2025

This paper builds upon the proposed dialogical extensions to the AIF, termed AIF+, by making explicit the representation of the role of illocutionary force in the connection between argument structures and dialogical structures. Illocutionary force is realised in the form of Illocutionary Application (YA-) nodes that provide an explicit linkage between the locutions uttered during a dialogue and the underlying arguments expressed by the content of those locutions. This linkage is explored in the context of two contrasting dialogue games from the literature, demonstrating how the approach can support the development of computational models in which the speech-act function of communicative moves can be accounted for.
Expanding Argumentation Frameworks: Enforcing and Monotonicity Results
Authors: Baumann Ringo  , Brewka Gerhard
Published: February 2025

This paper addresses the problem of revising a Dung-style argumentation framework by adding finitely many new arguments which may interact with old ones. We study the behavior of the extensions of the augmented argumentation frameworks, taking also into account possible changes of the underlying semantics (which may be interpreted as corresponding changes of proof standards). We show both possibility and impossibility results related to the problem of enforcing a desired set of arguments. Furthermore, we prove some monotonicity results for a special class of expansions with respect to the cardinality of the set of extensions and the justification state.
Approach for Handling Multiple Objects Without Breaking the Continuity of User's Thinking
Authors: Sugawara Kohei
Published: February 2025

There is a popular function that can display the target object to full screen in using computer. This function has a feature that many contents on last active object are hidden by the other object when the user switches the active object to the other object. Therefore, the resource for thinking is consumed by keeping the memory of the hidden information. In this paper, we propose three ideas for keeping the display of contents on active object below. One is an idea that is keeping the desired object to front side of the screen. The other idea is to list files while displaying the active object. And to set automatically the size and position of object to the frequently used size and position file by file. In addition this paper describes how to apply the above ideas to the control-icon that can easily handle multiple objects and was proposed by the authors' previously.
Towards Spoken Latvian Corpus: Current Situation, Methodology and Development
Authors: Auziņa Ilze
Published: February 2025

The aim of this paper is to present the development stages of Spoken Latvian Corpus and the current situation of Spoken Latvian Corpus. The development of Spoken Latvian Corpus has already begun in 2006 (Latvian Council of Science funding), and some individual speech corpora are developed. There are several stages in the creation of Spoken Latvian Corpus: development of concept, speech data collection procedures, transcription and annotation of speech data, representation of corpus.
A Pragmatic Approach for Qualitative Shape and Qualitative Colour Similarity Matching
Authors: Falomir Zoe  , Martí Isabel  , Viana William  , Museros Lledó  , Escrig M. Teresa
Published: February 2025

An approach for qualitative shape and qualitative colour similarity matching is presented in this paper and a first approximation to its application to the assembly of tile ceramic mosaics is given. Qualitative models of shape and colour are used for describing each ceramic tile composing a mosaic. Matrices of similarity values between qualitative shape and qualitative colour parameters are obtained by analysing the conceptual neighbourhood diagrams obtained for each qualitative model. An algorithm for matching the ceramic tiles in the correct place of the mosaic which apply thresholds for shape and colour similarity is defined. It is important to point out that, our approach has been tested in a real application and promising results are obtained.
Improving the efficiency of ontology engineering by introducing prototypicality
Authors: Aimé Xavier  , Fürst Frédéric  , Kuntz Pascale  , Trichet Francky
Published: February 2025

This paper introduces the notion of prototypicality in Ontology Engineering. Three kinds of prototypicality are considered: a concept can be more or less representative of its super-concept (conceptual prototypicality); a term can be more or less associated to a concept (lexical prototypicality); an instance can be more or less representative of its concept (instance prototypicality). Prototypicalities are modeled as order relations which allow to modulate links between concepts, terms and instances within an ontology. To calculate prototypicality gradients used to quantify these orders, we advocate a specific method which is based on all the components of an ontology (i.e. concepts, properties and instances) and a corpus. This paper also underlines the relevance of prototypicality for improving the efficiency of Ontology Engineering processes, in particular Ontology Personalization and Semantic-based Information Retrieval.
Relational Graph Mining for Learning Events from Video
Authors: Sridhar Muralikrishna  , Cohn Anthony G.  , Hogg David C.
Published: February 2025

In this work, we represent complex video activities as one large activity graph and propose a constraint based graph mining technique to discover a partonomy of classes of subgraphs corresponding to event classes. Events are defined as subgraphs of the activity graph that represent what we regard as interesting interactions, that is, where all objects are actively engaged and are characterized by frequent occurrences in the activity graph. Subgraphs with these two properties are mined using a level-wise algorithm, and then partitioned into equivalence classes which we regard as event classes. Moreover, a taxonomy of these event classes naturally emerges from the level-wise mining procedure. Experimental results in an aircraft turnaround apron scenario show that the proposed technique has considerable potential for characterizing and mining events from video.
Burdens of Proof in Monological Argumentation
Authors: Governatori Guido  , Sartor Giovanni
Published: February 2025

We shall argue that burdens of proof are relevant also to monological reasoning, i.e., for deriving the conclusions of a knowledge-base allowing for conflicting arguments. Reasoning with burdens of proof can provide a useful extension of current argument-based non-monotonic logics, at least a different perspective on them. Firstly we shall provide an objective characterisation of burdens of proof, assuming that burdens concerns rule antecedents (literals in the body of rules), rather than agents. Secondly, we shall analyse the conditions for a burden to be satisfied, by considering credulous or skeptical derivability of the concerned antecedent or of its complement. Finally, we shall develop a method for developing inferences out of a knowledge base merging rules and proof burdens in the framework of defeasible logic.
Bridging Topics for Story Generation
Authors: Sato Makoto  , Akaishi Mina  , Hori Koichi
Published: February 2025

This paper introduces a method for bridging topics designed to facilitate generating stories over documents. First, we present a method for topic extraction based on narrative structure with k-means algorithm. We then model the story generation process and present a method for finding a bridge document between two documents.
A Phenomena-of-Interest Approach for the Interconnection of Sensor Data and Spatiotemporal Web Contents
Authors: Kim Kyoung-Sook  , Nakanishi Takafumi  , Homma Hidenori  , Zettsu Koji  , Kidawara Yutaka  , Kiyoki Yasushi
Published: February 2025

With the advance of ubiquitous computing and mobile environments, we have begun to continuously monitor changes in real-world condition and environment through wireless sensor networks. Opportunities also exist for people to create information related to the world around them by using mobile phones equipped with sensing devices, and share that information online with others. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the interconnection of earth observation data and spatiotemporal web contents on the basis of spatiotemporal and thematic relationships. In particular, we use the concept of moving phenomena of interests to link between measurement sensing data and people-centric contents on the basis of spatiotemporal proximity and thematic relevance. This paper also shows a simple application that automatically generates semantic tags with respect to natural geographic phenomena, such as typhoons, climate changes, and air pollution, on the basis of our interconnection approach. We are able to easily understand qualitative meanings with respect to a certain phenomenon expressed by quantitative numeric conditions.
Switching Neural Network: An application to Regression Problems
Authors: Ferrari Enrico  , Muselli Marco
Published: February 2025

In this paper regression problems, in which the output is continuous or discrete, are considered. In particular, the Switching Neural Network approach, which has been introduced for classification, is properly extended to deal with regression tasks. The resulting model, named SNN-reg, presents multiple advantages, involving both the quality of the obtained solution and the computational effort needed for its generation. Moreover, SNN-reg allows a regression function to be swritten in terms of a set of intelligible rules, which can be interpreted by the user.
Applied pi calculus
Authors: Ryan Mark D.  , Smyth Ben
Published: February 2025

The applied pi calculus is a language for modelling security protocols. It is an extension of the pi calculus, a language for studying concurrency and process interaction. This chapter presents the applied pi calculus in a tutorial style. It describes reachability, correspondence, and observational equivalence properties, with examples showing how to model secrecy, authentication, and privacy aspects of protocols.
Verifying a bounded number of sessions and its complexity
Authors: Rusinowitch Michael  , Turuani Mathieu
Published: February 2025

We investigate the complexity of the protocol insecurity problem for a finite number of sessions (fixed number of interleaved runs). We show that this problem is NP-complete with respect to a Dolev-Yao model of intruders. The result does not assume a limit on the size of messages and supports asymetric and non-atomic symmetric encryption keys. We also prove that in order to build an attack with a fixed number of sessions the intruder needs only to forge messages of linear size, provided that they are represented as DAGs.
Integrated EPC Information Service Authentication Using OpenID in Cross Domains
Authors: Liu Yan-Chen  , Chien Hung-Yu  , Chen Yu-Chang  , Yang Chu-Sing  , Lo Nai-Wei
Published: February 2025

The authentication of existing EPC Information Service (EPCIS) platforms depends on individual authentication implementations of each EPCIS administration- this approach is not scalable and cannot fully meet the requirements of supply chain management. This paper extends OpenID authentication mechanism by sharing user attributes between identity providers and Relying Party (EPCIS in this application), and integrates the extended OpenID with EPCISs. This integrated platform allows a user with only one single OpenID account to access EPCISs of different domains around the globe, and each EPCIS can authorize applicable access rights to the users, based on the local policy and the user's attributes delivered from Identity Provider. This solution provides a scalable, effective and integrated authentication mechanism for EPCIS supplies chain management.
A Sub-0.5V Lattice-Based Public-Key Encryption Scheme for RFID Platforms in 130nm CMOS
Authors: Yao Yu  , Huang Jiawei  , Khanna Sudhanshu  , Shelat Abhi  , Calhoun Benton Highsmith  , Lach John  , Evans David
Published: February 2025

Implementing public-key cryptography on passive RFID tags is very challenging due to the limited die size and power available. Typical public-key algorithms require complex logical components such as modular exponentiation in RSA. We demonstrate the feasibility of implementing public-key encryption on low-power, low cost passive RFID tags to large-scale private identification. We use Oded Regev's Learning-With-Error (LWE) cryptosystem, which is provably secure under the hardness assumption of classic lattice problems. The advantage of using the LWE cryptosystem is its intrinsic computational simplicity (the main operation is modular additions). We leverage the low speed of RFID application by using circuit design with supply voltage close to transistor threshold (Vt) to lower power. This paper presents protocols for using the LWE cipher to provide private identification and evaluates a design for implementing those protocols on passive RFID tags, and reports on simulation experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.
Innovations in Democratic Governance
Authors: Bevir Mark  , Bowman Quinlan
Published: February 2025

This chapter explores how direct citizen participation can feature throughout the varied stages of the public policy cascade. It discusses a range of democratic innovations for public participation, focusing on three aspects of the policy process: public opinion formation, decision-making, and implementation. The case studies indicate how public participation can operate at multiple geographical scales – ranging from the neighborhood level all the way up to the transnational – and illustrate how participation at different levels might be linked up. The examples explore ways that citizens might craft their own rules for participation; monitor those rules and the policies they help generate; and cooperatively implement their own local policies. They also suggest ways in which the role of experts and officials might be transformed into one of largely supporting and facilitating public participation. To conclude, the authors discuss a few ways in which innovative practices might contribute to a more effective policy process.
Citizen-centric E-Governance and Innovative Developments of Public Services
Authors: Reddick Christopher G.
Published: February 2025

This chapter provides an analysis and examples of how the emergence of citizen-centric e-governance has transformed public service delivery. There is a discussion of what e-governance is and the most important models that explain its development. The important role that citizens play in e-governance is examined. E-governance and its impact on organizational change and development are highlighted, with a particular focus on its ability to transform government and public service delivery. Finally, there is a discussion of some of the emerging technologies that can potentially create more citizen-centric government. The overall conclusion of this chapter is that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have the potential to transform government, but the evidence suggests a more incremental path than what some of the earlier scholars had envisioned.
Developing ICT and e-Government: The South Korean Experience of ICT-based Governance Innovation
Authors: Hong Sung Gul
Published: February 2025

This chapter aims to explain why and how South Korea develop such an advanced information and communication technology (ICT) and e-government in short period of time, and how the public sector is being innovated by using various e-government services. Beginning with a brief introduction to South Korea, the author provides a historical overview of the developmental processes of South Korea's ICT and e-government. E-government systems and services available in South Korea are explained along with the major achievements in public governance innovation. Much of the e-government services provide efficient and transparent processes of public service provision, and citizen participation in policy making and politics is being increased over time. The combined effects of e-government systems and services are: convenient access to government services, fast responses to citizen demands, automatic digital record-keeping, increasing transparency, cost-effective service provision, active citizen participation in policy making processes, and increasing political activism. However, South Korean experience of building e-government still has problems to be resolved. Most problems are behavioral as well as cultural instead of technical.
Outsourcing: Rebuilding Public Service Delivery in China
Authors: Jing Yijia
Published: February 2025

China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy has been producing a market-based government. Outsourcing in service delivery has been increasingly adopted as a major public management innovation. This paper provides an overview of the development of outsourcing in China by analyzing the changing service delivery environments in China and generalizing the major developments and characteristics of outsourcing. An analytical framework for capacity development is proposed to examine the management practices of Chinese governments on outsourcing. A case of competitive outsourcing of social services in Shanghai is studied as China's avantgarde local innovation. The author argues that public-private collaboration in service delivery has become an irreversible trend in China, with important commonalities and differences from its western counterpart. It is critically important for Chinese governments to develop managing capacities to achieve success in harnessing this “buy” option.
Adding Formal Verification to occam-π
Authors: Welch Peter H.  , Pedersen Jan B.  , Barnes Fred R.M.  , Ritson Carl G.  , Brown Neil C.C.
Published: February 2025

This is a proposal for the formal verification of occam-π programs to be managed entirely within occam-π. The language is extended with qualifiers on types and processes (to indicate relevance for verification and/or execution) and assertions about refinement (including deadlock, livelock and determinism). The compiler abstracts a set of CSPm equations and assertions, delegates their analysis to the FDR2 model checker and reports back in terms related to the occam-π source. The rules for mapping the extended occam-π to CSPm are given. The full range of CSPm assertions is accessible, with no knowledge of CSP formalism required by the occam-π programmer. Programs are proved just by writing and compiling programs. A case-study analysing a new (and elegant) solution to the Dining Philosophers problem is presented. Deadlock-freedom for colleges with any number of philosphers is established by verifying an induction argument (the base and induction steps). Finally, following guidelines laid down by Roscoe, the careful use of model compression is demonstrated to verify directly the deadlock-freedom of an occam-π college with 102000 philosphers (in around 30 seconds). All we need is a universe large enough to contain the computer on which to run it.
12. Zinc in Critical Illness and Sepsis
Authors: Knoell Daren L.  , Besecker Beth Y.
Published: February 2025

Zinc availability affects the host response to major trauma and infection and is associated with the classic acute phase response. During the acute phase response plasma zinc levels precipitously decline as a result of mobilization of zinc into the intracellular compartment to assist with vital metabolic functions that enable immune defense, tissue repair and recovery. Despite knowing some but not all of the essential roles that zinc plays in host defense, little is known regarding metabolic zinc requirements at the onset of and during the acute phase response in the context of critical illness. Recent evidence suggests that zinc supplementation may have a beneficial role in the critically ill and that zinc deficiency, prior to host insult, may be disadvantageous. In this review, new data on zinc metabolism, its implication in the pathogenesis of critical illness with a focus on sepsis, and its therapeutic effects are summarized.
23. Zinc and the Gastrointestinal Tract
Authors: Soybel David I.  , Kohler Jonathan E.
Published: February 2025

This review focuses on Zn2+transport processes within exocrine cells and mucosal tissues of the gastrointestinal tract. Attention is directed to what is known about mechanisms of Zn2+transport and management within mucosal cells that are functionally unique in each region. An effort has been made to summarize the effects of zinc deficiency on signature functions within each region. Also identified are promising areas for further investigation of zinc transport and management in the gastrointestinal tract, especially with respect to human pathophysioloy and disease.
Linear Cryptanalysis Using Multiple Linear Approximations
Authors: Hermelin Miia  , Nyberg Kaisa
Published: February 2025

In this article, the theory of multidimensional linear attacks on block ciphers is developed and the basic attack algorithms and their complexity estimates are presented. As an application, Cho's multidimensional linear distinguisher for the block cipher PRESENT is discussed in detail.
Using Tools from Error Correcting Theory in Linear Cryptanalysis
Authors: Gérard Benoît  , Tillich Jean-Pierre
Published: February 2025

The main topics where coding theory can be useful for linear cryptanalysis are finding linear approximations of a cipher [6,7], recovering efficiently key bits from statistical data [1,9] and estimating the data complexity of a linear cryptanalysis [9]. We give an overview of such results here.
Instrumental Inference in Legal Expert System
Authors: Zurek Tomasz
Published: February 2025

Statute law legislators are usually not in a position to foresee each and every situation or event which may actually occur in real life. That is why lawyers in the course of their everyday practice very often struggle with interpreting the cases which are not expressly regulated in the law. The legal theory and practice has given rise to a wide array of methods to deal with this type of problems. The aim of this study is to develop and implement an instrumental inference model, i.e. one of the non-standard inference mechanisms used to interpret the rules of statutory law.
Three Concepts of Defeasible Permission
Authors: Governatori Guido  , Olivieri Francesco  , Rotolo Antonino  , Scannapieco Simone
Published: February 2025

In this paper we propose an extension of Defeasible Logic to represent different concepts of defeasible permission. Special attention is paid in particular to permissive norms that work as exceptions to opposite obligations.
Structural Approach to Service Composition Based on Relational Model
Authors: Akahoshi Yuhei  , Zettsu Koji  , Kidawara Yutaka  , Tanaka Katsumi
Published: February 2025

We propose a structural approach to service composition using a relational model. We focus on structural aspects of service composition and apply the relational model. Services in our model are defined and organized by relations, and service manipulations such as service invoke and service composition, are achieved by relational operations to the corresponding relations. Since conventional relational algebra is insufficient for service management, we extend relational algebra and introduce a new θ-operator to deal with services.
Cluster Analysis Systematisation for Data, Model and Knowledge Management
Authors: Jannaschk Kai  , Polomski Tsvetelin
Published: February 2025

Data mining algorithms aim to provide some means to expose the hidden information behind data. But considering a particular problem statement raises the question, which algorithm should be employed and moreover how and which processing steps should be nested to convey a target-aimed knowledge discovery process. Present approaches such as the CRISP-DM are mainly focused at the management or the description of such processes but they do not really describe how such a discovery process should be designed.
Chondrocytes and Mechanical Forces
Authors: Bougault Carole  , Mallein-Gerin Frédéric
Published: February 2025

Introduction
Maturation of Neuroscience Information Framework: An Ontology Driven Information System for Neuroscience
Authors: Imam Fahim T.  , Larson Stephen  , Bandrowski Anita  , Grethe Jeffrey S.  , Gupta Amarnath  , Martone Maryann E.
Published: February 2025

The numbers of available neuroscience resources (databases, tools, materials and networks) on the web have, and continue to expand; particularly in light of newly implemented data sharing policies required by funding agencies and journals. However, the nature of dense, multi-faceted neuroscience data and the design of classic search engine systems makes efficient, reliable, and relevant discovery of such resources a significant challenge. This challenge is especially pertinent for online databases, whose dynamic content is largely opaque to contemporary search engines. The Neuroscience Information FrameworkThe Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), http://neuinfo.org
The mysterious appearance of objects
Authors: Bottazzi Emanuele  , Ferrario Roberta  , Masolo Claudio
Published: February 2025

Moving from some reflections on the empirical practice of measurement and on the nature of visual perception, we present a constructivist approach to objects. At the basis of such approach there is the idea that all we may know about what is out there is always mediated by some sort of apparatus, being it a measurement instrument or our perceptual system. Given this perspective, some questions are in order: how are objects identified and re-identified through time from the outcomes of apparatuses? How can we distinguish different (kinds of) objects? Our first goal will be to make explicit the mechanism used to build objects from the apparatuses' outcomes, emphasizing what are the ontological and representational problems this construction faces. A second contribution will be a preliminary discussion of some possible ways to distinguish social objects, the constructed objects par excellence, from physical ones. A third contribution will be an attempt to make a bridge between two scientific communities that rarely seek contact or mutual recognition: that of formal ontologies and that of formal concept analysis.
Robot Skill Learning
Authors: Peters Jan  , Mülling Katharina  , Kober Jens  , Nguyen-Tuong Duy  , Krömer Oliver
Published: February 2025

Learning robots that can acquire new motor skills and refine existing ones have been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and the cognitive sciences. Early steps towards this goal in the 1980s made clear that reasoning and human insights will not suffice. Instead, new hope has been offered by the rise of modern machine learning approaches. However, to date, it becomes increasingly clear that off-the-shelf machine learning approaches will not be adequate for robot skill learning as these methods often do not scale into the high-dimensional domains of manipulator and humanoid robotics, nor do they fulfill the real-time requirement of the domain. As an alternative, we propose to divide the generic skill learning problem into parts that can be well-understood from a robotics point of view. After designing appropriate learning approaches for these basic components, these will serve as the ingredients of a general approach to robot skill learning. In this paper, we discuss our recent and current progress in this direction. As such, we present our work on learning to control, learning elementary movements, as well as our steps towards the learning of complex tasks. We show several evaluations using both real robots as well as physically realistic simulations.
An approach to multi-agent planning with incomplete information
Authors: Torreño Alejandro  , Onaindia Eva  , Sapena Óscar
Published: February 2025

Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches have been typically conceived for independent or loosely-coupled problems to enhance the benefits of distributed planning between autonomous agents as solving this type of problems require less coordination between the agents' sub-plans. However, when it comes to tightly-coupled agents' tasks, MAP has been relegated in favour of centralized approaches and little work has been done in this direction. In this paper, we present a general-purpose MAP capable to efficiently handle planning problems with any level of coupling between agents. We propose a cooperative refinement planning approach, built upon the partial-order planning paradigm, that allows agents to work with incomplete information and to have incomplete views of the world, i.e. being ignorant of other agents' information, as well as maintaining their own private information. We show various experiments to compare the performance of our system with a distributed CSP-based MAP approach over a suite of problems.
Disambiguating Road Names in Text Route Descriptions using Exact-All-Hop Shortest Path Algorithm
Authors: Zhang Xiao  , Qiu Baojun  , Mitra Prasenjit  , Xu Sen  , Klippel Alexander  , Mac Eachren Alan M.
Published: February 2025

Automatic extraction and understanding of human-generated route descriptions have been critical to research aiming at understanding human cognition of geospatial information. Among all research issues involved, road name disambiguation is the most important, because one road name can refer to more than one road. Compared with traditional toponym (place name) disambiguation, the challenges of disambiguating road names in human-generated route description are three-fold: (1) the authors may use a wrong or obsolete road name and the gazetteer may have incomplete or out-of-date information; (2) geographic ontologies often used to disambiguate cities or counties do not exist for roads, due to their linear nature and large spatial extent; (3) knowledge of the co-occurrence of road names and other toponyms are difficult to learn due to the difficulty in automatic processing of natural language and lack of external information source of road entities. In this paper, we solve the problem of road name disambiguation in human-generated route descriptions with noise, i.e. in the presence of wrong names and incomplete gazetteer. We model the problem as an Exact-All-Hop Shortest Path problem on a semi-complete directed k-partite graph, and design an efficient algorithm to solve it. Our disambiguation algorithm successfully handles the noisy data and does not require any extra information sources other than the gazetteer. We compared our algorithm with an existing map-based method. Experiment results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the existing method.
From Macro Plans to Automata Plans
Authors: Bäckström Christer  , Jonsson Anders  , Jonsson Peter
Published: February 2025

Macros have a long-standing role in planning as a tool for representing repeating subsequences of operators. Macros are useful both for guiding search towards a solution and for representing plans compactly. In this paper we introduce automata plans which consist of hierarchies of finite state automata. Automata plans can be viewed as an extension of macros that enables parametrization and branching. We provide several examples of the utility of automata plans, and prove that automata plans are strictly more expressive than macro plans. We also prove that automata plans admit polynomialtime sequential access of the operators in the underlying “flat” plan, and identify a subset of automata plans that admit polynomial-time random access. Finally, we compare automata plans with other representations allowing polynomial-time sequential access.
Cooperatives for Demand Side Management
Authors: Kota Ramachandra  , Chalkiadakis Georgios  , Robu Valentin  , Rogers Alex  , Jennings Nicholas R.
Published: February 2025

We propose a new scheme for efficient demand side management for the Smart Grid. Specifically, we envisage and promote the formation of cooperatives of medium-large consumers and equip them (via our proposed mechanisms) with the capability of regularly participating in the existing electricity markets by providing electricity demand reduction services to the Grid. Based on mechanism design principles, we develop a model for such cooperatives by designing methods for estimating suitable reduction amounts, placing bids in the market and redistributing the obtained revenue amongst the member agents. Our mechanism is such that the member agents have no incentive to show artificial reductions with the aim of increasing their revenues.
Adaptive parameter computation for the automatic measure of the Tear Break-Up Time
Authors: Ramos L.  , Barreira N.  , Mosquera A.  , Currás M.  , Pena-Verdeal H.  , Giráldez M.J.  , Penedo M.G.
Published: February 2025

Dry eye syndrome is a common disorder of the tear film, affecting a significant percentage of the population. The Break-Up Time (BUT) is a clinical test used for the diagnosis of this disease. In this work, we propose several improvements for the automatic computation of the BUT measure that solve the limitations of previous approaches. In particular, we present several procedures for the automatic computation of some parameters involved in the BUT measurement, such as the eye size, the intensity variation, or the starting point of the measurement frame sequence. We have tested our methodology on a dataset composed of 18 videos annotated by 4 different experts. The average difference between the automatic measure and the experts’ measures is on the acceptable range considering the high inter-observer variance.