25,186 research outputs found
Categorical Ontology of Complex Systems, Meta-Systems and Theory of Levels: The Emergence of Life, Human Consciousness and Society
Single cell interactomics in simpler organisms, as well as somatic cell interactomics in multicellular organisms, involve biomolecular interactions in complex signalling pathways that were recently represented in modular terms by quantum automata with âreversible behaviorâ representing normal cell cycling and division. Other implications of such quantum automata, modular modeling of signaling pathways and cell differentiation during development are in the fields of neural plasticity and brain development leading to quantum-weave dynamic patterns and specific molecular processes underlying extensive memory, learning, anticipation mechanisms and the emergence of human consciousness during the early brain development in children. Cell interactomics is here represented for the first time as a mixture of âclassicalâ states that determine molecular dynamics subject to Boltzmann statistics and âsteady-stateâ, metabolic (multi-stable) manifolds, together with âconfigurationâ spaces of metastable quantum states emerging from complex quantum dynamics of interacting networks of biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids that are now collectively defined as quantum interactomics. On the other hand, the time dependent evolution over several generations of cancer cells --that are generally known to undergo frequent and extensive genetic mutations and, indeed, suffer genomic transformations at the chromosome level (such as extensive chromosomal aberrations found in many colon cancers)-- cannot be correctly represented in the âstandardâ terms of quantum automaton modules, as the normal somatic cells can. This significant difference at the cancer cell genomic level is therefore reflected in major changes in cancer cell interactomics often from one cancer cell âcycleâ to the next, and thus it requires substantial changes in the modeling strategies, mathematical tools and experimental designs aimed at understanding cancer mechanisms. Novel solutions to this important problem in carcinogenesis are proposed and experimental validation procedures are suggested. From a medical research and clinical standpoint, this approach has important consequences for addressing and preventing the development of cancer resistance to medical therapy in ongoing clinical trials involving stage III cancer patients, as well as improving the designs of future clinical trials for cancer treatments.\ud
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KEYWORDS: Emergence of Life and Human Consciousness;\ud
Proteomics; Artificial Intelligence; Complex Systems Dynamics; Quantum Automata models and Quantum Interactomics; quantum-weave dynamic patterns underlying human consciousness; specific molecular processes underlying extensive memory, learning, anticipation mechanisms and human consciousness; emergence of human consciousness during the early brain development in children; Cancer cell âcyclingâ; interacting networks of proteins and nucleic acids; genetic mutations and chromosomal aberrations in cancers, such as colon cancer; development of cancer resistance to therapy; ongoing clinical trials involving stage III cancer patientsâ possible improvements of the designs for future clinical trials and cancer treatments. \ud
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A systems approach to evaluate One Health initiatives
Challenges calling for integrated approaches to health, such as the One Health (OH) approach, typically arise from the intertwined spheres of humans, animals, and ecosystems constituting their environment. Initiatives addressing such wicked problems commonly consist of complex structures and dynamics. As a result of the EU COST Action (TD 1404) âNetwork for Evaluation of One Healthâ (NEOH), we propose an evaluation framework anchored in systems theory to address the intrinsic complexity of OH initiatives and regard them as subsystems of the context within which they operate. Typically, they intend to influence a system with a view to improve human, animal, and environmental health. The NEOH evaluation framework consists of four overarching elements, namely: (1) the definition of the initiative and its context, (2) the description of the theory of change with an assessment of expected and unexpected outcomes, (3) the process evaluation of operational and supporting infrastructures (the âOH-nessâ), and (4) an assessment of the association(s) between the process evaluation and the outcomes produced. It relies on a mixed methods approach by combining a descriptive and qualitative assessment with a semi-quantitative scoring for the evaluation of the degree and structural balance of âOH-nessâ (summarised in an OH-index and OH-ratio, respectively) and conventional metrics for different outcomes in a multi-criteria-decision-analysis. Here, we focus on the methodology for Elements (1) and (3) including ready-to-use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for the assessment of the âOH-nessâ. We also provide an overview of Element (2), and refer to the NEOH handbook for further details, also regarding Element (4) (http://neoh.onehealthglobal.net). The presented approach helps researchers, practitioners, and evaluators to conceptualise and conduct evaluations of integrated approaches to health and facilitates comparison and learning across different OH activities thereby facilitating decisions on resource allocation. The application of the framework has been described in eight case studies in the same Frontiers research topic and provides first data on OH-index and OH-ratio, which is an important step towards their validation and the creation of a dataset for future benchmarking, and to demonstrate under which circumstances OH initiatives provide added value compared to disciplinary or conventional health initiatives
Visualizing and Interacting with Concept Hierarchies
Concept Hierarchies and Formal Concept Analysis are theoretically well
grounded and largely experimented methods. They rely on line diagrams called
Galois lattices for visualizing and analysing object-attribute sets. Galois
lattices are visually seducing and conceptually rich for experts. However they
present important drawbacks due to their concept oriented overall structure:
analysing what they show is difficult for non experts, navigation is
cumbersome, interaction is poor, and scalability is a deep bottleneck for
visual interpretation even for experts. In this paper we introduce semantic
probes as a means to overcome many of these problems and extend usability and
application possibilities of traditional FCA visualization methods. Semantic
probes are visual user centred objects which extract and organize reduced
Galois sub-hierarchies. They are simpler, clearer, and they provide a better
navigation support through a rich set of interaction possibilities. Since probe
driven sub-hierarchies are limited to users focus, scalability is under control
and interpretation is facilitated. After some successful experiments, several
applications are being developed with the remaining problem of finding a
compromise between simplicity and conceptual expressivity
A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter
Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are
central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic
identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been
explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network
platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of
tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and
real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained
significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing
with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and
context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall
picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the
prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We
first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing
Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then
structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency
is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies
adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two
related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest
recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur
Chatbot de Suporte para Plataforma de Marketing Multicanal
E-goi is an organization which provides automated multichannel marketing possibilities. Given its systemâs complexity, it requires a not so smooth learning curve, which means that sometimes costumers incur upon some difficulties which directs them towards appropriate Costumer Support resources. With an increase in the number of users, these Costumer Support requests are somewhat frequent and demand an increase in availability in Costumer Support channels which become inundated with simple, easily-resolvable requests. The organization idealized the possibility of automating significant portion of costumer generated tickets with the possibility of scaling to deal with other types of operations. This thesis aims to present a long-term solution to that request with the development of a chatbot system, fully integrated with the existing enterprise modules and data sources. In order to accomplish this, prototypes using several Chatbot management and Natural Language Processing frameworks were developed. Afterwards, their advantages and disadvantages were pondered, followed by the implementation of its accompanying system and testing of developed software and Natural Language Processing results. Although the developed overarching system achieved its designed functionalities, the masterâs thesis could not offer a viable solution for the problem at hand given that the available data could not provide an intent mining model usable in a real-world context.A E-goi Ă© uma organização que disponibiliza soluçÔes de marketing digital automatizadas e multicanal. Dada a complexidade do seu Sistema, que requer uma curva de aprendizagem nĂŁo muito suave, o que significa que os seus utilizadores por vezes tĂȘm dificuldades que os levam a recorrer aos canais de Apoio ao Cliente. Com um aumento de utilizadores, estes pedidos de Apoio ao Cliente tornam-se frequentes e requerem um aumento da disponibilidade nos canais apropriados que ficam inundados de pedidos simples e de fĂĄcil resolução. A organização idealizou a possibilidade de automatizar uma porção significativa de tais pedidos, podendo escalar para outro tipo de operaçÔes. Este trabalho de mestrado visa apresentar uma proposta de solução a longo prazo para este problema. Pretende-se o desenvolvimento de um sistema de chatbots, completamente integrado com o sistema existente da empresa e variadas fontes de dados. Para este efeito, foram desenvolvidos protĂłtipos de vĂĄrias frameworks para gestĂŁo de chatbots e de Natural Language Processing, ponderadas as suas vantagens e desvantagens, implementado o sistema englobante e realizados planos de testes ao software desenvolvido e aos resultados de Natural Language Processing. Apesar do sistema desenvolvido ter cumprido as funcionalidades pelas quais foi concebido, a tese de mestrado nĂŁo foi capaz de obter uma solução viĂĄvel para o problema dado que com os dados disponibilizados nĂŁo foi possĂvel produzir um modelo de deteção de intençÔes usĂĄvel num contexto real
Towards Personalized and Human-in-the-Loop Document Summarization
The ubiquitous availability of computing devices and the widespread use of
the internet have generated a large amount of data continuously. Therefore, the
amount of available information on any given topic is far beyond humans'
processing capacity to properly process, causing what is known as information
overload. To efficiently cope with large amounts of information and generate
content with significant value to users, we require identifying, merging and
summarising information. Data summaries can help gather related information and
collect it into a shorter format that enables answering complicated questions,
gaining new insight and discovering conceptual boundaries.
This thesis focuses on three main challenges to alleviate information
overload using novel summarisation techniques. It further intends to facilitate
the analysis of documents to support personalised information extraction. This
thesis separates the research issues into four areas, covering (i) feature
engineering in document summarisation, (ii) traditional static and inflexible
summaries, (iii) traditional generic summarisation approaches, and (iv) the
need for reference summaries. We propose novel approaches to tackle these
challenges, by: i)enabling automatic intelligent feature engineering, ii)
enabling flexible and interactive summarisation, iii) utilising intelligent and
personalised summarisation approaches. The experimental results prove the
efficiency of the proposed approaches compared to other state-of-the-art
models. We further propose solutions to the information overload problem in
different domains through summarisation, covering network traffic data, health
data and business process data.Comment: PhD thesi
Emerging Consciousness as a Result of Complex-Dynamical Interaction Process
A quite general interaction process within a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method, liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of the many-body problem reveals the phenomenon of dynamic multivaluedness, or redundance, of emerging, incompatible system realisations and dynamic entanglement of system components within each realisation. The ensuing concept of dynamic complexity (and related intrinsic chaoticity) is absolutely universal and can be applied to the problem of consciousness that emerges now as a high enough, properly specified level of unreduced complexity of a suitable interaction process. This complexity level can be identified with the appearance of bound, permanently localised states in the multivalued brain dynamics from strongly chaotic states of unconscious intelligence, by analogy with classical behaviour emergence from quantum states at much lower levels of world dynamics. We show that the main properties of this dynamically emerging consciousness (and intelligence, at the preceding complexity level) correspond to empirically derived properties of natural versions and obtain causally substantiated conclusions about their artificial realisation, including the fundamentally justified paradigm of genuine machine consciousness. This rigorously defined machine consciousness is different from both natural consciousness and any mechanistic, dynamically single-valued imitation of the latter. We use then the same, truly universal concept of complexity to derive equally rigorous conclusions about mental and social implications of the machine consciousness paradigm, demonstrating its indispensable role in the next stage of civilisation development
Network Structure, Interracial Contacts, and the Evolution of Social Norms
In this paper I explore the underlying mechanisms of the changes in public discourse with respect to the issue of racial equality that have been observed in the United States over the course of its history, with a particular focus on the changes that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century. Specifically, I provide a formal model of social interactions in which agents are assigned to non-homophilic networks, are heterogeneous with respect to preferences for equality between the races, and have preferences both to express their true preferences and to not appear deviant from the group. In a series of numerical experiments, results indicate that the probability of a transition in norms from an equilibrium around inequality to an equilibrium around equality is increasing in the size of the minority population and decreasing in the size of groups to which individuals are assigned
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