Blackboard Rules for Coordinating Context-aware Applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Thanks to improvements in wireless communication technologies and increasing computing power in hand-held devices, mobile ad hoc networks are becoming an ever-more present reality. Coordination languages are expected to become important means in supporting this type of interaction. To this extent we argue the interest of the Bach coordination language as a middleware that can handle and react to context changes as well as cope with unpredictable physical interruptions that occur in opportunistic network connections. More concretely, our proposal is based on blackboard rules that model declaratively the actions to be taken once the blackboard content reaches a predefined state, but also that manage the engagement and disengagement of hosts and transient sharing of blackboards. The idea of reactiveness has already been introduced in previous work, but as will be appreciated by the reader, this article presents a new perspective, more focused on a declarative setting.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432

Conformance Checking Based on Multi-Perspective Declarative Process Models

Process mining is a family of techniques that aim at analyzing business process execution data recorded in event logs. Conformance checking is a branch of this discipline embracing approaches for verifying whether the behavior of a process, as recorded in a log, is in line with some expected behaviors provided in the form of a process model. The majority of these approaches require the input process model to be procedural (e.g., a Petri net). However, in turbulent environments, characterized by high variability, the process behavior is less stable and predictable. In these environments, procedural process models are less suitable to describe a business process. Declarative specifications, working in an open world assumption, allow the modeler to express several possible execution paths as a compact set of constraints. Any process execution that does not contradict these constraints is allowed. One of the open challenges in the context of conformance checking with declarative models is the capability of supporting multi-perspective specifications. In this paper, we close this gap by providing a framework for conformance checking based on MP-Declare, a multi-perspective version of the declarative process modeling language Declare. The approach has been implemented in the process mining tool ProM and has been experimented in three real life case studies

Cognitive architectures as Lakatosian research programmes: two case studies

Cognitive architectures - task-general theories of the structure and function of the complete cognitive system - are sometimes argued to be more akin to frameworks or belief systems than scientific theories. The argument stems from the apparent non-falsifiability of existing cognitive architectures. Newell was aware of this criticism and argued that architectures should be viewed not as theories subject to Popperian falsification, but rather as Lakatosian research programs based on cumulative growth. Newell's argument is undermined because he failed to demonstrate that the development of Soar, his own candidate architecture, adhered to Lakatosian principles. This paper presents detailed case studies of the development of two cognitive architectures, Soar and ACT-R, from a Lakatosian perspective. It is demonstrated that both are broadly Lakatosian, but that in both cases there have been theoretical progressions that, according to Lakatosian criteria, are pseudo-scientific. Thus, Newell's defense of Soar as a scientific rather than pseudo-scientific theory is not supported in practice. The ACT series of architectures has fewer pseudo-scientific progressions than Soar, but it too is vulnerable to accusations of pseudo-science. From this analysis, it is argued that successive versions of theories of the human cognitive architecture must explicitly address five questions to maintain scientific credibility

Motivations, Values and Emotions: 3 sides of the same coin

This position paper speaks to the interrelationships between the three concepts of motivations, values, and emotion. Motivations prime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotions provide a common currency for values, and emotions implement motivations. While conceptually distinct, the three are so pragmatically intertwined as to differ primarily from our taking different points of view. To make these points more transparent, we briefly describe the three in the context a cognitive architecture, the LIDA model, for software agents and robots that models human cognition, including a developmental period. We also compare the LIDA model with other models of cognition, some involving learning and emotions. Finally, we conclude that artificial emotions will prove most valuable as implementers of motivations in situations requiring learning and development

Towards a Decoupled Context-Oriented Programming Language for the Internet of Things

Easily programming behaviors is one major issue of a large and reconfigurable deployment in the Internet of Things. Such kind of devices often requires to externalize part of their behavior such as the sensing, the data aggregation or the code offloading. Most existing context-oriented programming languages integrate in the same class or close layers the whole behavior. We propose to abstract and separate the context tracking from the decision process, and to use event-based handlers to interconnect them. We keep a very easy declarative and non-layered programming model. We illustrate by defining an extension to Golo-a JVM-based dynamic language

The Role of Consciousness in Memory

Conscious events interact with memory systems in learning, rehearsal and retrieval (Ebbinghaus 1885/1964; Tulving 1985). Here we present hypotheses that arise from the IDA computional model (Franklin, Kelemen and McCauley 1998; Franklin 2001b) of global workspace theory (Baars 1988, 2002). Our primary tool for this exploration is a flexible cognitive cycle employed by the IDA computational model and hypothesized to be a basic element of human cognitive processing. Since cognitive cycles are hypothesized to occur five to ten times a second and include interaction between conscious contents and several of the memory systems, they provide the means for an exceptionally fine-grained analysis of various cognitive tasks. We apply this tool to the small effect size of subliminal learning compared to supraliminal learning, to process dissociation, to implicit learning, to recognition vs. recall, and to the availability heuristic in recall. The IDA model elucidates the role of consciousness in the updating of perceptual memory, transient episodic memory, and procedural memory. In most cases, memory is hypothesized to interact with conscious events for its normal functioning. The methodology of the paper is unusual in that the hypotheses and explanations presented are derived from an empirically based, but broad and qualitative computational model of human cognition

Reactive Rules for Emergency Management

The goal of the following survey on Event-Condition-Action (ECA) Rules is to come to a common understanding and intuition on this topic within EMILI. Thus it does not give an academic overview on Event-Condition-Action Rules which would be valuable for computer scientists only. Instead the survey tries to introduce Event-Condition-Action Rules and their use for emergency management based on real-life examples from the use-cases identified in Deliverable 3.1. In this way we hope to address both, computer scientists and security experts, by showing how the Event-Condition-Action Rule technology can help to solve security issues in emergency management. The survey incorporates information from other work packages, particularly from Deliverable D3.1 and its Annexes, D4.1, D2.1 and D6.2 wherever possible

Lateralised sleep spindles relate to false memory generation

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Sleep is known to enhance false memories: After presenting participants with lists of semantically related words, sleeping before recalling these words results in a greater acceptance of unseen “lure” words related in theme to previously seen words. Furthermore, the right hemisphere (RH) seems to be more prone to false memories than the left hemisphere (LH). In the current study, we investigated the sleep architecture associated with these false memory and lateralisation effects in a nap study. Participants viewed lists of related words, then stayed awake or slept for approximately 90 min, and were then tested for recognition of previously seen-old, unseen-new, or unseen-lure words presented either to the LH or RH. Sleep increased acceptance of unseen-lure words as previously seen compared to the wake group, particularly for RH presentations of word lists. RH lateralised stage 2 sleep spindle density relative to the LH correlated with this increase in false memories, suggesting that RH sleep spindles enhanced false memories in the RH