Special issue on spatio-temporal theories and models for environmental, urban and social sciences: where do we stand ?

This extensive editorial of this special journal issue follows a workshop organized in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2013) in September 2013 in Scarborough, UK. The objective of this international workshop was to bring together representatives from these different disciplinary communities, and integrate academics, students, and practitioners for a one-day workshop on spatiotemporal concepts and theories. This editorial introduces the special issue, the research objectives the workshop followed and some of the main contributions as well as the theoretical achievements and research perspectives left

The application of classical conditioning to the machine learning of a commonsense knowledge of visual events

In the field of artificial intelligence, possession of commonsense knowledge has long been considered to be a requirementto construct a machine that possesses artificial general intelligence. The conventional approach to providing this commonsense knowledge is to manually encode the required knowledge, a process that is both tedious and costly. After an analysis of classical conditioning, it was deemed that constructing a system based upon the stimulusstimulus interpretation of classical conditioning could allow for commonsense knowledge to be learned through a machine directly and passively observing its environment. Based upon these principles, a system was constructed that uses a stream of events, that have been observed within the environment, to learn rules regarding what event is likely to follow after the observation of another event. The system makes use of a feedback loop between three sub-systems: one that associates events that occur together, a second that accumulates evidence that a given association is significant and a third that recognises the significant associations. The recognition of past associations allows for both the creation of evidence for and against the existence of a particular association, and also allows for more complex associations to be created by treating instances of strongly associated event pairs to be themselves events. Testing the abilities of the system involved simulating the three different learning environments. The results found that measures of significance based on classical conditioning generally outperformed a probability-based measure. This thesis contributes a theory of how a stimulus-stimulus interpretation classical conditioning can be used to create commonsense knowledge and an observation that a significant sub-set of classical conditioning phenomena likely exist to aid in the elimination of noise. This thesis also represents a significant departure from existing reinforcement learning systems as the system presented in this thesis does not perform any form of action selection

The Writing of Abstracts and SRAs by EFL Students : Analysis of Productions and Assessment of SFL Genre Pedagogy

Scientific writing is a very complex albeit crucial activity for researchers who need to share findings and become a part of, or maintain, a position as members of a wide international discourse community. Since most scientific communication happens in English, the task of writing in this foreign language for researchers in Argentinian universities is a challenge for both researchers themselves and teachers of English who need to facilitate the writing path for students. With increasing evidence of its usefulness, Genre Pedagogy has been shown to greatly improve EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writing. In this research, the Sydney School Genre Pedagogy (SSGP) approach as offered by the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective is applied to the teaching of writing, with a twofold aim. A linguistic objective is pursued in analyzing student-produced abstracts and Scientific Research Articles (SRAs), with a special focus on interpersonal meanings and rhetorical components in student-produced scientific discourse. Second, this investigation assesses the effectiveness of SFL Genre Pedagogy in the teaching of one of the most important scientific genres used for the communication of findings, i.e. the SRA