From Unstructured 3D Point Clouds to Structured Knowledge - A Semantics Approach

International audienc

Statistical reasoning with set-valued information : Ontic vs. epistemic views

International audienceIn information processing tasks, sets may have a conjunctive or a disjunctive reading. In the conjunctive reading, a set represents an object of interest and its elements are subparts of the object, forming a composite description. In the disjunctive reading, a set contains mutually exclusive elements and refers to the representation of incomplete knowledge. It does not model an actual object or quantity, but partial information about an underlying object or a precise quantity. This distinction between what we call ontic vs. epistemic sets remains valid for fuzzy sets, whose membership functions, in the disjunctive reading are possibility distributions, over deterministic or random values. This paper examines the impact of this distinction in statistics. We show its importance because there is a risk of misusing basic notions and tools, such as conditioning, distance between sets, variance, regression, etc. when data are set-valued. We discuss several examples where the ontic and epistemic points of view yield different approaches to these concepts

Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science

A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda ** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts ** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts ** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi ** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Ki

The Uşaklı Höyük Survey Project (2008-2012)

This book presents the results of the survey conducted by the University of Florence, in the years 2008-2012, at the site and in the surrounding territory of Uşaklı Höyük on the central Anatolian plateau in Turkey. Geological, geomorphological, topographic and geophysical research have provided new information and data relating to the environment and the settlement landscape, as well as producing new maps of the area and indicating the presence of large buried buildings on the site. Analysis of the rich corpus of pottery collected from the surface indicates that the site and its territory were continuously settled from the late Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age and down to the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. A few fragments of cuneiform tablets with Hittite texts, a sealing with two impressions of a stamp seal, and pottery stamps illustrate the importance of Uşaklı Höyük and support the hypothesis of its identification with the town of Zippalanda, known from the Hittite sources as a seat of the cult of the Storm God

Earthquakes: from chemical alteration to mechanical rupture

In the standard rebound theory of earthquakes, elastic deformation energy is progressively stored in the crust until a threshold is reached at which it is suddenly released in an earthquake. We review three important paradoxes, the strain paradox, the stress paradox and the heat flow paradox, that are difficult to account for in this picture, either individually or when taken together. Resolutions of these paradoxes usually call for additional assumptions on the nature of the rupture process (such as novel modes of deformations and ruptures) prior to and/or during an earthquake, on the nature of the fault and on the effect of trapped fluids within the crust at seismogenic depths. We review the evidence for the essential importance of water and its interaction with the modes of deformations. Water is usually seen to have mainly the mechanical effect of decreasing the normal lithostatic stress in the fault core on one hand and to weaken rock materials via hydrolytic weakening and stress corrosion on the other hand. We also review the evidences that water plays a major role in the alteration of minerals subjected to finite strains into other structures in out-of-equilibrium conditions. This suggests novel exciting routes to understand what is an earthquake, that requires to develop a truly multidisciplinary approach involving mineral chemistry, geology, rupture mechanics and statistical physics.Comment: 44 pages, 1 figures, submitted to Physics Report

II Workshop on Late Neolithic Ceramics in Ancient Mesopotamia : pottery in context

Aquest volum és el resultat del workshop celebrat per investigadors i especialistes en ceràmiques del Pròxim Orient que va tenir lloc al MAC-Empúries l'octubre de 2015. Els articles compilats en el llibre han estat escrits per 31 investigadors de 13 nacionalitats diferents i abasten temàtiques diverses al voltant de la producció ceràmica: matèries primeres, tècniques, analítiques, etc. Pel que fa al context geogràfic, els estudis se centren a Turquia, Siria, Irak, Jordània, Israel i Palestina, els països en que va aparèixer la ceràmica per primera vegada en l'àrea mediterrània, i on va experimentar un ràpid procés de transformació morfotipològic i tecnològic