Data representation and synthesis

This research concerns the problem of specifying the information relationships and their transformations included, explicitly and implicitly, in any problem-solving procedure. Our view of data representation is that problem representations (in a problem domain) are mapped to a machine representation (in an implementation domain) through various modelling representations (in modelling domains). Modelling domain representations make easier the discovery of acceptable implementation representations. We propose to focus on the study of mappings of data representations and their transformations from the modelling to implementation domains. Specifically, our goal is to answer four questions:1) what are appropriate formalisms for describing modelling domains and implenentation domains,2) what knowledge exists of each of these domains and how can this knowledge be represented in our formalisms,3) how do we map specific representations from one domain to the other, and4) how can we test the completeness of our formalisms and mapping process.In answering the fourth question, we propose to construct an interactive system for generating alternative implementation domain representations from a modelling domain representation and selecting that which comes closest to the user's desired program performance criteria in an actual programming context

Wicked Problems and the Invention of Calculus

Since the 1980s, wicked problems have represented a category of challenges that defy clear description, cannot be addressed with existing models or theories, and resist experimentation in trying to solve them. This class of problems existed before they were identified and have been unsuccessfully addressed with Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific discovery, an expectation that requires the identification of a new object and the development of its correct interpretation. This paper proposes an alternative view of scientific discovery using the invention of Calculus as a case study that describes a successful process addressing wicked-like problems from a philosophical perspective, develops ideas that have an epistemological objective and are multidisciplinary in their applications, and results in additions to the Body of Knowledge that permeate human language and understanding. Leibniz’s wicked problem was to produce a universal method of discovery at the centre of his idea of a ‘General Science’ and the compilation of an encyclopaedia of all knowledge available at the time. From the existing paradigm of geometrical arguments and deductive processes, there is a gestalt shift in Leibniz’s leap in understanding mathematical methods and the language used in describing and solving problems that was rooted in the idea of infinitesimals and in a more general method of analysis. In doing so, the transition that began with his methods and notation became the first stage in a Kuhnian paradigm shift and the incorporation of Calculus and its applications into the mainstream of science. I will start by giving some background on wicked problems and describing the concept of discovery associated with Kuhn’s ideas, and I will then introduce the process of additions to knowledge advocated in this essay. These ideas will form the antecedent to summarise the paradigm in 17th century mathematics and from there I will proceed to describe Leibniz’s leap and the inherent gestalt shift that occurred in the mathematics of the 18th century. That gestalt shift was not exempt from acrimonious discussions over alternate formulations and I will present some differences between the views of Newton and Leibniz and of two of their supporters; Maclaurin and l’Hôpital. I will then describe some of the efforts that helped to expand the acceptance of Calculus and to embed it in the mainstream of science. I will conclude by proposing that there are other examples from the History and Philosophy of Science that follow a similar process of additions to the Body of Knowledge

Street Rigor: Community Learning in the Liberal Arts

This essay was originally written for an online collection of articles on liberal arts in urban contexts, but it has not been formally published. The beginning and ending discuss community learning as a specific pedagogic approach in a liberal arts context. I\u27ve revised it for our retreat not to advocate for community service learning (though I do regard CL as a Good Thing), but rather to air the speculations about the nature of the liberal arts -- inspired by Hannah Arendt and John Dewey -- that arise in the latter part of the paper, beginning in section III (p. 6). In my opinion, much of the public discussion of higher education (for example, in Arum and Roksa\u27s Academically Adrift) is distorted by a commodifiction of knowledge, where knowledge is regarded as a Thing that can be transferred from teacher to student (the banking model criticized by Paolo Freire), and where community is construed as a sort of container in which students and faculty are housed. The alternative Deweyan view focuses on the activities of discovery, learning, and common purpose which are shared by all participants in college life

Endophytes as alternative paclitaxel sources : chemistry and genetics of Taxomyces andreanae and the endophytic flora of Wollemia nobilis

Whether suffering a pathogenic attack, basking in symbiotic comfort, or seemingly symptomless, plants constantly participate in molecular interplay with various classes of microbial organisms. One of the means of interorganismal communication in this dynamic continuum are secondary metabolites. The chemical diversity bearing pharmaceutical potential thus implied reaches beyond the plant kingdom and offers an expended view promising to transform glimpses of reductionist research of the past years to snapshots of an exuberant world of systems biology. Endophytes seem to fit perfectly into this natural ‘warehouse’, only a small part of which we have been able to tap into so far. The introductory section of the hereby presented thesis (chapter 2) provides an elaborate overview on the current state of knowledge about endophytic organisms – microbes colonizing internal tissues of all plant species, creating a huge biodiversity with yet unknown novel natural products presumed to push forward the frontiers of drug discovery (Staniek et al., 2008). Paclitaxel, the world’s first billion dollar anticancer blockbuster, was primarily obtained from Taxus brevifolia. While the search for alternative sources of the powerful antineoplastic agent brought an array of reports on paclitaxel producing endophytes, causing quite a controversy over the past two decades, the world’s market still relies on yew-derived supply of the valuable diterpene.

Virtuous Insightfulness

Insight often strikes us blind; when we aren’t expecting it, we suddenly see a connection that previously eluded us—a kind of ‘Aha!’ experience. People with a propensity to such experiences are regarded as insightful, and insightfulness is a paradigmatic intellectual virtue. What’s not clear, however, is just what it is in virtue of which being such that these experiences tend to happen to one renders one intellectually virtuous. This paper draws from both virtue epistemology as well as empirical work on the psychology of problem solving and creativity to make some inroads in accounting for insightfulness as an intellectual virtue. Important to the view advanced is that virtuously insightful individuals manifest certain skills which both cultivate insight experiences (even if not by directly bringing them about) and enable such individuals to move in an epistemically responsible way from insight experience to epistemic endorsement

On Cognitive Preferences and the Plausibility of Rule-based Models

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.Comment: V4: Another rewrite of section on interpretability to clarify focus on plausibility and relation to interpretability, comprehensibility, and justifiabilit

Mathematical Knowledge, the Analytic Method, and Naturalism

This chapter tries to answer the following question: How should we conceive of the method of mathematics, if we take a naturalist stance? The problem arises since mathematical knowledge is regarded as the paradigm of certain knowledge, because mathematics is based on the axiomatic method. Moreover, natural science is deeply mathematized, and science is crucial for any naturalist perspective. But mathematics seems to provide a counterexample both to methodological and ontological naturalism. To face this problem, some authors tried to naturalize mathematics by relying on evolutionism. But several difficulties arise when we try to do this. This chapter suggests that, in order to naturalize mathematics, it is better to take the method of mathematics to be the analytic method, rather than the axiomatic method, and thus conceive of mathematical knowledge as plausible knowledge

Scientific discovery reloaded

The way scientific discovery has been conceptualized has changed drastically in the last few decades: its relation to logic, inference, methods, and evolution has been deeply reloaded. The ‘philosophical matrix’ moulded by logical empiricism and analytical tradition has been challenged by the ‘friends of discovery’, who opened up the way to a rational investigation of discovery. This has produced not only new theories of discovery (like the deductive, cognitive, and evolutionary), but also new ways of practicing it in a rational and more systematic way. Ampliative rules, methods, heuristic procedures and even a logic of discovery have been investigated, extracted, reconstructed and refined. The outcome is a ‘scientific discovery revolution’: not only a new way of looking at discovery, but also a construction of tools that can guide us to discover something new. This is a very important contribution of philosophy of science to science, as it puts the former in a position not only to interpret what scientists do, but also to provide and improve tools that they can employ in their activity