197 research outputs found

    Northeastern Illinois University, Academic Catalog 2023-2024

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    https://neiudc.neiu.edu/catalogs/1064/thumbnail.jp

    Brain Computations and Connectivity [2nd edition]

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    This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Brain Computations and Connectivity is about how the brain works. In order to understand this, it is essential to know what is computed by different brain systems; and how the computations are performed. The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current biologically plausible computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes. Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions. This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed, and updates by much new evidence including the connectivity of the human brain the earlier book: Rolls (2021) Brain Computations: What and How, Oxford University Press. Brain Computations and Connectivity will be of interest to all scientists interested in brain function and how the brain works, whether they are from neuroscience, or from medical sciences including neurology and psychiatry, or from the area of computational science including machine learning and artificial intelligence, or from areas such as theoretical physics

    Neo-Roman Freedom in Economic Life

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    Hands-on Science. Celebrating Science and Science Education

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    The book herein aims to contribute to the improvement of Science Education in our schools and to an effective implementation of a sound widespread scientific literacy at all levels of society

    Towards full-scale autonomy for multi-vehicle systems planning and acting in extreme environments

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    Currently, robotic technology offers flexible platforms for addressing many challenging problems that arise in extreme environments. These problems’ nature enhances the use of heterogeneous multi-vehicle systems which can coordinate and collaborate to achieve a common set of goals. While such applications have previously been explored in limited contexts, long-term deployments in such settings often require an advanced level of autonomy to maintain operability. The success of planning and acting approaches for multi-robot systems are conditioned by including reasoning regarding temporal, resource and knowledge requirements, and world dynamics. Automated planning provides the tools to enable intelligent behaviours in robotic systems. However, whilst many planning approaches and plan execution techniques have been proposed, these solutions highlight an inability to consistently build and execute high-quality plans. Motivated by these challenges, this thesis presents developments advancing state-of-the-art temporal planning and acting to address multi-robot problems. We propose a set of advanced techniques, methods and tools to build a high-level temporal planning and execution system that can devise, execute and monitor plans suitable for long-term missions in extreme environments. We introduce a new task allocation strategy, called HRTA, that optimises the task distribution amongst the heterogeneous fleet, relaxes the planning problem and boosts the plan search. We implement the TraCE planner that enforces contingent planning considering propositional temporal and numeric constraints to deal with partial observability about the initial state. Our developments regarding robust plan execution and mission adaptability include the HLMA, which efficiently optimises the task allocation and refines the planning model considering the experience from robots’ previous mission executions. We introduce the SEA failure solver that, combined with online planning, overcomes unexpected situations during mission execution, deals with joint goals implementation, and enhances mission operability in long-term deployments. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approaches with a series of experiments using a new set of real-world planning domains.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/R026173/

    Verification and Validation of Planning Domain Models

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    The verification and validation of planning domain models is one of the biggest challenges to deploying planning-based automated systems in the real world.The state-of-the-art verification methods of planning domain models are vulnerable to false positives, i.e. counterexamples that are unreachable by sound planners when using the domain under verification during planning tasks. False positives mislead designers into believing correct models are faulty. Consequently, designers needlessly debug correct models to remove these false positives. This process might unnecessarily constrain planning domain models, which can eradicate valid and sometimes required behaviours. Moreover, catching and debugging errors without knowing they are false positives can give verification engineers a false sense of achievement, which might cause them to overlook valid errors.To address this shortfall, the first part of this thesis introduces goal-constrained planning domain model verification, a novel approach that constrains the verification of planning domain models with planning goals to reduce the number of unreachable planning counterexamples. This thesis formally proves the correctness of this method and demonstrates the application of this approach using the model checker Spin and the planner MIPS-XXL. Furthermore, it reports the empirical experiments that validate the feasibility and investigates the performance of the goal-constrained verification approach. The experiments show that not only the goal-constrained verification method is robust against false positive errors, but it also outperforms under-constrained verification tasks in terms of time and memory in some cases.The second part of this thesis investigates the problem of validating the functional equivalence of planning domain models. The need for techniques to validate the functional equivalence of planning domain models has been highlighted in previous research and has applications in model learning, development and extension. Despite the need and importance of proving the functional equivalence of planning domain models, this problem attracted limited research interest.This thesis builds on and extends previous research by proposing a novel approach to validate the functional equivalence of planning domain models. First, this approach employs a planner to remove redundant operators from the given domain models; then, it uses a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to check if a predicate mapping exists between the two domain models that makes them functionally equivalent. The soundness and completeness of this functional equivalence validation method are formally proven in this thesis.Furthermore, this thesis introduces D-VAL, the first planning domain model automatic validation tool. D-VAL uses the FF planner and the Z3 SMT solver to prove the functional equivalence of planning domain models. Moreover, this thesis demonstrates the feasibility and evaluates the performance of D-VAL against thirteen planning domain models from the International Planning Competition (IPC). Empirical evaluation shows that D-VAL validates the functional equivalence of the most challenging task in less than 43 seconds. These experiments and their results provide a benchmark to evaluate the feasibility and performance of future related work

    Romantic Citation and the Receding Future

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    This dissertation reads citation in Romantic literature as an aporetic movement between present and past, whereby what is cited becomes the receding ground on which the present and future’s erosion is inscribed. Citation exceeds quotation in that it forwards a disastrous intertextuality that retroactively determines not only past texts but events, histories, objects, and genres as accelerants that overshadow and ghost the present with its own extinction. Against generative modes of intertextuality such as those of Kristeva and Bakhtin in which texts’ repetitions of other texts facilitates the open-ended overturning and transformation of prior writing, citation precipitates a no future. This no future of Romantic citation, inflected by the period’s geological insights into the earth’s history as layers of sedimented disasters and extinctions, registers anteriority as topographical depths whose pre-spent force attenuates futurity. Citation thus discloses the destructive feedback loop underlying the generation of “progress” or open-ended futures from the past. Chapter 1 examines how in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron’s re-collection of history’s ruins becomes a symptom of a post- and pre-post-Waterloo history entropically recycling itself and backdating its “end of history” further into the past and expansively across the globe. In chapter 2, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man cites literary texts as a form of dĂ©jĂ  vu by which we discover ourselves as extinct proleptically in the literary past. Chapter 3 proposes that Percy Shelley’s re-cycled tropes and circular plots in the later poems encode the later poetry’s archaeological pull toward his corpus’s dark ground in the form of his early novel St. Irvyne and his other early Gothic texts that shadow his corpus with the specter of its exhaustion. And in chapter 4, Blake’s Jerusalem ends (Blake’s) history by re-citing his earlier works as if they were engines of apocalypse conspiratorially orientated toward Jerusalem’s abyssally predestined redemption, a volatile redemption that accelerates the burnout of Blake’s “System” rather than its survival into the future

    Attending responding becoming : a living-learning inquiry in a naturally inclusional playspace

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    Traditional scientific paradigms emphasise writing in the third person, effectively marginalising the subjective perspective of the researcher. Many systems thinking, cybernetics and complexity approaches are better in this regard, as they involve systemic interventions where the relationships between the researcher and other participants really matter. Writing in the first person therefore becomes acceptable.In this Thesis (and a partner document coupled with it), I have explored how to reincorporate subjective empiricism into my systemic intervention practice. This has brought forth many unanticipated contributions. These take the form of new frameworks, concepts and approaches for systems and complexity practice, emerging from my engagements with myself and others, as well as from reflections upon those engagements.However, the content of my reflections and ‘becomings’ are not all that represent my doctoral contribution; there is also the form of my representation(s), as well as the emergent nature of the process through which they have come to be. I have drawn from Gregory Bateson’s use of metalogues: where the nature of a conversation mirrors its content – e.g. getting into a muddle whilst talking about muddles! Intuitively, I grasped the importance of metalogue in what I was attempting, and found myself coining the term metalogic coherence. Without fully appreciating what this might mean in practice, I groped my way into undertaking and documenting my research in ways that I believed would be metalogically coherent with the complexity-attuned principles to which I was committing. In sum, and key to appreciating what unfolds in the narrative, is recognising this Thesis and its partner document as metalogically coherent artefacts of naturally inclusional, complexity-attuned, evolutionary research.To fully acknowledge the different ways of knowing that have flowed into my inquiry, I have written in multiple voices (called statewaves, for reasons to be explained in the thesis). I found myself shifting from one voice to another as I explored and expressed different dimensions of what I was experiencing and discovering.In addition, I have made liberal use of hyperlinks, so both documents are far from linear. They are more akin to a mycorrhizal network, interlinking flows of ideas and sensemaking, all of which can be accessed and experienced differently, depending on each reader’s engagement with and through it.The thesis and its partner document are part of a composite submission that contains both poetry and artwork (visual depictions and animations of the ideas). These elements, along with the more conventional academic text, are augmented by penetrating reflections on my personal motivations, guided by a narrator signposting the streams as they flow into and between each other. All of my being has been implicated and impacted by this endeavour. When insights and new ‘becomings’ emerged flowfully during my practice, my joy was reflected in my narrative; as indeed were my pain, doubts and reinterpretations associated with ideas that were difficult to birth. I present all this in my submission, without retrospective sanitisation or simplification. In so doing, I am keeping faith with the principle that I remain at the heart of my research, and cannot be extracted from it without doing violence to the metalogical coherence that gives it meaning
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