ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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A contribution to the ranking and description of classifications

This thesis presents a novel and complete fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology. This methodology is specifically designed for selecting classifications in the framework of unsupervised learning systems. The main results obtained are twofold. On the one hand, the definition of fuzzy criteria to be used to assess the suitability of a set of given classifications and, on the other hand, the design and development of a natural language generation (NLG) system to qualitatively describe them. Unsupervised learning systems often produce a large number of possible classifications. In order to select the most suitable one, a set of criteria is usually defined and applied sequentially to assess and filter the obtained classifications. This is done, in general, by using a true-false decision in the application of each criterion. This approach could result in classifications being discarded and not taken into account when they marginally fail to meet one particular criterion even though they meet other criteria with a high score. An alternative solution to this sequential approach has been introduced in this thesis. It consists of evaluating the degree up to which each fuzzy criterion is met by each classification and, only after this, aggregating for each classification the individual assessments. This overall value reflects the degree up to which the set of criteria is globally satisfied by each classification. Five fuzzy criteria are defined and analysed to be used collectively to evaluate classifications. The corresponding single evaluations are then proposed to be aggregated into a collective one by means of an Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operator guided by a fuzzy linguistic quantifier, which is used to implement the concept of fuzzy majority in the selection process. In addition, a NLG system to qualitatively describe the most important characteristics of the best classification is designed and developed in order to fully understand the chosen classification. Finally, this new methodology is applied to a real business problem in a marketing context. The main purpose of this application is to show how the proposed methodology can help marketing experts in the design of specific-oriented marketing strategies by means of an automatic and interpretable segmentation system

Excitatory and inhibitory signaling in the rod pathway of the retina: Functional properties and activation of synaptic and extrasynaptic receptors

The visual system is arguably one of the most complex and studied sensory systems. The processing of visual information starts in the retina, where photoreceptors transduce light stimuli (photons) to electrochemical signals that are then transferred to bipolar cells grouped in different pathways. In the mammalian retina, vision under dim light conditions is mediated by the rod pathway. Glutamatergic rod bipolar cells are presynaptic to two inhibitory interneurons: the AII and A17 amacrine cells. The narrow-field glycinergic AII amacrine transfers rod signals to ON- and OFF-cone bipolar cells via electrical and chemical synapses, respectively. The wide-field GABAergic A17 amacrine provides inhibitory feedback to rod bipolar cells. The synaptic input to both amacrines is mediated by Ca2+-permeable AMPA receptors. It has been recently demonstrated that these two cells express functional extrasynaptic NMDA receptors, with AII amacrines expressing GluN2B-containing receptors and A17 amacrines GluN2A-containing receptors. Ultrastructural studies reported the presence of inhibitory synaptic inputs from other amacrine cells to both the AII and the A17 amacrines. However, the activation and contribution to signal processing of the different receptors that mediate these excitatory and inhibitory inputs is not well understood. In this thesis, we combined electrophysiological and pharmacological approaches to characterize these receptors and investigate the conditions required for their activation on AII and A17 amacrine cells. Pre-incubation of retinal tissue in either bafilomycin A1 (an inhibitor of neurotransmitter uptake into synaptic vesicles) or L-methionine-sulfoximine (a glutamine synthetase inhibitor) abolished NMDA receptor activation on AII amacrines, but not on A17 amacrines. This suggests a neuronal origin for the glutamate that activates NMDA receptors on AII amacrines and a glial source in the case of A17 amacrine cells. Degradation of endogenous D-serine by DAAO (the enzyme that breaks down D-serine) reduced NMDA activation on AII amacrines, but not on A17 amacrine cells, suggesting that D-serine could be the endogenous co-agonist at NMDA receptors on AII amacrines, but not on A17 amacrine cells. We also performed a detailed analysis of the kinetics of synaptic and extrasynaptic GABA receptors on these two cells. We found spontaneous inhibitory postsynaptic currents on A17 amacrine cells that displayed fast decay kinetics (τw ~14 ms). Pharmacological investigations suggest that these events are mediated by GABAA receptors that are likely to be composed α1βγ2 subunits. However, we did not observe GABAergic synaptic currents on AII amacrines. Application of brief pulses of GABA (3 mM) to outside-out and nucleated patches from A17 and AII amacrines, respectively, evoked GABAA receptor-mediated responses with relatively slow decay kinetics (τw 42 ms on A17; τw 163 on AII). The use of pharmacological agents suggest that these receptors are likely to be composed of α2,3βγ2 subunits on both amacrine cells. The major contribution of the studies outlined in this thesis are that (1) different sources of glutamate and potentially different endogenous co-agonists activate the different extrasynaptic NMDA receptor populations on AII and A17 amacrine cells. This suggests a differential contribution of glutamate inputs to excitability and signaling in these cells. (2) A17 amacrine cells receive synaptic GABAergic input mediated by receptors with fast kinetics that could be involved in shunting of excitatory transmission. (3) Both AII and A17 amacrine cells express somatic GABAA receptors with relatively slow kinetics that could mediate signals that allow for temporal summation of inhibitory inputs with a low frequency.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Dynamic adaptation of user profiles in recommender systems

In a period of time in which the content available through the Internet increases exponentially and is more easily accessible every day, techniques for aiding the selection and extraction of important and personalised information are of vital importance. Recommender Systems (RS) appear as a tool to help the user in a decision making process by evaluating a set of objects or alternatives and aiding the user at choosing which one/s of them suits better his/her interests or preferences. Those preferences need to be accurate enough to produce adequate recommendations and should be updated if the user changes his/her likes or if they are incorrect or incomplete. In this work an adequate model for managing user preferences in a multi-attribute (numerical and categorical) environment is presented to aid at providing recommendations in those kinds of contexts. The evaluation process of the recommender system designed is supported by a new aggregation operator (Unbalanced LOWA) that enables the combination of the information that defines an alternative into a single value, which then is used to rank the whole set of alternatives. After the recommendation has been made, learning processes have been designed to evaluate the user interaction with the system to find out, in a dynamic and unsupervised way, if the user profile in which the recommendation process relies on needs to be updated with new preferences. The work detailed in this document also includes extensive evaluation and testing of all the elements that take part in the recommendation and learning processes

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

Collected Papers (on various scientific topics), Volume XII

This twelfth volume of Collected Papers includes 86 papers comprising 976 pages on Neutrosophics Theory and Applications, published between 2013-2021 in the international journal and book series “Neutrosophic Sets and Systems” by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 112 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 21 countries: Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Muhammad Akram, Bobin Albert, S. A. Alblowi, S. Anitha, Guennoun Asmae, Assia Bakali, Ayman M. Manie, Abdul Sami Awan, Azeddine Elhassouny, Erick González-Caballero, D. Dafik, Mithun Datta, Arindam Dey, Mamouni Dhar, Christopher Dyer, Nur Ain Ebas, Mohamed Eisa, Ahmed K. Essa, Faruk Karaaslan, João Alcione Sganderla Figueiredo, Jorge Fernando Goyes García, N. Ramila Gandhi, Sudipta Gayen, Gustavo Alvarez Gómez, Sharon Dinarza Álvarez Gómez, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Hamiden Abd El-Wahed Khalifa, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Ibrahim M. Hezam, German Acurio Hidalgo, Le Hoang Son, R. Jahir Hussain, S. Satham Hussain, Ali Hussein Mahmood Al-Obaidi, Hays Hatem Imran, Nabeela Ishfaq, Saeid Jafari, R. Jansi, V. Jeyanthi, M. Jeyaraman, Sripati Jha, Jun Ye, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Abdullah Kargın, J. Kavikumar, Kawther Fawzi Hamza Alhasan, Huda E. Khalid, Neha Andalleb Khalid, Mohsin Khalid, Madad Khan, D. Koley, Valeri Kroumov, Manoranjan Kumar Singh, Pavan Kumar, Prem Kumar Singh, Ranjan Kumar, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, A.N. Mangayarkkarasi, Carlos Rosero Martínez, Marvelio Alfaro Matos, Mai Mohamed, Nivetha Martin, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Mohamed Talea, K. Mohana, Muhammad Irfan Ahamad, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Muhammad Saqlain, Muhammad Shabir, Muhammad Zeeshan, Anjan Mukherjee, Mumtaz Ali, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Iqra Nawaz, Munazza Naz, Roan Thi Ngan, Necati Olgun, Rodolfo González Ortega, P. Pandiammal, I. Pradeepa, R. Princy, Marcos David Oviedo Rodríguez, Jesús Estupiñán Ricardo, A. Rohini, Sabu Sebastian, Abhijit Saha, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, Saima Anis, A.A. Salama, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Seyed Ahmad Edalatpanah, Sajana Shaik, Soufiane Idbrahim, S. Sowndrarajan, Mohamed Talea, Ruipu Tan, Chalapathi Tekuri, Selçuk Topal, S. P. Tiwari, Vakkas Uluçay, Maikel Leyva Vázquez, Chinnadurai Veerappan, M. Venkatachalam, Luige Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Xiao Long Xin.‬‬‬‬‬