Defining Attempts: Mandujano\u27s Error

The law of attempt requires a court to determine when trying to commit a crime is, in itself, conduct that deserves criminal punishment. Common-law courts were cautious not to push the boundaries of attempt crimes too far, and early definitions of attempt required that a defendant come very close to the completion of an intended crime before he could be convicted. As Congress has codified criminal law, it has created attempt statutes without defining attempt, presumably believing that courts would continue to use common-law meanings as they had always done. This is exactly what happened until the late twentieth century, when federal courts began to adopt a new, harsher formulation that had been proposed in the American Law Institute\u27s Model Penal Code (MPC). This Note examines the strange process through which federal courts expanded the definition of a background principle of criminal law, and argues that they were wrong to do so. Judges who ignore such deep common-law roots usurp the legislature\u27s role in defining crimes, and create confusion as to the true meaning of criminal statutes

Semantics of logic programs with explicit negation

After a historical introduction, the bulk of the thesis concerns the study of a declarative semantics for logic programs. The main original contributions are: ² WFSX (Well–Founded Semantics with eXplicit negation), a new semantics for logic programs with explicit negation (i.e. extended logic programs), which compares favourably in its properties with other extant semantics. ² A generic characterization schema that facilitates comparisons among a diversity of semantics of extended logic programs, including WFSX. ² An autoepistemic and a default logic corresponding to WFSX, which solve existing problems of the classical approaches to autoepistemic and default logics, and clarify the meaning of explicit negation in logic programs. ² A framework for defining a spectrum of semantics of extended logic programs based on the abduction of negative hypotheses. This framework allows for the characterization of different levels of scepticism/credulity, consensuality, and argumentation. One of the semantics of abduction coincides with WFSX. ² O–semantics, a semantics that uniquely adds more CWA hypotheses to WFSX. The techniques used for doing so are applicable as well to the well–founded semantics of normal logic programs. ² By introducing explicit negation into logic programs contradiction may appear. I present two approaches for dealing with contradiction, and show their equivalence. One of the approaches consists in avoiding contradiction, and is based on restrictions in the adoption of abductive hypotheses. The other approach consists in removing contradiction, and is based in a transformation of contradictory programs into noncontradictory ones, guided by the reasons for contradiction

Towards a Generic Framework to Generate Explanatory Traces of Constraint Solving and Rule-Based Reasoning

In this report, we show how to use the Simple Fluent Calculus (SFC) to specify generic tracers, i.e. tracers which produce a generic trace. A generic trace is a trace which can be produced by different implementations of a software component and used independently from the traced component. This approach is used to define a method for extending a java based CHRor platform called CHROME (Constraint Handling Rule Online Model-driven Engine) with an extensible generic tracer. The method includes a tracer specification in SFC, a methodology to extend it, and the way to integrate it with CHROME, resulting in the platform CHROME-REF (for Reasoning Explanation Facilities), which is a constraint solving and rule based reasoning engine with explanatory traces

What triggers the intention to use the European Citizens’ Initiative? The role of benefits, values and efficacy

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is a European Union instrument that aspires to encourage citizens to participate in EU policy‐making. Although scholarly interest in the ECI is strong, only isolated studies have examined the factors that shape the intention to use it. This article fills a gap in the literature by examining how personal benefits from the EU, value‐based assessments of the EU, and political efficacy (internal and external) may trigger potential use of the ECI. It develops a model that is tested with recent Eurobarometer data. Results show that personal benefits from the EU are key determinants of the intention to use the ECI while considerations based on democratic values play a less important role. In addition, internal political efficacy emerges as a strong predictor of potential use. The results challenge the expectation that the ECI could broaden public engagement with EU affairs

Intentional dialogues in multi-agent systems based on ontologies and argumentation

Some areas of application, for example, healthcare, are known to resist the replacement of human operators by fully autonomous systems. It is typically not transparent to users how artificial intelligence systems make decisions or obtain information, making it difficult for users to trust them. To address this issue, we investigate how argumentation theory and ontology techniques can be used together with reasoning about intentions to build complex natural language dialogues to support human decision-making. Based on such an investigation, we propose MAIDS, a framework for developing multi-agent intentional dialogue systems, which can be used in different domains. Our framework is modular so that it can be used in its entirety or just the modules that fulfil the requirements of each system to be developed. Our work also includes the formalisation of a novel dialogue-subdialogue structure with which we can address ontological or theory-of-mind issues and later return to the main subject. As a case study, we have developed a multi-agent system using the MAIDS framework to support healthcare professionals in making decisions on hospital bed allocations. Furthermore, we evaluated this multi-agent system with domain experts using real data from a hospital. The specialists who evaluated our system strongly agree or agree that the dialogues in which they participated fulfil Cohen’s desiderata for task-oriented dialogue systems. Our agents have the ability to explain to the user how they arrived at certain conclusions. Moreover, they have semantic representations as well as representations of the mental state of the dialogue participants, allowing the formulation of coherent justifications expressed in natural language, therefore, easy for human participants to understand. This indicates the potential of the framework introduced in this thesis for the practical development of explainable intelligent systems as well as systems supporting hybrid intelligence

Using causal knowledge to improve retrieval and adaptation in case-based reasoning systems for a dynamic industrial process

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a reasoning paradigm that starts the reasoning process by examining past similar experiences. The motivation behind this thesis lies in the observation that causal knowledge can guide case-based reasoning in dealing with large and complex systems as it guides humans. In this thesis, case-bases used for reasoning about processes where each case consists of a temporal sequence are considered. In general, these temporal sequences include persistent and transitory (non-persistent) attributes. As these sequences tend to be long, it is unlikely to find a single case in the case-base that closely matches the problem case. By utilizing causal knowledge in the form of a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) and exploiting the independence implied by the structure of the network and known attributes, this system matches independent portions of the problem case to corresponding sub-cases from the case-base. However, the matching of sub-cases has to take into account the persistence properties of attributes. The approach is then applied to a real life temporal process situation involving an automotive curing oven, in which a vehicle moves through stages within the oven to satisfy some thermodynamic relationships and requirements that change from stage to stage. In addition, testing has been conducted using data randomly generated from known causal networks. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .T54. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0366. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006