8,578 research outputs found
Exploring sensor data management
The increasing availability of cheap, small, low-power sensor hardware and the ubiquity of wired and wireless networks has led to the prediction that `smart evironments' will emerge in the near future. The sensors in these environments collect detailed information about the situation people are in, which is used to enhance information-processing applications that are present on their mobile and `ambient' devices.\ud
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Bridging the gap between sensor data and application information poses new requirements to data management. This report discusses what these requirements are and documents ongoing research that explores ways of thinking about data management suited to these new requirements: a more sophisticated control flow model, data models that incorporate time, and ways to deal with the uncertainty in sensor data
A Connectionist Theory of Phenomenal Experience
When cognitive scientists apply computational theory to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, as
many of them have been doing recently, there are two fundamentally distinct approaches available. Either
consciousness is to be explained in terms of the nature of the representational vehicles the brain deploys; or
it is to be explained in terms of the computational processes defined over these vehicles. We call versions of
these two approaches vehicle and process theories of consciousness, respectively. However, while there may
be space for vehicle theories of consciousness in cognitive science, they are relatively rare. This is because
of the influence exerted, on the one hand, by a large body of research which purports to show that the
explicit representation of information in the brain and conscious experience are dissociable, and on the
other, by the classical computational theory of mind â the theory that takes human cognition to be a species
of symbol manipulation. But two recent developments in cognitive science combine to suggest that a
reappraisal of this situation is in order. First, a number of theorists have recently been highly critical of the
experimental methodologies employed in the dissociation studies â so critical, in fact, itâs no longer
reasonable to assume that the dissociability of conscious experience and explicit representation has been
adequately demonstrated. Second, classicism, as a theory of human cognition, is no longer as dominant in
cognitive science as it once was. It now has a lively competitor in the form of connectionism; and
connectionism, unlike classicism, does have the computational resources to support a robust vehicle theory
of consciousness. In this paper we develop and defend this connectionist vehicle theory of consciousness. It
takes the form of the following simple empirical hypothesis: phenomenal experience consists in the explicit
representation of information in neurally realized PDP networks. This hypothesis leads us to re-assess some
common wisdom about consciousness, but, we will argue, in fruitful and ultimately plausible ways
Causes of Ineradicable Spurious Predictions in Qualitative Simulation
It was recently proved that a sound and complete qualitative simulator does
not exist, that is, as long as the input-output vocabulary of the
state-of-the-art QSIM algorithm is used, there will always be input models
which cause any simulator with a coverage guarantee to make spurious
predictions in its output. In this paper, we examine whether a meaningfully
expressive restriction of this vocabulary is possible so that one can build a
simulator with both the soundness and completeness properties. We prove several
negative results: All sound qualitative simulators, employing subsets of the
QSIM representation which retain the operating region transition feature, and
support at least the addition and constancy constraints, are shown to be
inherently incomplete. Even when the simulations are restricted to run in a
single operating region, a constraint vocabulary containing just the addition,
constancy, derivative, and multiplication relations makes the construction of
sound and complete qualitative simulators impossible
Clock and Category; IS QUANTUM GRAVITY ALGEBRAIC
We investigate the possibility that the quantum theory of gravity could be
constructed discretely using algebraic methods. The algebraic tools are similar
to ones used in constructing topological quantum field theories.The algebraic
tools are related to ideas about the reinterpretation of quantum mechanics in a
general relativistic context.Comment: To appear in special issue of JMP. Latex documen
Huebner\u27s Critical Encounter with the Philosophy of Heidegger in \u3cem\u3eBeing and Time\u3c/em\u3e: Learning, Understanding, and the Authentic Unfolding of History in the Curriculum
This paper responds to the following question: What are the issues concerned with potential educational reform that arise from Huebner\u27s critical encounter with Heidegger and the tradition in education and curriculum theory? In attempting a rejoinder, I revisit Huebner\u27s groundbreaking essay, Curriculum as Concern for Man\u27s Temporality, which introduces the phenomenological method in education and curriculum studies, with the goal of examining in detail the underlying themes, issues, and concepts, which ground Huebner\u27s reconceptualization of curriculum reform, as they emerge from Heidegger\u27s philosophy. I show that Huebner\u27s understanding of Being-in-the-world in terms of the design of the educational environment, not only mirrors, but as well, embodies the flux, flow, and rhythmic dynamics of history\u27s dialectic unfolding as a temporal phenomenon, which for Heidegger represents our authentic historizing in the moment of vision, or Augenblick, and this for Heidegger is the definitive embodiment of Dasein\u27s authentic mode of existence as historical Being-in-the-world as Being-with Others
Fifty Million Elvis Fans Canât be Wrong
This essay revisits some classic problems in the philosophy of space and time concerning the counting of possibilities. I argue that we should think that two Newtonian worlds can differ only as to when or where things happen and that general relativistic worlds can differ in something like the same wayâthe first of these theses being quaintly heterodox, the second baldly heretical, according to the mores of contemporary philosophy of physics
Some Metaphysical Implications of Hegelâs Theodicy
This paper examines Hegelâs claim that philosophy âhas no other object than Godâ as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. On this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegelâs version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, Leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them -- the âparadox of perspectivismâ
Prolegomena to a neurocomputational architecture for human grammatical encoding and decoding
The study develops a neurocomputational architecture for grammatical processing in language production and language comprehension (grammatical encoding and decoding, respectively). It seeks to answer two questions. First, how is online syntactic structure formation of the complexity required by natural-language grammars possible in a fixed, preexisting neural network without the need for online creation of new connections or associations? Second, is it realistic to assume that the seemingly disparate instantiations of syntactic structure formation in grammatical encoding and grammatical decoding can run on the same neural infrastructure? This issue is prompted by accumulating experimental evidence for the hypothesis that the mechanisms for grammatical decoding overlap with those for grammatical encoding to a considerable extent, thus inviting the hypothesis of a single âgrammatical coder.â The paper answers both questions by providing the blueprint for a syntactic structure formation mechanism that is entirely based on prewired circuitry (except for referential processing, which relies on the rapid learning capacity of the hippocampal complex), and can subserve decoding as well as encoding tasks. The model builds on the âUnification Spaceâ model of syntactic parsing developed by Vosse & Kempen (2000, 2008, 2009). The design includes a neurocomputational mechanism for the treatment of an important class of grammatical movement phenomena
Anaphora and the Logic of Change
This paper shows how the dynamic interpretation of natural language introduced in work by Hans Kamp and Irene Heim can be modeled in classical type logic. This provides a synthesis between Richard Montague's theory of natural language semantics and the work by Kamp and Heim
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