Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a subject garnering increasing attention in both academia and the industry today. The understanding is that AI-enhanced methods and techniques create a variety of opportunities related to improving basic and advanced business functions, including production processes, logistics, financial management and others. As this collection demonstrates, AI-enhanced tools and methods tend to offer more precise results in the fields of engineering, financial accounting, tourism, air-pollution management and many more. The objective of this collection is to bring these topics together to offer the reader a useful primer on how AI-enhanced tools and applications can be of use in today’s world. In the context of the frequently fearful, skeptical and emotion-laden debates on AI and its value added, this volume promotes a positive perspective on AI and its impact on society. AI is a part of a broader ecosystem of sophisticated tools, techniques and technologies, and therefore, it is not immune to developments in that ecosystem. It is thus imperative that inter- and multidisciplinary research on AI and its ecosystem is encouraged. This collection contributes to that

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Archaeology

The contents of this book show the implementation of new methodologies applied to archaeological sites. Chapters have been grouped in four sections: New Approaches About Archaeological Theory and Methodology; The Use of Geophysics on Archaeological Fieldwork; New Applied Techniques - Improving Material Culture and Experimentation; and Sharing Knowledge - Some Proposals Concerning Heritage and Education. Many different research projects, many different scientists and authors from different countries, many different historical times and periods, but only one objective: working together to increase our knowledge of ancient populations through archaeological work. The proposal of this book is to diffuse new methods and techniques developed by scientists to be used in archaeological works. That is the reason why we have thought that a publication on line is the best way of using new technology for sharing knowledge everywhere. Discovering, sharing knowledge, asking questions about our remote past and origins, are in the basis of humanity, and also are in the basis of archaeology as a science

The Victorian Naturalist

v.44 (1927-1928

William Blake's Laocoon: The Genealogy of a Form

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the relationship between the British artist and poet William Blake and the art of Antiquity, in particular the Laocoön sculpture group in the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Blake never saw the work firsthand, but he knew of it through the writings of such prominent eighteenth-century art theorists as Winckelmann, Lessing and Fuseli, and from plaster casts in the Royal Academy collections. The recurrence of the Laocoöntic gesture in his art and illuminated poetry testifies to its powerful hold on his imagination, and my goal is to ascertain the significance of this gesture in relation to his own theories of art and, more particularly, his prophetic writings. The first two chapters discuss the sculpture in the broader context of late eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, art historiography, and Anglo-French nationalism. This includes a detailed discussion of the popular debate surrounding the semiotics of graphic and textual representation, a debate that has long been at the center of Blake studies, since his prophetic books consist of both visual and verbal elements. Further attention is given to the prominence of the sculpture in the development of neoclassical taste and the privileging of the Greek ideal in the art academies of England and France. Both countries adopted this ideal as a way to give cultural legitimacy to their respective geopolitical and economic ambitions. Blake's writings on art reveal his keen awareness and interest in these debates, culminating in his remarkable engraving of the Laocoön surrounded by a dense, disjointed textual apparatus that addresses all these concerns. Chapters three and four deal specifically with the recurrence of the Laocoöntic gesture in Blake's graphic work and illuminated poetry. I begin by explaining the rationale behind such formulaic repetitions as the foundation for an elaborate expressive code that assigns specific meanings to the gesture, and then trace these meanings in several of the illuminated prophecies, starting first with the shorter Lambeth books (America, Europe, and The Book of Urizen), and then proceeding to a chapter-length study of the Four Zoas manuscript, a work that has received less critical attention than his two other epic-length prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem. My primary point in these readings is that, in the same way the sculpture came to symbolize for Blake ideal beauty degraded by imperialism and war, in the illuminated poetry the same figure represents humanity in both its fallen and redemptive states

Introduction and Elucidation of the Quality of Sagacity in the Extended Variable Precision Rough Sets Model

This paper introduces the quality of sagacity measure in the extended variable precision rough sets model - VPRSl,u. The need for this measure is a direct consequence of the use of the associated l and u values. Moreover, different levels of miss-classification are allowed in the classification of objects to a decision class or its compliment. This measure attempts to take this into account, by acknowledging the classification of an object to the compliment of a decision class, as an appropriate (if not optimum) classification of that object. A consequence of the analysis is a discussion of the notion of open and closed worlds in VPRSl,u