A Synthesis of the Procedural and Declarative Styles of Interactive Theorem Proving

We propose a synthesis of the two proof styles of interactive theorem proving: the procedural style (where proofs are scripts of commands, like in Coq) and the declarative style (where proofs are texts in a controlled natural language, like in Isabelle/Isar). Our approach combines the advantages of the declarative style - the possibility to write formal proofs like normal mathematical text - and the procedural style - strong automation and help with shaping the proofs, including determining the statements of intermediate steps. Our approach is new, and differs significantly from the ways in which the procedural and declarative proof styles have been combined before in the Isabelle, Ssreflect and Matita systems. Our approach is generic and can be implemented on top of any procedural interactive theorem prover, regardless of its architecture and logical foundations. To show the viability of our proposed approach, we fully implemented it as a proof interface called miz3, on top of the HOL Light interactive theorem prover. The declarative language that this interface uses is a slight variant of the language of the Mizar system, and can be used for any interactive theorem prover regardless of its logical foundations. The miz3 interface allows easy access to the full set of tactics and formal libraries of HOL Light, and as such has "industrial strength". Our approach gives a way to automatically convert any procedural proof to a declarative counterpart, where the converted proof is similar in size to the original. As all declarative systems have essentially the same proof language, this gives a straightforward way to port proofs between interactive theorem provers

Reading Out of Doors: How Nature Becomes Text and Vice-Versa

The tensions between city and country, the artificial and the natural, the real and the fake are at the heart of attempts to render nature in writing. In many such texts, nature—especially wilderness—is the realm of the real, authentic, and pure, while the city is the realm of the artificial and corrupt. This placement of value in nature, members of the critical theory camp tend to counter, is misguided. Any effort to render nature in text is by its “nature” artificial—far more about human values embedded in language itself than about some extra-textual world. With an approach derived from theorists and critics as diverse in approach as Robert Pogue Harrison, Gilles Deleuze, Hans Jonas and R.G. Collingwood, my study rejects both monisms—of both matter and text—in favor of retaining the two fields as separate, but so entangled in each other that any claim to “purity” is illusory, futile. My study begins in Arcadia with an examination of the pastoral impulse through a close reading of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Égloga Tercera, which concerns the entwinement of Nature with Art. It then moves through considerations of several sites of interaction between language and environment: the mountain as terrain of the wild sublime; the river as site of wild nature harnessed to the use of humanity; the animal as agent of natural law; and the city as the source of longing for the pastoral locus amoenus. The texts range from the Ikhwan al-Safa’s Case of the Animals Versus Man to Petrarch’s account of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux, from Thoreau’s journey on the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Krakauer’s account of Chris McCandless’s ill-fated foray into the wilderness of Alaska. As my discussion suggests, Nature and Art, world and language, are all impure. Every encounter with the world implies language; every encounter with language limns a world

Multisensory processing, affect and multimodal manipulation: A cognitive-semiotic empirical study of travel documentaries

Multisensory processing represents the mirror image of multimodal meaning-making, in that interpreting multimodal discourse predominantly requires multisensory processing, even when different modes rely on the same sensory channels (Khateb et al., 2002), for example images and text in a book (Gibbons, 2012, p. 40). Remley (2017) makes a similar point when discussing the neuroscience of multimodal persuasive messages, when he asserts that “[t]he term ‘multisensory integration’ is the biological equivalent of the term ‘multimodal’ in rhetoric” (p. 9). An understanding of multisensory processing can therefore be (and presumably is) exploited at the stage of text-production as a resource for manipulative multimodal discourses, with all the ideological consequences that entails. The concept of manipulation has been a matter of discussion in critical discourse studies (CDS) and pragmatics for more than a decade. Agreement on how to define and analyse the latter has yet to be reached, although most scholars seem to agree that Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) can provide a useful entry point thanks to its theorisation of variable contexts and individual cognitive environments (de Saussure, 2005; Maillat, 2013; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Oswald, 2014). Moreover, the concept of epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010) has been used to investigate the cognitive barriers that need to be bypassed in order for manipulation to work (Hart, 2013; Mazzarella, 2015). Finally, Sorlin (2017: 133) recently highlighted the need to focus not only on the cognitive aspects influencing manipulation, but also on “the psychological aspect of manipulation that often consists in exploiting the target's weaknesses”, thus pointing towards the dimension of affect as a further explanatory force. This paper begins with an overview of the concepts of manipulation and epistemic vigilance, before discussing insights from the field of multisensory processing in the neurosciences. Then, drawing on some principles from Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and looking at some data from travel documentary programmes and their viewers, examples are offered of how manipulation is attempted and achieved through this specific multimodal genre in individual case studies. The focus of the analysis will be on bottom-up (i.e. text-driven) processes and the interpretation/reaction of an audience. The research draws on a novel methodological approach (Castaldi, 2021) that integrates Audience Research (e.g., Schrøder et al., 2003) and Social Semiotics (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1999; Machin and Mayr, 2012) in order to analyse media interactions in their individuality. Results suggest that the affective dimension, predominantly attended to through sonic and visual modes, plays a key role for multimodal manipulation to successfully occur

De-Sign Environment Landscape City Atti

La VI Conferenza Internazionale sul Disegno, De_Sign Environment Landscape City_Genova 2020 tratta di: Rilievo e Rappresentazione dell’Architettura e dell’Ambiente; Il Disegno per il paesaggio; Disegni per il Progetto: tracce - visioni e pre-visioni; I margini i segni della memoria e la città in progress; Cultura visiva e comunicazione dall’idea al progetto; Le emergenze architettoniche; Il colore e l’ambiente; Percezione e identità territoriale; Patrimonio iconografico culturale paesaggistico: arte, letteratura e ricadute progettuali; Segni e Disegni per il Design e Rappresentazione avanzata. Federico Babina, architetto e graphic designer presenta ARCHIVISION, e Eduardo Carazo Lefort, Docente dell’Università di Valladolid e Targa d’Oro dell’Unione Italiana Disegno la Lectio Magistralis. The VI International Conference on Drawing, De_Sign Environment Landscape City_Genoa 2020, deals with: Survey and Representation of Architecture and the Environment; Drawing for the landscape; De-signs for the Project: traces-visions and previews; Margins, signs of memory and the city in progress; Visual culture and communication from idea to project; Architectural emergencies; The color and the environment; Perception and territorial identity; Landscape cultural iconographic heritage: art, literature and design implications; Signs and Drawings for Design and Advanced Representation. Federico Babina, architect and graphic designer presents ARCHIVISION, and Professor Eduardo Carazo Lefort-University of Valladolid and Gold Plate of the Italian Design Union presents his Lectio Magistralis

Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture – although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well

Data ethics : building trust : how digital technologies can serve humanity

Data is the magic word of the 21st century. As oil in the 20th century and electricity in the 19th century: For citizens, data means support in daily life in almost all activities, from watch to laptop, from kitchen to car, from mobile phone to politics. For business and politics, data means power, dominance, winning the race. Data can be used for good and bad, for services and hacking, for medicine and arms race. How can we build trust in this complex and ambiguous data world? How can digital technologies serve humanity? The 45 articles in this book represent a broad range of ethical reflections and recommendations in eight sections: a) Values, Trust and Law, b) AI, Robots and Humans, c) Health and Neuroscience, d) Religions for Digital Justice, e) Farming, Business, Finance, f) Security, War, Peace, g) Data Governance, Geopolitics, h) Media, Education, Communication. The authors and institutions come from all continents. The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, business, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and building trust! The book is a continuation of the volume “Cyber Ethics 4.0” published in 2018 by the same editors

Practices of Speculation: Modeling, Embodiment, Figuration

This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp