13,589 research outputs found
Personal security in travel by public transport : the role of traveller information and associated technologies
Acknowledgement This research reported in this paper has been funded by a grant award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council: EP/I037032/1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Confidence Reports
We advocate and develop a states-based semantics for both nominal and adjectival confidence reports, as in "Ann is confident/has confidence that it's raining", and their comparatives "Ann is more confident/has more confidence that it's raining than that it's snowing". Other examples of adjectives that can report confidence include "sure" and "certain". Our account adapts Wellwood's account of adjectival comparatives in which the adjectives denote properties of states, and measure functions are introduced compositionally. We further explore the prospects of applying these tools to the semantics of probability operators. We emphasize three desirable and novel features of our semantics: (i) probability claims only exploit qualitative resources unless there is explicit compositional pressure for quantitative resources; (ii) the semantics applies to both probabilistic adjectives (e.g., "likely") and probabilistic nouns (e.g., "probability"); (iii) the semantics can be combined with an account of belief reports that allows thinkers to have incoherent probabilistic beliefs (e.g. thinking that A & B is more likely than A) even while validating the relevant purely probabilistic claims (e.g. validating the claim that A & B is never more likely than A). Finally, we explore the interaction between confidence-reporting discourse (e.g., "I am confident that...") and belief-reports about probabilistic discourse (e.g.,"I think it's likely that..")
Future prospects for personal security in travel by public transport
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/I037032/1]. No other funding support from any other bodies was provided.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Free Search of real value or how to make computers think
This book introduces in detail Free Search - a novel advanced method for search and optimisation. It also deals with some essential questions that have been raised in a strong debate following the publication of this method in
journal and conference papers. In the light of this debate, Free Search deserves serious attention, as it appears to be superior to other competitive methods in the context of the experimental results obtained. This superiority is not only
quantitative in terms of the actual optimal value found but also qualitative in terms of independence from initial conditions and adaptation capabilities in an unknown environment
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Robots for Exploration, Digital Preservation and Visualization of Archeological Sites
Monitoring and conservation of archaeological sites
are important activities necessary to prevent damage or to
perform restoration on cultural heritage. Standard techniques,
like mapping and digitizing, are typically used to document the
status of such sites. While these task are normally accomplished
manually by humans, this is not possible when dealing with
hard-to-access areas. For example, due to the possibility of
structural collapses, underground tunnels like catacombs are
considered highly unstable environments. Moreover, they are full
of radioactive gas radon that limits the presence of people only
for few minutes. The progress recently made in the artificial
intelligence and robotics field opened new possibilities for mobile
robots to be used in locations where humans are not allowed
to enter. The ROVINA project aims at developing autonomous
mobile robots to make faster, cheaper and safer the monitoring of
archaeological sites. ROVINA will be evaluated on the catacombs
of Priscilla (in Rome) and S. Gennaro (in Naples)
Infrastructures Impacts Assessment, deliverable 4
The objective of the report is to produce qualitative analysis of the evolution of the transport system after important infrastructure investment project, and also to produce quantitative indicators. This report corresponds to the work package 4 of the TranSEcon project whom aims is to assess long term effect of large transport investment.Content of the report : [chapter 2]: presentation of the general methodology for impact assessment within TranSEcon project.[chapter 3]: presentation of the general framework of work package 4. In this chapter the application of the general methodology developed for work package 4 is described. The grid of indicators is first described and then data production and collection is commented[chapter 4]: presentation of the case studies[chapter 5]: description and impact on public transport and private transport supply system. Here some indicators are described to quantify both public and private transport supply. The impact on investment, operating costs and transport related revenues is then analysised[chapter 6]: analysis of the impact on demand of the case studies project in terms of mobility, passenger*kilometre and time savings[chapter 7]: is dedicated to results concerning transport environment and safety impact analysis. (Extract of the report).Transport Infrastructure ; Impact assessment ; Quantitative indicators ; Socio-economic evaluation
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