28,143 research outputs found
Logic-Based Specification Languages for Intelligent Software Agents
The research field of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) aims to find
abstractions, languages, methodologies and toolkits for modeling, verifying,
validating and prototyping complex applications conceptualized as Multiagent
Systems (MASs). A very lively research sub-field studies how formal methods can
be used for AOSE. This paper presents a detailed survey of six logic-based
executable agent specification languages that have been chosen for their
potential to be integrated in our ARPEGGIO project, an open framework for
specifying and prototyping a MAS. The six languages are ConGoLog, Agent-0, the
IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog, Concurrent METATEM and Ehhf. For each
executable language, the logic foundations are described and an example of use
is shown. A comparison of the six languages and a survey of similar approaches
complete the paper, together with considerations of the advantages of using
logic-based languages in MAS modeling and prototyping.Comment: 67 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted for publication by the Journal
"Theory and Practice of Logic Programming", volume 4, Maurice Bruynooghe
Editor-in-Chie
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
Markovian Testing Equivalence and Exponentially Timed Internal Actions
In the theory of testing for Markovian processes developed so far,
exponentially timed internal actions are not admitted within processes. When
present, these actions cannot be abstracted away, because their execution takes
a nonzero amount of time and hence can be observed. On the other hand, they
must be carefully taken into account, in order not to equate processes that are
distinguishable from a timing viewpoint. In this paper, we recast the
definition of Markovian testing equivalence in the framework of a Markovian
process calculus including exponentially timed internal actions. Then, we show
that the resulting behavioral equivalence is a congruence, has a sound and
complete axiomatization, has a modal logic characterization, and can be decided
in polynomial time
A haptic-enabled multimodal interface for the planning of hip arthroplasty
Multimodal environments help fuse a diverse range of sensory modalities, which is particularly important when integrating the complex data involved in surgical preoperative planning. The authors apply a multimodal interface for preoperative planning of hip arthroplasty with a user interface that integrates immersive stereo displays and haptic modalities. This article overviews this multimodal application framework and discusses the benefits of incorporating the haptic modality in this area
Understanding of Object Manipulation Actions Using Human Multi-Modal Sensory Data
Object manipulation actions represent an important share of the Activities of
Daily Living (ADLs). In this work, we study how to enable service robots to use
human multi-modal data to understand object manipulation actions, and how they
can recognize such actions when humans perform them during human-robot
collaboration tasks. The multi-modal data in this study consists of videos,
hand motion data, applied forces as represented by the pressure patterns on the
hand, and measurements of the bending of the fingers, collected as human
subjects performed manipulation actions. We investigate two different
approaches. In the first one, we show that multi-modal signal (motion, finger
bending and hand pressure) generated by the action can be decomposed into a set
of primitives that can be seen as its building blocks. These primitives are
used to define 24 multi-modal primitive features. The primitive features can in
turn be used as an abstract representation of the multi-modal signal and
employed for action recognition. In the latter approach, the visual features
are extracted from the data using a pre-trained image classification deep
convolutional neural network. The visual features are subsequently used to
train the classifier. We also investigate whether adding data from other
modalities produces a statistically significant improvement in the classifier
performance. We show that both approaches produce a comparable performance.
This implies that image-based methods can successfully recognize human actions
during human-robot collaboration. On the other hand, in order to provide
training data for the robot so it can learn how to perform object manipulation
actions, multi-modal data provides a better alternative
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