Ontologies, Mental Disorders and Prototypes

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. However, the need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific mental disorders. On this respect, we favor a hybrid approach to the representation of psychiatric concepts, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual spaces

Project HealthDesign: Rethinking the Power and Potential of Personal Health Records: Round One Final Report

Describes an initiative to develop prototypes for next-generation personal health record applications on a common platform focused on self-management for better health. Outlines grantees' prototypes for user-centered daily monitoring and lessons learned

Cultural prototypes and dimensions of honor

Research evidence and theoretical accounts of honor point to differing definitions of the construct in differing cultural contexts. The current studies address the question “What is honor?” using a prototype approach in Turkey and the northern US. Studies 1a/1b revealed substantial differences in the specific features generated by members of the two groups, but Studies 2 and 3 revealed cultural similarities in the underlying dimensions of Self-Respect, Moral Behavior, and Social Status/Respect. Ratings of the centrality and personal importance of these factors were similar across the two groups, but their association with other relevant constructs differed. The tri-partite nature of honor uncovered in these studies helps observers and researchers alike understand how diverse responses to situations can be attributed to honor. Inclusion of a prototype analysis into the literature on honor cultures can provide enhanced coverage of the concept that may lead to testable hypotheses and new theoretical developments

Active diffusers : some prototypes and 2D measurements

Diffusing devices are used to improve room acoustics in a wide variety of applications. The dispersion generated by current diffuser technologies is often limited to mid-to-high frequencies because low-frequency diffusers are usually too large to be easily accommodated. To extend the bandwidth of diffusers to a lower frequency a new approach is proposed, that is to use active control technology. In particular, active impedance techniques have been exploited to create non-absorbing diffusers, and hybrid structures that partly absorb while dispersing any reflected sound. This paper presents results mostly from a feedforward structure. It is found that achieving active dispersion without absorption other a worthwhile bandwidth can be more difficult than achieving active absorption due to the more complex target impedance that the controller needs to learn. Measurements on polar responses provide evidence that the active diffusers can achieve wider bandwidth dispersion. Boundary element modelling has enabled the design of these structures to be examined in more application-realistic set-ups

Evolutionary approach to overcome initialization parameters in classification problems

Proceeding of: 7th International Work-Conference on Artificial and Natural Neural Networks, IWANN 2003 Maó, Menorca, Spain, June 3–6, 2003.The design of nearest neighbour classifiers is very dependent from some crucial parameters involved in learning, like the number of prototypes to use, the initial localization of these prototypes, and a smoothing parameter. These parameters have to be found by a trial and error process or by some automatic methods. In this work, an evolutionary approach based on Nearest Neighbour Classifier (ENNC), is described. Main property of this algorithm is that it does not require any of the above mentioned parameters. The algorithm is based on the evolution of a set of prototypes that can execute several operators in order to increase their quality in a local sense, and emerging a high classification accuracy for the whole classifier