Open-domain neural conversational agents: The step towards artificial general intelligence

Development of conversational agents started half century ago and since then it has transformed into a technology that is accessible in various aspects in everyday life. This paper presents a survey current state-of-the-art in the open domain neural conversational agent research and future research directions towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) creation. In order to create a conversational agent which is able to pass the Turing Test, numerous research efforts are focused on open-domain dialogue system. This paper will present latest research in domain of Neural Network reasoning and logical association, sentiment analysis and real-time learning approaches applied to open domain neural conversational agents. As an effort to provide future research directions, current cuttingedge approaches applied to open domain neural conversational agents, current cutting-edge approaches in rationale generation and the state-of-the-art research directions in alternative training methods will be discussed in this paper

The Impact of Augmented Reality on Vocabulary Acquisition in Iran

This paper explores gender differences among the students that used augmented reality (AR) in Iranian secondary schools. Vocabulary learning is considered as basic in foreign language acquisition, and it has a great importance in Iranian language education. Participants of the study were both female and male students due to the fact Iranian schools are considered gender-based. The Iranian education system is not based on co-education, and for this reason male and female students attend different schools. The current study is based on experimental design, and data was collected using pre-test and post-test. The findings show that there are no differences in learning English vocabulary due to gender among the Iranian students who use the AR-based approach

Fuzzy Multi-criteria Model for Selecting the Best Location for a Regional Landfill

The expected deficit in power supply all over the world demands all types of institutions such as scientific, vocational and governmental to focus an increased attention on the problems of increasing energy efficiency, using renewable energy sources as biomass (biodegradable parts of products, waste and remains in agriculture, forestry and related industries, as well as biodegradable parts of industrial waste and urban litter, according to European Union Directive (EU) 2001/77/EC). Although biomass is often referred to as carbon neutral fuel, it can still contribute to global warming. Energy can be obtained from biomass in different ways, for example by: (1) direct burning (wood, vegetative remains, wood waste) in order to get thermal energy, (2) digestionprocessing animal waste (manure) into biogass, (3) processing biomass into alcohol (ethanol) or producing vegetable oils. It should also be noted that during its life cycle, biomass absorbs CO 2 which is released back into the atmosphere when biomass is used for obtaining energy. The EU puts a lot of effort into stimulating the use of biomass as a fuel. 4% of the overall energy demand in the EU is satisfied by biomass production, which is equal to 69m tons of petroleum. Data found in literature (International Energy Agency (IEA), Head of Communication and Information Office, Paris, France: World Energy Outlook, 2008) suggest that using biomass as a fuel may lead to diversity in energy supply, considerable decrease in emission of gases which cause the greenhouse effect, increasing the employment rate and potential cuts in prices of petroleum as a result of declining demand. One of subissues of using biomass as a fuel is the selection of a biomass burying location. The considered problem is important bearing in mind three different groups of aspects: -economic and social group of aspects (this creates the possibility to improve the competitive position of regional economy, makes new production programs as growing biomass plantation, using biomass for energy, solving the problem of waste disposal and increasing the employment rate); -socially-energetic and ecological group of aspects (preservation and/or improvement in environment protection and natural resources use, improving life quality and a contribution to the use of renewable energy sources); -the aspect of energetics development strategy realisation (improving the reliability of energy supply in both industry and households, decreasing the use of other energy forms and giving contribution to meeting local energetic needs). The problem of selecting location for biomass burying and processing has been discussed in a certain number of papers so far. I

A review of the international early recommendations for departments organization and cancer management priorities during the global COVID-19 pandemic: applicability in low- and middle-income countries.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new virus that has never been identified in humans before. COVID-19 caused at the time of writing of this article, 2.5 million cases of infections in 193 countries with 165,000 deaths, including two-third in Europe. In this context, Oncology Departments of the affected countries had to adapt quickly their health system care and establish new organizations and priorities. Thus, numerous recommendations and therapeutic options have been reported to optimize therapy delivery to patients with chronic disease and cancer. Obviously, while these cancer care recommendations are immediately applicable in Europe, they may not be applicable in certain emerging and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this review, we aimed to summarize these international guidelines in accordance with cancer types, making a synthesis for daily practice to protect patients, staff and tailor anti-cancer therapy delivery taking into account patients/tumour criteria and tools availability. Thus, we will discuss their applicability in the LMICs with different organizations, limited means and different constraints

Linkage Mapping of Stem Saccharification Digestibility in Rice

Rice is the staple food of almost half of the world population, and in excess 90% of it is grown and consumed in Asia, but the disposal of rice straw poses a problem for farmers, who often burn it in the fields, causing health and environmental problems. However, with increased focus on the development of sustainable biofuel production, rice straw has been recognized as a potential feedstock for non-food derived biofuel production. Currently, the commercial realization of rice as a biofuel feedstock is constrained by the high cost of industrial saccharification processes needed to release sugar for fermentation. This study is focused on the alteration of lignin content, and cell wall chemotypes and structures, and their effects on the saccharification potential of rice lignocellulosic biomass. A recombinant inbred lines (RILs) population derived from a cross between the lowland rice variety IR1552 and the upland rice variety Azucena with 271 molecular markers for quantitative trait SNP (QTS) analyses was used. After association analysis of 271 markers for saccharification potential, 1 locus and 4 pairs of epistatic loci were found to contribute to the enzymatic digestibility phenotype, and an inverse relationship between reducing sugar and lignin content in these recombinant inbred lines was identified. As a result of QTS analyses, several cell-wall associated candidate genes are proposed that may be useful for marker-assisted breeding and may aid breeders to produce potential high saccharification rice varieties

Diverse aging rates in ectothermic tetrapods provide insights for the evolution of aging and longevity

Comparative studies of mortality in the wild are necessary to understand the evolution of aging; yet, ectothermic tetrapods are underrepresented in this comparative landscape, despite their suitability for testing evolutionary hypotheses. We present a study of aging rates and longevity across wild tetrapod ectotherms, using data from 107 populations (77 species) of nonavian reptiles and amphibians. We test hypotheses of how thermoregulatory mode, environmental temperature, protective phenotypes, and pace of life history contribute to demographic aging. Controlling for phylogeny and body size, ectotherms display a higher diversity of aging rates compared with endotherms and include phylogenetically widespread evidence of negligible aging. Protective phenotypes and life-history strategies further explain macroevolutionary patterns of aging. Analyzing ectothermic tetrapods in a comparative context enhances our understanding of the evolution of aging.Animal science

Vulnerabilities of virtual and networked organizations

Virtual organizations (VO) represent a future paradigm of business. Having in mind different types of perturbations in business today, from the economic crisis to the earthquakes in Japan and terrorists' actions, new business solutions have emerged in order to sustain development all over the world. As a new field in scientific research, organizational resilience needs to be investigated in the context of VO's. This paper has the intention to suggest a qualitative way to assess one dimension of organizational resilience in VO's related to keystone vulnerabilities and to establish directions for future work, emphasizing the importance of quantifying overall organizational resilience. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global

Model for Selection of the Best Location Based on Fuzzy AHP and Hurwitz Methods

© 2017 Slavko Arsovski et al. The problem of evaluation and selection of parking lots is a part of significant issues of public transport management in cities. As population expands as well as urban areas, solving the mentioned issues affects employees, security and safety of citizens, and quality of life in long-time period. The aim of this paper is to propose a multicriteria decision model which includes both quantitative and qualitative criteria, which may be of either benefit or cost type, to evaluate locations. The criteria values and the importance of criteria are either precise or linguistic expressions defined by trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The human judgments of the relative importance of evaluation criteria and uncertain criteria values are often vague and cannot be expressed by exact precise values. The ranking of locations with respect to all criteria and their weights is performed for various degrees of pessimistic-optimistic index. The proposed model is tested through an illustrative example with real life data, where it shows the practical implications in public communal enterprises

Supplier selection using NSGA-II technique

In modern manufacturing industries, supplier selection is increasingly recognized as a critical decision in supply chain management. Supplier selection problem is a typical multiple criteria decision making problem involving a number of different and usually conflicting objectives. Because of that, modern supplier selection techniques imply solving of multi-objective optimization problems. In this paper supplier selection using evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II method) is presented. Recent investigations show that quality and costs are among the most important selection factors. In this paper the authors used variance of quality and total costs as criteria for selection optimization. Results show that described methodology can be applicable for the practical purposes. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global