Implementing Green Infrastructure for Air Pollution Abatement: General Recommendations for Management and Plant Species Selection

Green infrastructure (GI) includes trees, hedges, individual shrubs, green walls, and green roofs. GI offers many different benefits or services, including flood risk mitigation, microclimate regulation, carbon sequestration, improved health and wellbeing and – the focus of this document – air pollution abatement. Air pollution comprises variable quantities of many different types of pollutants, including gaseous pollutants, such as nitrous oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM), which is composed of particles such as black carbon (BC). Road traffic is a dominant source of air pollution in urban areas globally. In near-road environments, vegetation can act as a barrier between traffic emissions and pedestrians (figure below), by collecting pollutants and/or redirecting the flow of polluted air. This document summarises best practice regarding GI implementation for improved urban air quality and reduced pedestrian exposure to air pollution. Generic (i.e. not site-specific) recommendations are offered for typical urban environments. These recommendations are based upon contemporary scientific evidence and knowledge, and may therefore be subject to modification as the evidence base develops. This guidance document consolidates major findings from relevant publications, including a detailed report on the relationship between vegetation and urban air quality, review articles and other guidance documents.</p

Dependence Logic with Generalized Quantifiers: Axiomatizations

We prove two completeness results, one for the extension of dependence logic by a monotone generalized quantifier Q with weak interpretation, weak in the meaning that the interpretation of Q varies with the structures. The second result considers the extension of dependence logic where Q is interpreted as "there exists uncountable many." Both of the axiomatizations are shown to be sound and complete for FO(Q) consequences.Comment: 17 page

The evolution of digital dominance: how and why we got to GAFA

Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are now the five most valuable public companies in the world by market capitalization. This is the first time ever that technology (“tech”) companies have so dominated the stock market -- even more than at the end of the 1990s’ Internet bubble. They are a large part of everyday life in developed economies and increasingly elsewhere. They wield enormous power, raising difficult questions about their governance, regulation, and accountability. This chapter is about how and why this came about

Formalizing Mathematical Knowledge as a Biform Theory Graph: A Case Study

A biform theory is a combination of an axiomatic theory and an algorithmic theory that supports the integration of reasoning and computation. These are ideal for formalizing algorithms that manipulate mathematical expressions. A theory graph is a network of theories connected by meaning-preserving theory morphisms that map the formulas of one theory to the formulas of another theory. Theory graphs are in turn well suited for formalizing mathematical knowledge at the most convenient level of abstraction using the most convenient vocabulary. We are interested in the problem of whether a body of mathematical knowledge can be effectively formalized as a theory graph of biform theories. As a test case, we look at the graph of theories encoding natural number arithmetic. We used two different formalisms to do this, which we describe and compare. The first is realized in ${\rm CTT}_{\rm uqe}$, a version of Church's type theory with quotation and evaluation, and the second is realized in Agda, a dependently typed programming language.Comment: 43 pages; published without appendices in: H. Geuvers et al., eds, Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2017), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 10383, pp. 9-24, Springer, 201

Logics of Finite Hankel Rank

We discuss the Feferman-Vaught Theorem in the setting of abstract model theory for finite structures. We look at sum-like and product-like binary operations on finite structures and their Hankel matrices. We show the connection between Hankel matrices and the Feferman-Vaught Theorem. The largest logic known to satisfy a Feferman-Vaught Theorem for product-like operations is CFOL, first order logic with modular counting quantifiers. For sum-like operations it is CMSOL, the corresponding monadic second order logic. We discuss whether there are maximal logics satisfying Feferman-Vaught Theorems for finite structures.Comment: Appeared in YuriFest 2015, held in honor of Yuri Gurevich's 75th birthday. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23534-9_1

Information completeness in Nelson algebras of rough sets induced by quasiorders

In this paper, we give an algebraic completeness theorem for constructive logic with strong negation in terms of finite rough set-based Nelson algebras determined by quasiorders. We show how for a quasiorder $R$, its rough set-based Nelson algebra can be obtained by applying the well-known construction by Sendlewski. We prove that if the set of all $R$-closed elements, which may be viewed as the set of completely defined objects, is cofinal, then the rough set-based Nelson algebra determined by a quasiorder forms an effective lattice, that is, an algebraic model of the logic $E_0$, which is characterised by a modal operator grasping the notion of "to be classically valid". We present a necessary and sufficient condition under which a Nelson algebra is isomorphic to a rough set-based effective lattice determined by a quasiorder.Comment: 15 page

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues