45 research outputs found
A Propositional CONEstrip Algorithm
We present a variant of the CONEstrip algorithm for checking whether the origin lies in a finitely generated convex cone that can be open, closed, or neither. This variant is designed to deal efficiently with problems where the rays defining the cone are specified as linear combinations of propositional sentences. The variant differs from the original algorithm in that we apply row generation techniques. The generator problem is WPMaxSAT, an optimization variant of SAT; both can be solved with specialized solvers or integer linear programming techniques. We additionally show how optimization problems over the cone can be solved by using our propositional CONEstrip algorithm as a preprocessor. The algorithm is designed to support consistency and inference computations within the theory of sets of desirable gambles. We also make a link to similar computations in probabilistic logic, conditional probability assessments, and imprecise probability theory
Logic, Probability and Action: A Situation Calculus Perspective
The unification of logic and probability is a long-standing concern in AI,
and more generally, in the philosophy of science. In essence, logic provides an
easy way to specify properties that must hold in every possible world, and
probability allows us to further quantify the weight and ratio of the worlds
that must satisfy a property. To that end, numerous developments have been
undertaken, culminating in proposals such as probabilistic relational models.
While this progress has been notable, a general-purpose first-order knowledge
representation language to reason about probabilities and dynamics, including
in continuous settings, is still to emerge. In this paper, we survey recent
results pertaining to the integration of logic, probability and actions in the
situation calculus, which is arguably one of the oldest and most well-known
formalisms. We then explore reduction theorems and programming interfaces for
the language. These results are motivated in the context of cognitive robotics
(as envisioned by Reiter and his colleagues) for the sake of concreteness.
Overall, the advantage of proving results for such a general language is that
it becomes possible to adapt them to any special-purpose fragment, including
but not limited to popular probabilistic relational models
Bayesian Inference in Processing Experimental Data: Principles and Basic Applications
This report introduces general ideas and some basic methods of the Bayesian
probability theory applied to physics measurements. Our aim is to make the
reader familiar, through examples rather than rigorous formalism, with concepts
such as: model comparison (including the automatic Ockham's Razor filter
provided by the Bayesian approach); parametric inference; quantification of the
uncertainty about the value of physical quantities, also taking into account
systematic effects; role of marginalization; posterior characterization;
predictive distributions; hierarchical modelling and hyperparameters; Gaussian
approximation of the posterior and recovery of conventional methods, especially
maximum likelihood and chi-square fits under well defined conditions; conjugate
priors, transformation invariance and maximum entropy motivated priors; Monte
Carlo estimates of expectation, including a short introduction to Markov Chain
Monte Carlo methods.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, invited paper for Reports on Progress in Physic
The BLue Amazon Brain (BLAB): A Modular Architecture of Services about the Brazilian Maritime Territory
We describe the first steps in the development of an artificial agent focused
on the Brazilian maritime territory, a large region within the South Atlantic
also known as the Blue Amazon. The "BLue Amazon Brain" (BLAB) integrates a
number of services aimed at disseminating information about this region and its
importance, functioning as a tool for environmental awareness. The main service
provided by BLAB is a conversational facility that deals with complex questions
about the Blue Amazon, called BLAB-Chat; its central component is a controller
that manages several task-oriented natural language processing modules (e.g.,
question answering and summarizer systems). These modules have access to an
internal data lake as well as to third-party databases. A news reporter
(BLAB-Reporter) and a purposely-developed wiki (BLAB-Wiki) are also part of the
BLAB service architecture. In this paper, we describe our current version of
BLAB's architecture (interface, backend, web services, NLP modules, and
resources) and comment on the challenges we have faced so far, such as the lack
of training data and the scattered state of domain information. Solving these
issues presents a considerable challenge in the development of artificial
intelligence for technical domains
Compulsory admissions of patients with mental disorders : State of the art on ethical and legislative aspects in 40 European countries
Copyright: This record is sourced from MEDLINE/PubMed, a database of the U.S. National Library of MedicineBACKGROUND.: Compulsory admission procedures of patients with mental disorders vary between countries in Europe. The Ethics Committee of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) launched a survey on involuntary admission procedures of patients with mental disorders in 40 countries to gather information from all National Psychiatric Associations that are members of the EPA to develop recommendations for improving involuntary admission processes and promote voluntary care. METHODS.: The survey focused on legislation of involuntary admissions and key actors involved in the admission procedure as well as most common reasons for involuntary admissions. RESULTS.: We analyzed the survey categorical data in themes, which highlight that both medical and legal actors are involved in involuntary admission procedures. CONCLUSIONS.: We conclude that legal reasons for compulsory admission should be reworded in order to remove stigmatization of the patient, that raising awareness about involuntary admission procedures and patient rights with both patients and family advocacy groups is paramount, that communication about procedures should be widely available in lay-language for the general population, and that training sessions and guidance should be available for legal and medical practitioners. Finally, people working in the field need to be constantly aware about the ethical challenges surrounding compulsory admissions.Peer reviewe
Compulsory admissions of patients with mental disorders : State of the art on ethical and legislative aspects in 40 European countries
Background. Compulsory admission procedures of patients with mental disorders vary between countries in Europe. The Ethics Committee of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) launched a survey on involuntary admission procedures of patients with mental disorders in 40 countries to gather information from all National Psychiatric Associations that are members of the EPA to develop recommendations for improving involuntary admission processes and promote voluntary care. Methods. The survey focused on legislation of involuntary admissions and key actors involved in the admission procedure as well as most common reasons for involuntary admissions. Results. We analyzed the survey categorical data in themes, which highlight that both medical and legal actors are involved in involuntary admission procedures. Conclusions. We conclude that legal reasons for compulsory admission should be reworded in order to remove stigmatization of the patient, that raising awareness about involuntary admission procedures and patient rights with both patients and family advocacy groups is paramount, that communication about procedures should be widely available in lay-language for the general population, and that training sessions and guidance should be available for legal and medical practitioners. Finally, people working in the field need to be constantly aware about the ethical challenges surrounding compulsory admissions.Peer reviewe
Biomedical Discovery Acceleration, with Applications to Craniofacial Development
The profusion of high-throughput instruments and the explosion of new results in the scientific literature, particularly in molecular biomedicine, is both a blessing and a curse to the bench researcher. Even knowledgeable and experienced scientists can benefit from computational tools that help navigate this vast and rapidly evolving terrain. In this paper, we describe a novel computational approach to this challenge, a knowledge-based system that combines reading, reasoning, and reporting methods to facilitate analysis of experimental data. Reading methods extract information from external resources, either by parsing structured data or using biomedical language processing to extract information from unstructured data, and track knowledge provenance. Reasoning methods enrich the knowledge that results from reading by, for example, noting two genes that are annotated to the same ontology term or database entry. Reasoning is also used to combine all sources into a knowledge network that represents the integration of all sorts of relationships between a pair of genes, and to calculate a combined reliability score. Reporting methods combine the knowledge network with a congruent network constructed from experimental data and visualize the combined network in a tool that facilitates the knowledge-based analysis of that data. An implementation of this approach, called the Hanalyzer, is demonstrated on a large-scale gene expression array dataset relevant to craniofacial development. The use of the tool was critical in the creation of hypotheses regarding the roles of four genes never previously characterized as involved in craniofacial development; each of these hypotheses was validated by further experimental work