Law's ontology and practical reason

The thesis is an attempt to reconcile law's dual nature, its factual dimension (its facticity) and its normative/evaluative dimension (its normativity), in a non-reductive manner. The tension between those two dimensions appears particularly acute when we try to discern some object of reference for our normative talk/discourse. Then the possibility of absence of such objects poses a high threat to the meaningfulness of the enterprise of law tout court. Faced with this danger lawyers usually end up reducing legal referents to physical, nonnormative entities. Palpable for our senses as those entities may be, they do not seem to eliminate the threat of meaninglessness posed to the legal enterprise, as they end up eliminating law's normativity. In contrast I argue that legal and broader practical norms can be reconstructed as abstract objects that are available to knowledge. The method employed, relies predominantly on a semantic explication of the 'objecthood' of norms along the lines of a neo-Fregean theory of mental content. Further, I employ an analysis of the meaning of legal expressions in order to show that a semantic account of legal 'objecthood' will be demarcated by the pragmatic-normative requirements that support the relevant practices in which legal meaning is generated (as is specified by some version of Wittgenstein's 'meaning as use' theory of meaning). I proceed to argue that those pragmatic requirements include some transcendental pragmatic norms which specify an ultimate practical or moral point of view against the background of which practical meaning is possible. Later, this point of view is specified as a Super-norm or Principle of Autonomy. This norm bestows an evaluative element upon the meaning of all practical expressions/sentences and, via the semantic explication of ontology, into the normative objects (rules, properties and so on) that correspond to them. Finally, it is claimed that legal norms are a species of practical norms, to the extent that both fall under the same criteria of validity that are specified by the point of view of the Norm ofAutonomy

Surfing the π-clouds for Non-covalent Interactions: A comparative Study of Arenes versus Alkenes

A comparative study by NMR spectroscopy using molecular balances indicates that non-covalent functional group interactions with an arene dominate over those with an alkene and a p-facial intramolecular hydrogen bond from a hydroxyl group to an arene is favoured by ~1.2 kJ mol-1. The strongest interaction observed in this study is with the cyano group and analysis of the series of Et, CH=CH2, C≡CH and C≡N groups is indicative of a weak long range electrostatic interaction and a correlation with the electrophilicity of the Ca atom of the Y substituent. Changes in the free energy differences of conformers show a linear dependence on the solvent hydrogen bond acceptor parameter β

Noncovalent Interactions of pi Systems with Sulfur: The Atomic Chameleon of Molecular Recognition

The relative strength of noncovalent interactions between a thioether sulfur atom and various π systems in designed top pan molecular balances was determined by NMR spectroscopy. Compared to its oxygen counterpart, the sulfur atom displays a remarkable ability to interact with almost equal facility over the entire range of π systems studied, with the simple alkene emerging as the most powerful partner. With the exception of the O⋅⋅⋅heteroarene interaction, all noncovalent interactions of sulfur with π systems are favoured over oxygen

The molecular basis of polysaccharide cleavage by lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases.

Lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMOs) are copper-containing enzymes that oxidatively break down recalcitrant polysaccharides such as cellulose and chitin. Since their discovery, LPMOs have become integral factors in the industrial utilization of biomass, especially in the sustainable generation of cellulosic bioethanol. We report here a structural determination of an LPMO-oligosaccharide complex, yielding detailed insights into the mechanism of action of these enzymes. Using a combination of structure and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, we reveal the means by which LPMOs interact with saccharide substrates. We further uncover electronic and structural features of the enzyme active site, showing how LPMOs orchestrate the reaction of oxygen with polysaccharide chains.We thank K. Rasmussen and R.M. Borup for experimental assistance, and MAXLAB, Sweden and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), France, for synchrotron beam time and assistance. This work was supported by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (grant numbers BB/L000423 to P.D., G.J.D. and P.H.W., and BB/L021633/1 to G.J.D. and P.H.W.), Agence Française de l'Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l'Energie (grant number 1201C102 to B.H.), the Danish Council for Strategic Research (grant numbers 12-134923 to L.L.L. and 12-134922 to K.S.J.). Travel to synchrotrons was supported by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science through the Instrument Center DANSCATT and the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under BioStruct-X (grant agreement 283570). L.M., S.F., S.C. and H.D. were supported by Institut de Chimie Moléculaire de Grenoble FR 2607, LabEx ARCANE (ANR-11-LABX-0003-01), the PolyNat Carnot Institute and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (PNRB2005-11).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.202

Multimodal Gesture Recognition

120 σ.Η συγκεκριμένη διπλωματική έχει σαν αντικείμενο την αντιμετώπιση του προβλήματος της αναγνώρισης χειρονομιών, και των τεχνικών πολυτροπικής σύμμειξης που μπορούν να εφαρμοστούν. Μελετάται η μοντελοποίηση και η αναγνώριση των χειρονομιών με χρήση ισχυρών εργαλείων όπως τα Κρυφά Μαρκοβιανά Μοντέλα, αλλά και άλλων ταξινομητών μηχανικής μάθησης, όπως τα Support Vector Machines και k-Nearest Neighbor. Για την εξαγωγή χαρακτηριστικών χρησιμοποιούμε το κανάλι πληροφορίας της χειρομορφής, από όπου εξάγουμε δημοφιλείς οπτικούς περιγραφητές, όπως τα Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), αλλά και το κανάλι πληροφορίας της θέσης-κίνησης, όπου τα χαρακτηριστικά προκύπτουν από τη θέση (σχετική θέση, απόσταση) και την κίνηση (ταχύτητα, διεύθυνση), του χεριού και του αγκώνα. Τέλος, παρουσιάζουμε δύο επιτυχημένα σχήματα σύμμειξης αυτών των δύο καναλιών οπτικής πληροφορίας με την τροπικότητα του ήχου. Μάλιστα, τα αποτελέσματά μας σε πολυτροπική βάση αναγνώρισης χειρονομιών, ξεπερνούν τις επιδόσεις που επιτεύχθηκαν σε πρόσφατο διαγωνισμό πολυτροπικής αναγνώρισης χειρονομιών.This thesis focuses on the gesture recognition problem and on multimodal fusion techniques for it. We study gesture modeling and recognition using powerful tools, such as Hidden Markov Models, as well as other machine learning classifiers, like Support Vector Machines and K-Nearest Neighbor. For feature extraction we focus on Handshape information, employing various visual descriptors, like Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), and Movement-Position information, where features are extracted based on the position (relative position, distance) and the movement (velocity, direction) of hands and elbows. Finally, we present two successful fusion schemes, employing both visual cues and audio modality. Our proposed methodology achieves high gesture recognition accuracy in a multimodal gesture dataset, outperforming all recently published approaches on the same challenging gesture recognition task.Γεώργιος Η. Παυλάκο

Exploiting non-covalent π interactions for catalyst design

Molecular recognition, binding and catalysis are often mediated by non-covalent interactions involving aromatic functional groups. Although the relative complexity of these so-called π interactions has made them challenging to study, theory and modelling have now reached the stage at which we can explain their physical origins and obtain reliable insight into their effects on molecular binding and chemical transformations. This offers opportunities for the rational manipulation of these complex non-covalent interactions and their direct incorporation into the design of small-molecule catalysts and enzymes