Proving termination of logic programs with delay declarations

In this paper we propose a method for proving termination of logic programs with delay declarations. The method is based on the notion of recurrent logic program, which is used to prove programs terminating wrt an arbitrary selection rule. Most importantly, we use the notion of bound query (as proposed by M. Bezem) in the definition of cover, a new notion which forms the kernel of our approach. We introduce the class of delay recurrent programs and prove that programs in this class terminate for all local delay selection rules, provided that the delay conditions imply boundedness. The corresponding method can be also used to transform a logic program into a terminating logic program with delay declarations

Proving deadlock freedom of logic programs with dynamic scheduling

In increasingly many logic programming systems, the Prolog left to right selection rule has been replaced with dynamic selection rules, that select an atom of a query among those satisfying suitable conditions. These conditions describe the form of the arguments of every program predicate, by means of a so-called delay declaration. Dynamic selection rules introduce the possibility of deadlock, an abnormal form of termination that occurs if the query is non-empty and it contains no `selectable' atoms. In this paper, we introduce a simple compositional assertional method for proving deadlock freedom. The method is based on the notion of suspension cover, a static description of the possible dynamic schedulings of the body atoms of a clause, according to a given delay declaration. In the method, we assume that monotonic assertions are used for specifying the conditions of the delay declaration. Apart sections are devoted to two more practical instances of the method, that use types and modes, respectively

A criança como "sujeito de direito" no cotidiano da Educação Infantil

A presente pesquisa foi desenvolvida no município de Vitória (ES), no Centro Municipal de Educação Infantil (CMEI) Darcy Vargas. A metodologia se caracteriza como um estudo do tipo etnográfico, utilizando-se de observação participante, registro sistemático em diário de campo e registro fotográfico. A permanência no campo de pesquisa abrangeu um período entre setembro a dezembro de 2011. Objetivou-se compreender o processo de apropriação do discurso referente à criança como sujeito de direitos e suas implicações nas práticas pedagógicas da Educação Infantil, nesta experiência e permanência de crianças em tempo integral. Especificamente corresponderam a: investigar os processos históricos produzidos em torno da ideia da criança como sujeito de direitos; analisar a apropriação da concepção de criança como sujeito de direitos pelo campo da Educação Infantil; e investigar as implicações do reconhecimento da criança como sujeito de direitos no cotidiano da educação infantil. Os sujeitos da pesquisa foram as crianças, os professores e os assistentes de Educação Infantil de uma Turma Mista, composta por crianças de diferentes grupos e faixas etárias variadas entre 4 anos a 6 anos, do turno matutino do CMEI Darcy Vargas. Diante das discussões da área do direito, do contexto histórico da criança como sujeito de direito e, especificamente, do direito ao acesso e à permanência na educação infantil, tensionou-se as implicações do reconhecimento da criança como sujeito de direitos em um contexto no qual crianças são atendidas pelo Programa de Educação em Tempo Integral. A hipótese levantada, de que o reconhecimento da criança como sujeito de direitos gera mudanças no conceito de infância e nas concepções de criança, é legítima. As práticas educativas acompanham esse movimento no campo da educação infantil. Os resultados indicaram que a existência do Programa de Educação em Tempo Integral, no cotidiano da educação infantil, pressupõe o reconhecimento da criança como sujeito de direito, contudo, nas práticas instituídas sobressaem os direitos dos adultos, deixando transparecer uma contradição das diretrizes do Programa, destinadas, sobretudo, às crianças em situação de risco e/ou vulnerabilidade social

Morphological and molecular characterization of adults and larvae of Crassicauda spp. (Nematoda: Spirurida) from Mediterranean fin whales Balaenoptera physalus (Linnaeus, 1758)

Crassicauda boopis is known to infect the kidneys and vascular system of mysticetes included Balaenoptera physalus and has been recently reported in Mediterranean waters. Identification at the species level relies on the observation of morphological features of the adult parasites, but field conditions during necropsy and the massive reaction of the host's immune system often prevent optimal conservation of the extremities. Moreover, larval stages of Crassicauda have never been described and no sequences are available in public databases to help such identification. Adult and larvae of Crassicauda were isolated from four specimens of B. physalus and studied with morphological and molecular techniques. Specimens of C. anthonyi, C. grampicola and Crassicauda sp. isolated from Ziphius cavirostris, Grampus griseus, Stenella coeruleoalba and Tursiops truncatus respectively were studied as well. Sequences of nuclear markers 18S and ITS-2 and of mitochondrial gene cox1 were obtained and phylogenetic relationships within the genus Crassicauda were analysed. Analysis of the ITS2 grouped the dif- ferent species in accordance with morphological identification, as already evidenced in literature for other Spirurida. A higher intra-specific variability was observed for the cox1 gene, for which two species (C. grampicola and C. anthonyi) did not appear as monophyletic in the tree. Well-developed non-attached larval specimens in the intestinal lumen of a whale calf were molecularly identified as C. boopis, allowing new insights on the life cycle of this species. This work broadens the genetic database on cetaceans parasites, allowing species identi- fication even in challenging field conditions or in poor conservation of the samples; moreover, the first mor- phological description of C. boopis larvae is provided

Measurement of the Charge Collection Efficiency after Heavy Non-Uniform Irradiation in BaBar Silicon Detectors

We have investigated the depletion voltage changes, the leakage current increase and the charge collection efficiency of a silicon microstrip detector identical to those used in the inner layers of the BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) after heavy non-uniform irradiation. A full SVT module with the front-end electronics connected has been irradiated with a 0.9 GeV electron beam up to a peak fluence of 3.5 x 10^14 e^-/cm^2, well beyond the level causing substrate type inversion. We irradiated one of the two sensors composing the module with a non-uniform profile with sigma=1.4 mm that simulates the conditions encountered in the BaBar experiment by the modules intersecting the horizontal machine plane. The position dependence of the charge collection properties and the depletion voltage have been investigated in detail using a 1060 nm LED and an innovative measuring technique based only on the digital output of the chip.Comment: 7 pages, 13 figures. Presented at the 2004 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium, October 18-21, Rome, Italy. Accepted for publication by IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Scienc

Efficient Behavior of Small-World Networks

We introduce the concept of efficiency of a network, measuring how efficiently it exchanges information. By using this simple measure small-world networks are seen as systems that are both globally and locally efficient. This allows to give a clear physical meaning to the concept of small-world, and also to perform a precise quantitative a nalysis of both weighted and unweighted networks. We study neural networks and man-made communication and transportation systems and we show that the underlying general principle of their construction is in fact a small-world principle of high efficiency.Comment: 1 figure, 2 tables. Revised version. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

From controlling single processes to the complex automation of process chains by artificially intelligent control systems: the ControlInSteel project

The ControlInSteel project, a cooperation of four research institutes, revisited research projects of the last 20 years focusing on automation and control solutions applied to the downstream steel production route. During this investigation we found hints to those solutions, which were beneficial for specific problems. For our analysis, 46 projects were systematically reviewed. Taxonomies for the problem space, the solution space, the barriers and issues and the impact were developed and each project categorized along these taxonometrical dimensions. As a result, the interdependencies between solutions and impact could be analysed in a quantifiable way, which led to a new way of evaluating project success. It also brought new insights about the most promising techniques already applied and those techniques, that have been apparently not yet been applied to steel production, although being highly successful in other domains. This leads to potential future research chances for the steel production and their complex process chains. The paper will also finally demonstrate how a similar taxonometrical approach can be used to conserve expert knowledge in automation to feed a truly artificially intelligent control solution - not only exploiting machine learning methods but essentially using machine reasoning on top of the digitized expert knowledge to achieve improved process automation

Transfer Learning for Domain Adaptation in MRI: Application in Brain Lesion Segmentation

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely used in routine clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, variations in MRI acquisition protocols result in different appearances of normal and diseased tissue in the images. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have shown to be successful in many medical image analysis tasks, are typically sensitive to the variations in imaging protocols. Therefore, in many cases, networks trained on data acquired with one MRI protocol, do not perform satisfactorily on data acquired with different protocols. This limits the use of models trained with large annotated legacy datasets on a new dataset with a different domain which is often a recurring situation in clinical settings. In this study, we aim to answer the following central questions regarding domain adaptation in medical image analysis: Given a fitted legacy model, 1) How much data from the new domain is required for a decent adaptation of the original network?; and, 2) What portion of the pre-trained model parameters should be retrained given a certain number of the new domain training samples? To address these questions, we conducted extensive experiments in white matter hyperintensity segmentation task. We trained a CNN on legacy MR images of brain and evaluated the performance of the domain-adapted network on the same task with images from a different domain. We then compared the performance of the model to the surrogate scenarios where either the same trained network is used or a new network is trained from scratch on the new dataset.The domain-adapted network tuned only by two training examples achieved a Dice score of 0.63 substantially outperforming a similar network trained on the same set of examples from scratch.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure