FOOD SAFETY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The past decade has taught us that pathogenic microorganisms are adapting themselves to processing treatments and environmental conditions once thought to be effective in controlling their proliferation. Genetic exchange is sprouting new varieties of bacterial strains with increased abilities to cause disease. The scientific community must adopt a proactive approach, including an aggressive research agenda that seeks to determine the ecology of the food production and processing environments, as well as the basic biology of pathogenic organisms. In addition, it is crucial that we develop a well-integrated educational strategy that seeks to educate industry and consumers.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Evaluation of an anthropomorphic user interface in a travel reservation context and affordances

This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number ofyears in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine theeffectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback in various domains. The results are of use to all interactivesystems designers, particularly when dealing with issues of user interface feedback design. There is currently somedisagreement amongst computer scientists concerning the suitability of such types of feedback. This research is working toresolve this disagreement. The experiment detailed, concerns the specific software domain of Online Factual Delivery in thespecific context of online hotel bookings. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphicfeedback. Statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that the non-anthropomorphic feedback was more effective.The results for user satisfaction were however less clear. The results obtained are compared with previous research. Thissuggests that the observed results could be due to the issue of differing domains yielding different results. However the resultsmay also be due to the affordances at the interface being more facilitated in the non-anthropomorphic feedback

Solving parity games: Explicit vs symbolic

In this paper we provide a broad investigation of the symbolic approach for solving Parity Games. Specifically, we implement in a fresh tool, called, four symbolic algorithms to solve Parity Games and compare their performances to the corresponding explicit versions for different classes of games. By means of benchmarks, we show that for random games, even for constrained random games, explicit algorithms actually perform better than symbolic algorithms. The situation changes, however, for structured games, where symbolic algorithms seem to have the advantage. This suggests that when evaluating algorithms for parity-game solving, it would be useful to have real benchmarks and not only random benchmarks, as the common practice has been

Checking Interval Properties of Computations

Model checking is a powerful method widely explored in formal verification. Given a model of a system, e.g., a Kripke structure, and a formula specifying its expected behaviour, one can verify whether the system meets the behaviour by checking the formula against the model. Classically, system behaviour is expressed by a formula of a temporal logic, such as LTL and the like. These logics are "point-wise" interpreted, as they describe how the system evolves state-by-state. However, there are relevant properties, such as those constraining the temporal relations between pairs of temporally extended events or involving temporal aggregations, which are inherently "interval-based", and thus asking for an interval temporal logic. In this paper, we give a formalization of the model checking problem in an interval logic setting. First, we provide an interpretation of formulas of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS over finite Kripke structures, which allows one to check interval properties of computations. Then, we prove that the model checking problem for HS against finite Kripke structures is decidable by a suitable small model theorem, and we provide a lower bound to its computational complexity.Comment: In Journal: Acta Informatica, Springer Berlin Heidelber, 201

Optimal Pooling in Claims Resolution Facilities

A class of nonlinear stochastic processes satysfying a "Lipschitz-type strip condition" and supplied by a linear output equation, is considered. Robust asymptotic (high-gain) state estimation for nonlinear stochastic processes via differential neural networks is discussed. A new type learning law for the weight dynamics is suggested. By a stochastic Lyapunov-like analysis (with Ito formula implementation), the stability conditions for the state estimation error as well as for the neural network weights are established. The upper bound for this error is derived. The numerical example, dealing with "module"-type nonlinearities, illustrates the effectiveness of the suggested approach

Dynamic escape game

We introduce Dynamic Escape Game (DEC), a tool that provides emergency evacuation plans in situations where some of the escape paths may become unavailable at runtime. We formalize the setting as a reachability two-player turn-based game where the universal player has the power of inhibiting at runtime some moves to the existential player. Thus, the universal player can change the structure of the game arena along a play. DEC uses a graphical interface to depict the game and displays a winning play whenever it exists

Parity-energy ATL for Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning in MAS

In this paper, we introduce a new logic suitable to reason about strategic abilities of multi-agent systems where (teams of) agents are subject to qualitative (parity) and quantitative (energy) constraints and where goals are represented, as usual, by means of temporal properties. We formally define such a logic, named parity-energy-atl (peatl, for short), and we study its model checking problem, which we prove to be decidable with different complexity upper bounds, depending on different choices for the energy range

Verifying and Synthesising Multi-Agent Systems against One-Goal Strategy Logic Specifications

© Copyright 2015, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaa1.org). All rights reserved.Strategy Logic (SL) has recently come to the fore as a useful specification language to reason about multi-agent systems. Its one-goal fragment, or SL[1g], is of particular interest as it strictly subsumes widely used logics such as ATL∗, while maintaining attractive complexity features. In this paper we put forward an automata-based methodology for verifying and synthesising multi-agent systems against specifications given in SL[Ig], We show that the algorithm is sound and optimal from a computational point of view. A key feature of the approach is that all data structures and operations on them can be performed on BDDs. We report on a BDD-based model checker implementing the algorithm and evaluate its performance on the fair process scheduler synthesis

PLENARY PANEL: A 360-DEGREE VIEW OF SCIENCE AND AGRICULTURAL POLICY; EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Agricultural and Food Policy,