Measures of neuropsychological assessment as indicators of success in neuropsychological rehabilitation: an exploratory correlational study

Neuropsychological assessment not only allows diagnosing possible neurocognitive impairments in domains such as attention, working memory, and executive functions, but can also provide useful information for the neuropsychological rehabilitation. By applying a set of valid neuropsychological tests to individuals with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), and subsequently studying how patients’ performance in rehabilitation programs relates with measures that are commonly provided by these tests, we may obtain valuable predictors of individual success that can be considered in neuropsychological rehabilitation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Non-parametric contextual stochastic search

Stochastic search algorithms are black-box optimizer of an objective function. They have recently gained a lot of attention in operations research, machine learning and policy search of robot motor skills due to their ease of use and their generality. Yet, many stochastic search algorithms require relearning if the task or objective function changes slightly to adapt the solution to the new situation or the new context. In this paper, we consider the contextual stochastic search setup. Here, we want to find multiple good parameter vectors for multiple related tasks, where each task is described by a continuous context vector. Hence, the objective function might change slightly for each parameter vector evaluation of a task or context. Contextual algorithms have been investigated in the field of policy search, however, the search distribution typically uses a parametric model that is linear in the some hand-defined context features. Finding good context features is a challenging task, and hence, non-parametric methods are often preferred over their parametric counter-parts. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric contextual stochastic search algorithm that can learn a non-parametric search distribution for multiple tasks simultaneously. In difference to existing methods, our method can also learn a context dependent covariance matrix that guides the exploration of the search process. We illustrate its performance on several non-linear contextual tasks

Applying biological paradigms to emerge behaviour in RoboCup Rescue team

This paper presents a hybrid behaviour process for performing collaborative tasks and coordination capabilities in a rescue team. RoboCup Rescue simulator and its associated international competition are used as the testbed for our proposal. Unlike other published work in this field one of our main concerns is having good results on RoboCup Rescue championships by emerging behaviour in agents using a biological paradigm. The benefit comes from the hierarchic and parallel organisation of the mammalian brain. In our behaviour process, Artificial Neural Networks are used in order to make agents capable of learning information from the environment. This allows agents to improve several algorithms like their Path Finding Algorithm to find the shortest path between two points. Also, we aim to filter the most important messages that arise from the environment, to make the right choice on the best path planning among many alternatives, in a short time. A policy action was implemented using Kohonen's network, Dijkstra's and D* algorithm. This policy has achieved good results in our tests, getting our team classified for RoboCup Rescue Simulation League 2005

Desenvolvimento de recursos didácticos informatizados no âmbito da educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável. o exemplo do courseware SeRe

A falta de recursos didácticos informatizados de qualidade para o 1º e 2º Ciclos do Ensino Básico (1º/2º CEB), concebidos no âmbito da Educação para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável (EDS), numa perspectiva de Ensino por Pesquisa, determinou a organização de uma equipa multidisciplinar para o desenvolvimento do «Courseware Sere - O Ser Humano e os Recursos Naturais». Ajustando alguns princípios de desenvolvimento de software, particularmente de Design Centrado no Utilizador (DCU), o trabalho da equipa multidisciplinar, constituída por elementos com diversas competências (ao nível da Didáctica das Ciências, da Tecnologia Educativa, de Design e de Programação), centrou-se no desenvolvimento de um recurso didáctico informatizado que integra várias tipologias de software, nomeadamente simulações e visualizações, com as actividades didácticas. A orientação do recurso, as temáticas propostas e as metodologias e estratégias de exploração privilegiadas fundamentam-se: i) na identificação das orientações nacionais e internacionais da EDS; ii) na identificação das necessidades e interesses dos professores quanto à implementação de actividades com orientação EDS (Sá, 2008; Sá e Martins, 2007), iii) no paradigma de ensino por competências (Cachapuz, Sá-Chaves e Paixão, 2004) e iv) no recurso a um design interactivo centrado no utilizador (Costa, Loureiro, Reis, Sá, Guerra e Vieira, 2009; Guerra, 2007). Neste artigo faz-se uma apresentação do processo de desenvolvimento do recurso didáctico, das temáticas propostas e das metodologias e estratégias de exploração perspectivadas pelos autores do recurs

Vision based referee sign language recognition system for the RoboCup MSL league

In RoboCup Middle Size league (MSL) the main referee uses assisting technology, controlled by a second referee, to support him, in particular for conveying referee decisions for robot players with the help of a wireless communication system. In this paper a vision-based system is introduced, able to interpret dynamic and static gestures of the referee, thus eliminating the need for a second one. The referee's gestures are interpreted by the system and sent directly to the Referee Box, which sends the proper commands to the robots. The system is divided into four modules: a real time hand tracking and feature extraction, a SVM (Support Vector Machine) for static hand posture identification, an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) for dynamic unistroke hand gesture recognition, and a FSM (Finite State Machine) to control the various system states transitions. The experimental results showed that the system works very reliably, being able to recognize the combination of gestures and hand postures in real-time. For the hand posture recognition, with the SVM model trained with the selected features, an accuracy of 98,2% was achieved. Also, the system has many advantages over the current implemented one, like avoiding the necessity of a second referee, working on noisy environments, working on wireless jammed situations. This system is easy to implement and train and may be an inexpensive solution

A mathematical analysis of the evolution of perturbations in a modified Chaplygin gas model

One approach in modern cosmology consists in supposing that dark matter and dark energy are different manifestations of a single `quartessential' fluid. Following such idea, this work presents a study of the evolution of perturbations of density in a flat cosmological model with a modified Chaplygin gas acting as a single component. Our goal is to obtain properties of the model which can be used to distinguish it from another cosmological models which have the same solutions for the general evolution of the scale factor of the universe, without the construction of the power spectrum. Our analytical results, which alone can be used to uniquely characterize the specific model studied in our work, show that the evolution of the density contrast can be seen, at least in one particular case, as composed by a spheroidal wave function. We also present a numerical analysis which clearly indicates as one interesting feature of the model the appearence of peaks in the evolution of the density constrast.Comment: 21 pages, accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Epidermis recreation in spongy-like hydrogels: New opportunities to explore epidermis-like analogues

[Excerpt] On the road to successfully achieving skin regeneration, 3D matrices/scaffolds that provide the adequate physico-chemical and biological cues to recreate the ideal healing environment are believed to be a key element [1], [2] and [3]. Numerous polymeric matrices derived from both natural [4] and [5] and synthetic [6], [7] and [8] sources have been used as cellular supports; nowadays, fewer matrices are simple carriers, and more and more are ECM analogues that can actively participate in the healing process. Therefore, the attractive characteristics of hydrogels, such as high water content, tunable elasticity and facilitated mass transportation, have made them excellent materials to mimic cells’ native environment [9]. Moreover, their hygroscopic nature [10] and possibility of attaining soft tissues-like mechanical properties mean they have potential for exploitation as wound healing promoters [11], [12], [13] and [14]. Nonetheless, hydrogels lack natural cell adhesion sites [15], which limits the maximization of their potential in the recreation of the cell niche. This issue has been tackled through the use of a range of sophisticated approaches to decorate the hydrogels with adhesion sequences such as arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) derived from fibronectin [16], [17] and [18], and tyrosine-isoleucine-glycine-serine-arginine (YIGSR) derived from laminin [18] and [19], which not only aim to modulate cell adhesion, but also influencing cell fate and survival [18]. Nonetheless, its widespread use is still limited by significant costs associated with the use of recombinant bioactive molecules

The two-dimensional random-bond Ising model, free fermions and the network model

We develop a recently-proposed mapping of the two-dimensional Ising model with random exchange (RBIM), via the transfer matrix, to a network model for a disordered system of non-interacting fermions. The RBIM transforms in this way to a localisation problem belonging to one of a set of non-standard symmetry classes, known as class D; the transition between paramagnet and ferromagnet is equivalent to a delocalisation transition between an insulator and a quantum Hall conductor. We establish the mapping as an exact and efficient tool for numerical analysis: using it, the computational effort required to study a system of width $M$ is proportional to $M^{3}$, and not exponential in $M$ as with conventional algorithms. We show how the approach may be used to calculate for the RBIM: the free energy; typical correlation lengths in quasi-one dimension for both the spin and the disorder operators; even powers of spin-spin correlation functions and their disorder-averages. We examine in detail the square-lattice, nearest-neighbour $\pm J$ RBIM, in which bonds are independently antiferromagnetic with probability $p$, and ferromagnetic with probability $1-p$. Studying temperatures $T\geq 0.4J$, we obtain precise coordinates in the $p-T$ plane for points on the phase boundary between ferromagnet and paramagnet, and for the multicritical (Nishimori) point. We demonstrate scaling flow towards the pure Ising fixed point at small $p$, and determine critical exponents at the multicritical point.Comment: 20 pages, 25 figures, figures correcte