Deontic Epistemic stit Logic Distinguishing Modes of `Mens Rea\u27

Most juridical systems contain the principle that an act is only unlaw- ful if the agent conducting the act has a `guilty mind\u27 (`mens rea\u27). Dif- ferent law systems distinguish different modes of mens rea. For instance, American law distinguishes between `knowingly\u27 performing a criminal act, `recklessness\u27, `strict liability\u27, etc. I will show we can formalize several of these categories. The formalism I use is a complete stit-logic featuring operators for stit-actions taking effect in `next\u27 states, S5-knowledge op- erators and SDL-type obligation operators. The different modes of `mens rea\u27 correspond to the violation conditions of different types of obligation definable in the logic

What an Agent Ought To Do

This paper reviewes Horty\u27s 2001 book `Agency and Deontic Logic\u27. We place Horty\u27s research I a broader context and discuss the relevancy for logics for multi-agent systems

The TNFR1 antagonist Atrosimab reduces neuronal loss, glial activation and memory deficits in an acute mouse model of neurodegeneration

Abstract Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and its key role in modulating immune responses has been widely recognized as a therapeutic target for inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases. Even though inhibition of TNF-α is beneficial for the treatment of certain inflammatory diseases, total neutralization of TNF-α largely failed in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. TNF-α exerts distinct functions depending on interaction with its two TNF receptors, whereby TNF receptor 1 (TNFR1) is associated with neuroinflammation and apoptosis and TNF receptor 2 (TNFR2) with neuroprotection and immune regulation. Here, we investigated the effect of administering the TNFR1-specific antagonist Atrosimab, as strategy to block TNFR1 signaling while maintaining TNFR2 signaling unaltered, in an acute mouse model for neurodegeneration. In this model, a NMDA-induced lesion that mimics various hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases, such as memory loss and cell death, was created in the nucleus basalis magnocellularis and Atrosimab or control protein was administered centrally. We showed that Atrosimab attenuated cognitive impairments and reduced neuroinflammation and neuronal cell death. Our results demonstrate that Atrosimab is effective in ameliorating disease symptoms in an acute neurodegenerative mouse model. Altogether, our study indicates that Atrosimab may be a promising candidate for the development of a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases

Cerebellar plasticity and associative memories are controlled by perineuronal nets.

Perineuronal nets (PNNs) are assemblies of extracellular matrix molecules, which surround the cell body and dendrites of many types of neuron and regulate neural plasticity. PNNs are prominently expressed around neurons of the deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN), but their role in adult cerebellar plasticity and behavior is far from clear. Here we show that PNNs in the mouse DCN are diminished during eyeblink conditioning (EBC), a form of associative motor learning that depends on DCN plasticity. When memories are fully acquired, PNNs are restored. Enzymatic digestion of PNNs in the DCN improves EBC learning, but intact PNNs are necessary for memory retention. At the structural level, PNN removal induces significant synaptic rearrangements in vivo, resulting in increased inhibition of DCN baseline activity in awake behaving mice. Together, these results demonstrate that PNNs are critical players in the regulation of cerebellar circuitry and function

Handling Conflicts in Depth-First Search for LTL Tableau to Debug Compliance Based Languages

Providing adequate tools to tackle the problem of inconsistent compliance rules is a critical research topic. This problem is of paramount importance to achieve automatic support for early declarative design and to support evolution of rules in contract-based or service-based systems. In this paper we investigate the problem of extracting temporal unsatisfiable cores in order to detect the inconsistent part of a specification. We extend conflict-driven SAT-solver to provide a new conflict-driven depth-first-search solver for temporal logic. We use this solver to compute LTL unsatisfiable cores without re-exploring the history of the solver.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2011, arXiv:1109.239

Interpreting Product Update as Reasoning about Observations and Meta-Observations

In this brief note, I would like to suggest that it makes sense to reinterpret product update, as introduced by Baltag, Moss and Solecki, as a system to account for observations and metaobservations, where a meta-observation is an observation of an observation. Under this interpretation we also take products of action models with meta-action models. I deliberate on some possible consequences of this extension to the interpretation of product update

Cerebellar plasticity and associative memories are controlled by perineuronal nets.

Perineuronal nets (PNNs) are assemblies of extracellular matrix molecules, which surround the cell body and dendrites of many types of neuron and regulate neural plasticity. PNNs are prominently expressed around neurons of the deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN), but their role in adult cerebellar plasticity and behavior is far from clear. Here we show that PNNs in the mouse DCN are diminished during eyeblink conditioning (EBC), a form of associative motor learning that depends on DCN plasticity. When memories are fully acquired, PNNs are restored. Enzymatic digestion of PNNs in the DCN improves EBC learning, but intact PNNs are necessary for memory retention. At the structural level, PNN removal induces significant synaptic rearrangements in vivo, resulting in increased inhibition of DCN baseline activity in awake behaving mice. Together, these results demonstrate that PNNs are critical players in the regulation of cerebellar circuitry and function