Predictability of Volcano Eruption: lessons from a basaltic effusive volcano

Volcano eruption forecast remains a challenging and controversial problem despite the fact that data from volcano monitoring significantly increased in quantity and quality during the last decades.This study uses pattern recognition techniques to quantify the predictability of the 15 Piton de la Fournaise (PdlF) eruptions in the 1988-2001 period using increase of the daily seismicity rate as a precursor. Lead time of this prediction is a few days to weeks. Using the daily seismicity rate, we formulate a simple prediction rule, use it for retrospective prediction of the 15 eruptions,and test the prediction quality with error diagrams. The best prediction performance corresponds to averaging the daily seismicity rate over 5 days and issuing a prediction alarm for 5 days. 65% of the eruptions are predicted for an alarm duration less than 20% of the time considered. Even though this result is concomitant of a large number of false alarms, it is obtained with a crude counting of daily events that are available from most volcano observatoriesComment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

A New Species of Ceraclea (Trichopterma:Leptoceridae) Preying on Snails

Ceraclea joannae, new species, feeds on the freshwater snail Somatogyrus virginicus Walker (Hydrobiidae). Our study is the first report of prey other than sponges for a Ceraclea species and the first report of snail predation by Trichoptera larvae in North America. Ceraclea joannae larvae and adults resemble those of C. diluta (Hagen); however, the larva of the new species has a dark head, sickle-shaped mandibles, and a dark pronotum except for a pair of unique, conspicuous, oblique, white bands; the male differs in the slightly longer superior appendages, more nearly straight ventral margins of tergum X, slightly stouter inferior appendages, and the more-tapered apex and less-pronounced ventral notch of the phallus. This new species of Ceraclea is known from only 3.2 km of the Little River (Montgomery County, North Carolina, USA), downstream of the developing town of Asheboro. Because of its rarity and limited distribution, Ceraclea joannae may be highly vulnerable to changes in water or habitat quality

Sylphella puccoon gen. n., sp n. and two additional new species of aquatic oligochaetes (Lumbriculidae, Clitellata) from poorly-known lotic habitats in North Carolina (USA)

Three new species of Lumbriculidae were collected from floodplain seeps and small streams in southeastern North America. Some of these habitats are naturally acidic. Sylphella puccoon gen. n., sp. n. has prosoporous male ducts in X-XI, and spermathecae in XII-XIII. Muscular, spherical atrial ampullae and acuminate penial sheaths distinguish this monotypic new genus from other lumbriculid genera having similar arrangements of reproductive organs. Cookidrilus pocosinus sp. n. resembles its two subterranean, Palearctic congeners in the arrangement of reproductive organs, but is easily distinguished by the position of the spermathecal pores in front of the chaetae in X-XIII. Stylodrilus coreyi sp. n. differs from congeners having simple-pointed chaetae and elongate atria primarily by the structure of the male duct and the large clusters of prostate cells. Streams and wetlands of Southeastern USA have a remarkably high diversity of endemic lumbriculids, and these poorly-known invertebrates should be considered in conservation efforts.We are grateful to Dr Akifumi Ohtaka for putting at our disposal Yamaguchi's histological preparations of Lumbriculus japonicus, as well as a specimen of Styloscolex japonicus. We thank Mark Wetzel and Christer Erseus for valuable comments on the manuscript. This work was made possible for the first author thanks to a sabbatical permit of the University of the Basque Country (from October 2010 to September 2011), partially supported by the Basque Government research project GIU10/140, and to Cindy Brown for providing access to laboratory facilities at the US Geological Survey Menlo Park campus (CA, USA) during P. Rodriguez's sabbatical period

On the Notion of Interestingness in Automated Mathematical Discovery

Deciding whether something is interesting or not is of central importance in automated mathematical discovery, as it helps determine both the search space and search strategy for finding and evaluating concepts and conjectures

A Model for Integration and Interlinking of Idea Management Systems

This paper introduces the use of Semantic Web technologies for the Idea Management Systems as a gap closer between heterogeneous software and achieving interoperability. We present a model that proposes how and what kind of rich metadata annotations to apply in the domain of Idea Management Systems. In addition, as a part of our model, we present a Generic Idea and Innovation Management Ontology (GI2MO). The described model is backed by a set of use cases followed by evaluations that prove how Semantic Web can work as tool to create new opportunities and leverage the contemporary Idea Management legacy systems into the next level

Some Empirical Criteria for Attributing Creativity to a Computer Program

Peer reviewedPostprin

A framework for automatic semantic video annotation

The rapidly increasing quantity of publicly available videos has driven research into developing automatic tools for indexing, rating, searching and retrieval. Textual semantic representations, such as tagging, labelling and annotation, are often important factors in the process of indexing any video, because of their user-friendly way of representing the semantics appropriate for search and retrieval. Ideally, this annotation should be inspired by the human cognitive way of perceiving and of describing videos. The difference between the low-level visual contents and the corresponding human perception is referred to as the ‘semantic gap’. Tackling this gap is even harder in the case of unconstrained videos, mainly due to the lack of any previous information about the analyzed video on the one hand, and the huge amount of generic knowledge required on the other. This paper introduces a framework for the Automatic Semantic Annotation of unconstrained videos. The proposed framework utilizes two non-domain-specific layers: low-level visual similarity matching, and an annotation analysis that employs commonsense knowledgebases. Commonsense ontology is created by incorporating multiple-structured semantic relationships. Experiments and black-box tests are carried out on standard video databases for action recognition and video information retrieval. White-box tests examine the performance of the individual intermediate layers of the framework, and the evaluation of the results and the statistical analysis show that integrating visual similarity matching with commonsense semantic relationships provides an effective approach to automated video annotation