Strict General Setting for Building Decision Procedures into Theorem Provers

The efficient and flexible incorporating of decision procedures into theorem provers is very important for their successful use. There are several approaches for combining and augmenting of decision procedures; some of them support handling uninterpreted functions, congruence closure, lemma invoking etc. In this paper we present a variant of one general setting for building decision procedures into theorem provers (gs framework [18]). That setting is based on macro inference rules motivated by techniques used in different approaches. The general setting enables a simple describing of different combination/augmentation schemes. In this paper, we further develop and extend this setting by an imposed ordering on the macro inference rules. That ordering leads to a ”strict setting”. It makes implementing and using variants of well-known or new schemes within this framework a very easy task even for a non-expert user. Also, this setting enables easy comparison of different combination/augmentation schemes and combination of their ideas

Development and evaluation of an introductory child sexual abuse webinar training module on sexual exploitation of minors: a strengths-based sociocultural perspective

The aim of this dissertation was to synthesize information from the empirical literature, existing organizations related to sexually exploited minors (SEMs), and information collected through feedback from mental health professionals (MHPs) on their child sexual abuse (CSA) and commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) training experiences, gaps, and needs in order to produce an introductory training webinar module introducing MHPs to the foundational sociocultural and strengths-based treatment considerations while working with SEMs. The thirst for specific and evidence-based interventions from MHPs speaks to the lack of training, established standards of care, and best practices for working with SEMs. Further, the limited strengths-based training among surveyed MHPs along with the importance of adaptive skill building and empowering of vulnerable and marginalized populations amplified the need to use a strengths-based perspective. Through this introductory level training, MHPs can begin to acquire a basic understanding and appreciation of SEMs’ unique needs along with foundational skills and approaches for providing services for child survivors of CSE. The developed SEMs webinar was evaluated by an expert to receive recommendations for enhancing the webinar training and ensuring accuracy, relevance, and applicability for MHPs who work with or plan to work with SEMs in the United States. Future directions for developing the webinar training are discussed, including establishing best practices for working with CSE survivors, especially minors; creating a specialty of working with SEMs within the field; and the aggregation of existing resources into a cohesive community of specialized MHPs and allies to effectively serve the needs of SEMs across different cultures

Software Verification and Graph Similarity for Automated Evaluation of Students' Assignments

In this paper we promote introducing software verification and control flow graph similarity measurement in automated evaluation of students' programs. We present a new grading framework that merges results obtained by combination of these two approaches with results obtained by automated testing, leading to improved quality and precision of automated grading. These two approaches are also useful in providing a comprehensible feedback that can help students to improve the quality of their programs We also present our corresponding tools that are publicly available and open source. The tools are based on LLVM low-level intermediate code representation, so they could be applied to a number of programming languages. Experimental evaluation of the proposed grading framework is performed on a corpus of university students' programs written in programming language C. Results of the experiments show that automatically generated grades are highly correlated with manually determined grades suggesting that the presented tools can find real-world applications in studying and grading

A Comparison of Decision Procedures in Presburger Arithmetic

It is part of the tradition and folklore of automated reasoning that the intractability of Cooper's decision procedure for Presburger integer arithmetic makes is too expensive for practical use. More than 25 years of work has resulted in numerous approximate procedures via rational arithmetic, all of which are incomplete and restricted to the quantifier-free fragment. In this paper we report on an experiment which strongly questions this tradition. We measured the performance of procedures due to Hodes, Cooper (and heuristic variants thereof which detect counterexamples), across a corpus of 10 000 randomly generated quantifierfree Presburger formulae. The results are startling: a variant of Cooper's procedure outperforms Hodes' procedure on both valid and invalid formulae, and is fast enough for practical use. These results contradict much perceived wisdom that decision procedures for integer arithmetic are too expensive to use in practice. 1 Introduction A decis..

SIADH and hyponatraemia: why does it matter?

The vasopressin-receptor antagonists have received approval for the treatment of hyponatraemia secondary to the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion (SIADH). It is therefore necessary that physicians encountering hyponatraemia focus on SIADH. Recent studies show that hyponatraemia is often poorly managed—insufficient diagnostic tests are ordered and patients are undertreated. At the same time, it has become clear that chronic hyponatraemia causes neurological symptoms such as gait disturbances and attention deficits. However, physicians often tolerate chronic hyponatraemia as if it were benign, or as if its treatment would cause significant morbidity. Therefore, physicians must reconsider the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to hyponatraemia and SIADH