From Monotheism to Scepticism and Back Again

From Notions to Models and Back Again, Again

A typical thread in research relies on the maturing of ideasthrough an iterative process of construction, testing and refinement.In this talk I will trace some such trajectories of ideas by illustrationfrom some of my own and others’ experiences in agent-based modelling.I draw inspiration from previous commentaries, including from thosewho generated the mottos: “No Notation ...

From Paragraphs to Vectors and Back Again

I investigate some methods of encoding text into vectors and decoding these vector representations. The purpose of decoding vector representations is two fold. Firstly, I could apply unsupervised learning algorithms to the paragraph vectors to find significant ”new” vectors and decode them into paragraphs of text. Effectively, I could process text and generate ”new” ideas. Secondly, I could dec...

From Local to Global and Back Again

This paper considers the cost of preprocessing a digital terrain model (DTM) represented as a trian-gulated irregular network (TIN) so that drainage queries|e.g., what is the watershed of a query point, or how much water passes through a point given that rain is falling at a known rate|can be answered by simply evaluating a summary function. Although the worst-case storage and preprocessing cos...

From bedside to bench and back again.

From PRISM to ProbLog and Back Again

PRISM and ProbLog are two prominent languages for Probabilistic Logic Programming. While they are superficially very similar, there are subtle differences between them that lead to different formulations of the same probabilistic model. This paper aims to shed more light on the differences by developing two source-to-source transformations, from PRISM to ProbLog and back.