Prix, honneurs, distinctions

A Grand Prix performance

‘Scientist of the Year’ has a nicesounding ring to it but Renée Schroeder is the first to place her latest award in context. “The prize is given by the Austrian Club of Science and Education Journalists, who are probably not best able to evaluate my research,” she says disarmingly. “It was awarded because of my work with journalists rather than because of anything I have achieved scientifically...

Back pain in Grand Prix drivers.

Mechanistic Distinctions

The notion of autocatalysis actually covers a large variety of mechanistic realisations of chemical systems. From the most general definition of autocatalysis, that is a process in which a chemical compound is able to catalyze its own formation, several different systems can be described. We detail the different categories of autocatalyses, and compare them on the basis of their mechanistic, ki...

MULTI-MODAL UTILE DISTINCTIONS Multi-Modal Utile Distinctions

We introduce Multi-Modal Utility Trees (MMU), an algorithm for autonomously learning decision treebased state abstractions in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with multi-modal observations. MMU builds the trees using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical test. Additionally, MMU incorporates the ability to perform online tree restructuring, enabling it to build and maintain a compact ...

Abduction and its Distinctions

What distinguishes abductive inference from other modes of inference? What distinguishes the different forms of abductive inference? These are perhaps the key questions that face the student of abduction, and the core of Lorenzo Magnani’s book is devoted to them. The book contains, among other things, a defence of several putative distinctions, and it touches on an impressively wide range of pe...