Rolling Thunder

Gathering thunder

It’s common to accompany the rollout of a new biomedical journal with an explanation for its coming into being, usually by suggesting there’s an unmet need, despite the panoply of existing journals. I’m not going to do that, at least not exactly. The biomedical literature is almost unimaginably vast already, much more than even the most diligent speed-reading scholar-who-listens-to-science-blog...

Learning the thunder.

Gifts from the Thunder Beings

The thunder of distant Net storms

Computers and routers on the Internet send each other error messages (called ICMP datagrams) to signal conditions such as network congestion or blackouts. While these datagrams are very rare, less than 0.001% of total traffic, they hold very important global information about problems and congestions elsewhere in the Net. A measurement of the flow of such error messages in our local cluster sho...

Combining goal generation and planning in an argumentation framework

In this paper we use formal argumentation theory to study the deliberation cycle of the BOID cognitive agent architecture. We combine goal generation with a planning approach recently proposed by Leila Amgoud. In her formal argumentation framework plans for fulfilling a desire are represented just like arguments that support a conclusion; the framework can thus deal with conflicting desires. In...