When it’s good to have MAITs

Food fortification: good to have or need to have?

Only very small quantities of vitamins and minerals are needed for human health but deficiencies can have disproportionately large, often life-threatening, effects. Micronutrient deficiencies lead to a vicious cycle of malnutrition and infection in poorly nourished populations. Fortification of staple foods is the cheapest, most efficient and most effective way to supply large populations with ...

When Bad Things Happen to Good Campuses

G ene Washington, director of acdemic computing, is buzzed by his secretary to take an urgent call from Provost Marion Mossback. “Washington,” yells Mossback, “what kind of trouble have you got Ypsilanti University into now?” After a few minutes of gentle probing, Washington has the outline of the “trouble.” Mossback has just received a letter from a prominent alumnus and benefactor, Mr. Martin...

When VAD Things Happen to Good People.

When bad things happen to good trees

When the edges in a tree or rooted tree fail with a certain fixed probability, the (greedoid) rank may drop. We compute the expected rank as a polynomial in p and as a real number under the assumption of uniform distribution. We obtain several different expressions for this expected rank polynomial for both trees and rooted trees, one of which is especially simple in each case. We also prove tw...

When Do Robots Have to Think?

An intelligent robot would seem to be an obvious place to implement a cognitive architecture, yet most robotics applications generally have complex software systems that bear little resemblance to cognitive systems. Furthermore, architectures are usually heavily engineered for specific applications. In this paper, we discuss why general architectures that include deliberation and learning are r...