This paper offers a logical formalisation of an argument-based account of reasoning about action, taking seriously the abductive nature of this form of reasoning. The particular question addressed is what is the best way to achieve a specified goal? Given a set of final goals and a set of rules on the effects of actions, the formation of subgoals for a goal is formalised as the application of a...

Diagrammatic logics were introduced in 2002, with emphasis on the notions of specifications and models. In this paper we improve the description of the inference process, which is seen as a Yoneda functor on a bicategory of fractions. A diagrammatic logic is defined from a morphism of limit sketches (called a propagator) which gives rise to an adjunction, which in turn determines a bicategory o...

An intelligent agent has multiple goals, limited resources, and a dynamic real-time task environment. Because it has many predictable and unpredictable opportunities to act, the agent must "control" its actions-it must decide which of many possible actions to execute at each opportunity over a period of time. In a given situation, the agent’s control decisions determine whether it achieves its ...

Nowadays, urban environments suffer from recurrent traffic jam with associated side effects. One reason of this is the social implicit priority given to personal cars, which are preferred to public transportation systems the main drawback of which is the time and path rigidity. Recently, some alternative transportation systems have been developed based on size adaptable trains of vehicles calle...

We present a new technique for visually comparing placement results through component coloring using partitioning and the Fiedler eigenvector. By coloring a placement result, we can quickly get insights on how to improve a placement tool and understand what matters and what does not to the placement quality. As a side effect, our coloring scheme may generate beautiful images, making this paper ...

This paper objects to the current consensus that machine translation (MT) systems are generally inferior to human translation (HT) in terms of translation quality. In our opinion, this belief is erroneous for many reasons, the both most important being a lack of formalism in comparison methods and a certain supineness to recover from past experience. As a side effect, this paper will provide ev...

Traditionally antimicrobial devices and applications have leveraged the elution of biocides from devices which were infused with these active molecules. The elution of these agents can, in some cases, limit the application of the device and can potentially lead to unwanted side effects. Following the ground breaking works of Isqueth, Abbott and Walters, surface immobilized antimicrobial agents ...

162 Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 2003: 29(3) Background Inevitably there are limited long-term safety data for any new contraceptive method. Detailed scientific studies, performed in a small number of women, provide evidence on mode of action. Larger clinical trials examine efficacy, side effects and acceptability. The number of women-years of exposure is less than fo...

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Combinatorial therapy is a promising strategy for combating complex disorders due to improved efficacy and reduced side effects. However, screening new drug combinations exhaustively is impractical considering all possible combinations between drugs. Here, we present a novel computational approach to predict drug combinations by integrating molecular and pharmacological data. Specifically, drug...