In this paper, we present a survey of the development of the technique of argument diagramming covering not only the fields in which it originated informal logic, argumentation theory, evidence law and legal reasoning – but also more recent work in applying and developing it in computer science and artificial intelligence. Beginning with a simple example of an everyday argument, we present an a...

The session "Polymers, Encapsulation, and Artificial Organs" at the Fourth International Symposium on Neurotransplantation consisted of five presentations examining the possibility that polymer capsules with or without cells could have therapeutic application for various neurological diseases. Dr. Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided an introduction to the use of ...

Peripheral deafferentation downregulates acetylcholine (ACh) synthesis in sensory cortices. However, the responsible neural circuits and processes are not known. We irreversibly transected the rat infraorbital nerve and implanted neuroprosthetic microdevices for proximal stump stimulation, and assessed cytochrome-oxidase and choline- acetyl-transferase (ChAT) in somatosensory, auditory and visu...

Population growth and increasing droughts are creating unprecedented strain on the continued availability of water resources. Since irrigation is a major consumer of fresh water, wastage of resources in this sector could have strong consequences. To address this issue, irrigation water management and prediction techniques need to be employed effectively and should be able to account for the var...

Existing approaches to artificial intelligence problems such as sequence induction, automatic programming, machine learning, planning, and pattern recognition typically require specification in advance of the size and shape of the solution to the problem (often in a unnatural and difficult way). This paper reports on a new approach in which the size and shape of the solution to such problems is...

Earlier models for the self-organization of orientation preference and orientation selectivity maps are explicitly designed to reproduce the functional structures observed in cortical tissue. They mostly use formal though biologically motivated implementations and artifical assumptions to achieve this result. In particular, orientation selective cells are usually encoded by doubling the orienta...

Physical wave properties in nervous system offer new methodologies by contrast to artifical neural networks, especially to pattern handling networks. All information inherent a nerve impulse is only the time point the first derivative crosses zero. To change physical distances, delays or arrangement in space means for net models, to vary the most significant value, to destroy the information. I...