Independence -- the study of what is relevant to a given problem of reasoning -- has received an increasing attention from the AI community. In this paper, we consider two basic forms of independence, namely, a syntactic one and a semantic one. We show features and drawbacks of them. In particular, while the syntactic form of independence is computationally easy to check, there are cases in whi...

Little is known about the process of how nurses transition between vocational training and institutions of higher education. Understanding this process provides educators with the knowledge to support new groups of university students making this transition. Grounded theory (GT) was used to explore and understand this process. Three studies from a 7-year research program were used as data. The ...

Rule extraction is one of the main tasks in the Knowledge Discovery process. Our hypothesis is that the interestingness of rules is strongly related to statistical independence between facts. Human reasoning assumes by default statistical independence and when a rule breaks this assumption it is considered interesting. This fact has been noticed long ago and even proposed as a principle for rul...

Optimistic synchronization allows concurrent execution of critical sections while performing dynamic conflict detection and recovery. Optimistic synchronization will increase performance only if critical regions are data independent—concurrent critical sections access disjoint data most of the time. Optimistic synchronization primitives, such as transactional memory, will improve the performanc...

The analyzability of the universe into subsystems requires a concept of the “independence” of the subsystems, of which the relativistic quantum world supports many distinct notions which either coincide or are trivial in the classical setting. The multitude of such notions and the complex relations between them will only be adumbrated here. The emphasis of the discussion is placed upon the warr...

Observers given brief exposures of pairs of colored bars and asked to report both the color and the orientation of each bar showed evidence of stochastic independence between reports of the 4 features (2 colors and 2 orientations). The authors also found virtually perfect stochastic independence between reports of colors and directions of motion of pairwise presented circular disks at each of 3...

We study the class of independence complexes of claw-free graphs. The main theorem give good bounds on the connectivity of these complexes, given bounds for a few subcomplexes of the same class. Two applications are presented. Firstly, we show that the independence complex of a claw-free graph with n vertices and maximal degree d is (cn/d + ε)–connected, where c = 2/3. This can be compared with...

We prove the NP-hardness of computing homology groups of simplicial complexes when the size of the input complex is measured by the number of maximal faces or the number of minimal non-faces. The latter case implies NP-hardness of the homology problem for clique and independence complexes of graphs. Our approach is based on the observation that the homology of an independence complex of a chord...

We consider the theory of database queries with functions on the complex value data model. The notion of a syntactic criteria, called “embedded allowed”, for queries which guarantee embedded domain independence, is generalized for this model. We show that all embedded allowed calculus (or fix-point) queries are external function-domain independent and continuous. We also develop an algorithm fo...