Social insects are frequently used to investigate the importance of kinship (genetic relatedness) in the evolution of complex societies. These genetic studies often downplay the organizing roles of the environment in shaping the development and expression of socially-relevant traits. As noted by Hamilton (1964) in his original formulation of “genetical” approaches to understanding sociality, th...

Social hierarchy exists in almost all social species and affects everything from resource allocation to the development of intelligence. Previous studies showed that status within a social hierarchy influences the perceived fairness of income allocation. However, the effect of one's social status on economic decisions is far from clear, as are the neural processes underlying these decisions. In...

Ecological interface design techniques were used to first model and then develop an interface to help clinicians assess tissue oxygenation in a neonatal intensive care unit. Several challenges were encountered during this work. The abstraction hierarchy model structure that was used has limitations in this environment. The first limitation concerned the depth of knowledge that was available. Ti...

In this paper we develop and test theoretical models that position the social environment (both normative and institutional) as a critical component of sociological inquiry into behavioral genetics. We focus on schools as important social institutions that condition the magnitude of genetic influences on smoking behaviors. Specifically, we develop and test five hypotheses that examine gene-envi...

As large databases of conceptual graphs are developed for complex domains, eecient retrieval techniques must be developed to manage the complexity of graph-matching while maintaining reasonable space requirements. This paper describes a novel method \the multi-level hierarchical retrieval method" that exploits redundancy to improve both space and execution time eeciency. The method involves sea...

Modularity and hierarchy are fundamental notions in structured system design. By subdividing a large and unstructured problem into smaller and tractable chunks, design automation becomes possible. In this paper we discuss the use of modularity and hierarchy for functional specialization during the development of neural networks. We study the behavioral differences and requirements for back-prop...

In the general case, at any aggregation level a behavioral specification for a multi-agent system component consists of dynamic properties expressed by complex temporal relations in TTL, which therefore does not allow direct application of automatic verification procedures, more specifically, model checking techniques, used in this paper. In order to apply model checking techniques it is needed...

Frequent pattern mining has become one of the most popular data mining approaches for the analysis of purchasing patterns. There are techniques such as Apriori and FP-Growth, which were typically restricted to a single concept level. We extend our research to discover cross level frequent patterns in multi-level environments. Unfortunately, little research has been paid to this research area. M...

Bi-level decision-making techniques aim to deal with decentralized management problems that feature interactive decision entities distributed throughout a bi-level hierarchy. A challenge in handling bi-level decision problems is that various uncertainties naturally appear in decision-making process. Significant efforts have been devoted that fuzzy set techniques can be used to effectively deal ...