When autonomous agents attempt to coordinate action, it is often necessary that they reach some kind of consensus. Reaching consensus has traditionally been dealt with in the Distributed Artiicial Intelligence literature via negotiation. Another alternative is to have agents use a voting mechanism; each agent expresses its preferences, and a group choice mechanism is used to select the result. ...

We investigate the following problem of construction of a social decision rule. Given a set of n agents, each agent evaluates alternatives from a finite set X using complete and transitive preferences, and we look for a complete and transitive social preference over the alternatives. This kind of aggregation has been considered in many publications, beginning with the seminal work by Arrow [6]....

BACKGROUND Observational studies have suggested that patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who experience inadequate response to anti-tumour necrosis factor (anti-TNF) agents respond more favourably to rituximab (RTX) than to an alternative anti-TNF agent. However, the relative effectiveness of these agents on long-term outcomes, particularly in radiographic damage, remains unclear. OBJECTI...

stroke is an important cause of death in the world and disability world‑wide especially in developed countries. following acute phase of stroke, some procedures and medical treatment such as thrombolytic agents has been recommended; nevertheless many patients have enduring deficits. thus, there is a realistic need to develop treatment strategies for reducing neurological deficits. however, the ...

introduction: this case report describes apexogenesis treatment of three molar teeth of an 8-year-old boy using three different pulpotomy agents. methods: pulpotomy was performed on decayed immature molar teeth with established irreversible pulpitis and the remaining pulp was capped with either zinc oxide eugenol, proroot mineral trioxide aggregate or calcium-enriched mixture (cem) cement. teet...

Abstract This article refines a foundational tenet of rational choice theory known as the principle description invariance. Attempts to apply this human agents with imperfect knowledge have paid insufficient attention two aspects: first, agents’ epistemic situations, i.e. whether and when they recognize alternative descriptions an object be equivalent; second, individuation objects description,...

Alternative splicing is a major diversification mechanism in the human transcriptome and proteome. Several diseases, including cancers, have been associated with dysregulation of alternative splicing. Thus, correcting alternative splicing may restore normal cell physiology in patients with these diseases. This paper summarizes several alternative splicing-related diseases, including cancers and...

Some domains, like robot soccer, are difficult for agents to learn in using direct statistical and reinforcement learning techniques. However, agents often have a goal or purpose, which gives them a natural basis for reinforcement learning in the form of a fitness function. Such a fitness function allows the task of learning to be accomplished through optimization of the fitness function in the...

We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently learn to operate in a common environment. We identify three properties – adaptivity, commitment, and diversity – which are necessary for efficient coordinated exploration and demonstrate that straightforward extensions to single-agent optimistic and posterior sampling approaches fail to satisfy them. As an alternative, we pro...

Anthracyclines and taxanes represent the mainstay of first-line cytotoxic therapy for metastatic breast cancer (MBC), but most patients eventually develop resistance to these agents. Consequently, alternative combinations for MBC therapy are the subject of much ongoing research. Capecitabine and ixabepilone is the only chemotherapy combination specifically approved for MBC after failure of anth...