We describe a framework for top-down centralized self-adaptive MASs where adaptive agents are “protocol-driven” and adaptation consists in runtime protocol switch. Protocol specifications take a global, rather than a local, perspective and each agent, before starting to follow a new (global) protocol, projects it for obtaining a local version. If all the agents in the MAS are driven by the same...

Some nouns can be counted—we term these countable; other nouns cannot—we term these uncountable. By and large this distinction makes sense in terms of how we humans view the real world. Thus, for example, horses are countable, while flour is obviously not. Such cases are generally not a problem. However, there are entities that are, from a human perspective, on the borderline, which do cause pr...

The notion of ‘appropriate technology’ (AT) is universally seen as emanating from the writing and activities of the economist Fritz Schumacher. In fact, the term that Schumacher himself used was ‘intermediate technology’ and derived from visits he paid to India and Burma in the late 1950s and early 1960s in his capacity as senior economist to the British National Coal Board, invited to advise t...

Agriculture in developing countries is complex and vulnerable, especially for resource-poor farmers. They require location-specific technologies and solutions developed with their active involvement. In Nepal, several top-down approaches have been tried but there appeared to be challenges in addressing the needs of poor farmers. Participatory approaches emphasise involvement of local farmers an...

In this paper we use our previous work which has examined the different levels involved in reasoning about legal cases to examine some challenges to the relevance of current theoretical work in AI and Law made by Branting. In our model we view the process of legal reasoning as being divided into three distinct but interconnected levels of reasoning. These levels involve a bottom layer concernin...

Tree series transformations computed by bottom-up and top-down tree series transducers are called bottomup and top-down tree series transformations, respectively. (Functional) compositions of such transformations are investigated. It turns out that the class of bottom-up tree series transformations over a commutative and complete semiring is closed under left-composition with linear bottom-up t...

This paper introduces a method for algorithmic reduction of the search space of an ILP task, omitting the need for explicit language bias. It relies on bottom-up propositionalisation of examples and background knowledge. A proof of concept has been developed for observational learning of stratified normal logic programs.

This paper explores how standardization education can be implemented at the national level. Previous studies form the main source for the paper. This research shows that implementation of standardization in the national education system requires policy at the national level, a long term investment in support, and cooperation between industry, standardization bodies, academia, other institutions...

This tutorial paper summarizes the motivations, concepts and techniques of finite-set statistics (FISST), a systemlevel, “top-down,” direct generalization of ordinary single-sensor, single-target engineering statistics to the realm of multisensor, multitarget detection and tracking. Finite-set statistics provides powerful new conceptual and computational methods for dealing with multisensor-mul...

1.3 Stimulus generation process. Upper panel shows the face decomposed into five independent scales. Middle panel: bubbles sample the information space at random locations, allowing overlapping. Bottom panel shows how bubbles are applied to the appropriate scales to produce a sub-sample of the face List of Figures 6 3.2 Cumulative distribution function (c.d.f.) of Beta-distribution is used as a...