Location-based Services (LBS) have become a very important area for research with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the ubiquitous use of smartphones and social networks in our daily lives. Although users can enjoy a lot of flexibility and conveniences from the LBS with IoT, they may also lose their privacy. Untrusted or malicious LBS servers with all users’ infor...

Drug addiction is a neuropsychiatric disorder that marks the end stage of a progression beginning with recreational drug taking but culminating in habitual and compulsive drug use. This progression is considered to reflect transitions among multiple neural loci. Dopamine neurotransmission in the ventromedial striatum (VMS) is pivotal in the control of initial drug use, but emerging evidence ind...

We conducted a study on 861 healthy and sick subjects and demonstrated that some calculated parameters based on measurement of the dynamic light scattering (DLS) signal from the finger correlate highly with chronological age ranging from 1.5 to 85 years old. Measurements of DLS signals were obtained during both occlusion and nonocclusion of blood flow in the finger. For the nonocclusion case we...

Tableau-based Reasoning for Description Logics with Inverse Roles and Number Restrictions Yu Ding, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2008 The tableaux algorithm is a general technique for deciding concept satisfiability problems in description logics (DLs). It is useful not only for practical implementations, but also for studying the correctness and complexity of concrete decision procedures. There ...

As drug use becomes chronic, aberrant striatal processing contributes to the development of perseverative drug-taking behaviors. Two particular portions of the striatum, the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), are known to undergo neurobiological changes from acute to chronic drug use. However, little is known about the exact progression of changes in functional striata...

Description Logics (DLs) are playing a central role in ontologies and in the Semantic Web, since they are currently the most used formalisms for building ontologies. Both semantic and computational issues arise when extending DLs with rule-based components. In particular, integrating DLs with nonmonotonic rules requires to properly deal with two semantic discrepancies: (a) DLs are based on the ...

The role of dopamine (DA) in rewarding motivated actions is well established but its role in learning how to avoid aversive events is still controversial. Here we tested the role of D2-like DA receptors in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) of rats in the learning and performance of conditioned avoidance responses (CAR). Adult male Wistar rats received systemic, int...

Ontology-Based Query Answering (OBQA) is currently a problem that receives a lot of attention both from knowledge representation and databases communities. The aim is to answer queries that are at least as expressive as conjunctive queries while taking an ontology into account. This is important in order to improve the quality of query answering and interoperability between different sources of...

As fragments of first-order logic, Description logics (DLs) do not provide nonmonotonic features such as defeasible inheritance and default rules. Since many applications would benefit from the availability of such features, several families of nonmonotonic DLs have been developed that are mostly based on default logic and autoepistemic logic. In this paper, we consider circumscription as an in...

Two-way regular path queries (2RPQs) have received increased attention recently due to their ability to relate pairs of objects by flexibly navigating graph-structured data. They are present in property paths in SPARQL 1.1, the new standard RDF query language, and in the XML query language XPath. In line with XPath, we consider the extension of 2RPQs with nesting, which allows one to require th...