We consider two complementary operations: Hairpin completion introduced in [D. Cheptea, C. Martin-Vide, V. Mitrana, A new operation on words suggested by DNA biochemistry: Hairpin completion, in: Proc. Transgressive Computing, 2006, pp. 216–228] with motivations coming from DNA biochemistry and hairpin reduction as the inverse operation of the hairpin completion. Both operations are viewed here...

Approaches to text processing that rely on parsing the text with a context-free grammar tend to be slow and error-prone because of the massive ambiguity of long sentences. In contrast, FASTUS employs a nondeterministic finite-state language model that produces a phrasal decomposition of a sentence into noun groups, verb groups and particles. Another finite-state machine recognizes domain-specif...

The flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unparalleled in the biological world. Explaining how children acquire this fundamental aspect of human language is a key challenge for cognitive science. A recent corpus study by Yang (2013) has cast doubt on the lexical specificity of children’s productivity, as hypothesized by usage-based approaches. Focusing on determi...

Historically, the utilization of context, the range and scope of context-aware systems, and the levels of computational intelligence in such systems have been very limited. While the inherent complexity is a significant factor, a principal reason for these limitations lies in the failure to incorporate the emotional component. Affective computing technologies are designed to implement innate em...

A challenging topic for cognitive ergonomics and cognitive engineering is the development of smart applications and devices which apply some “intelligence” of the situations, i.e. commonsense knowledge about the occupants of the household, their individual and collective routines, and their expected patterns of behavior. Most people spend more time at home than in any other place, including wor...

Typical solutions for agents assessing trust relies on the circulation of information on the individual level, i.e. reputational images, subjective experiences, statistical analysis, etc. This work presents an alternative approach, inspired to the cognitive heuristics enabling humans to reason at a categorial level. The approach is envisaged as a crucial ability for agents in order to: (1) esti...

In the last decade, the usage of portable communication devices has continuously increased, together with the number of wireless communication standards. As a consequence, optimal radio resources allocation has become a problem requiring more complex solutions, including the possibility of thinking of a re-configurable, adaptive use of spectrum. A cognitive approach to radio spectrum management...