A set of operat ions for construct ing a lgebra ic specif icat ions in an arbi t rary logical system is presented. This builds on the f ramework provided by Goguen and Burstal l 's work on the not ion of an inst i tut ion as a formal isat ion of the concept of a logical system for wri t ing specif icat ions. We show how to introduce free variables into the sentences of an arbi t rary institutio...

An important feature of speech-gesture integration is that speech and gesture content influence each other in interpretation. To analyse this, we sketch an approach based on three assumptions: (i) the interpreter infers by abduction an explanation for why a particular gesture is synchronized with a particular utterance (part), (ii) semantic composition amounts to the identification of free vari...

This paper demonstrates that genetic programming can be used to automatically create the design for both the topology and parameter values (tuning) for a common parameterized controller for all the plants in two families of plants that are representative of typical industrial processes. The genetically evolved controller is "general" in the sense that it contains free variables representing the...

We make a formal sociologic study of the concept of free will. By using the language of mathematics and logic, we define what we call everlasting societies. Everlasting societies never age: persons never age, and the goods of the society are indestructible. The infinite history of an everlasting society unfolds by following deterministic and probabilistic laws that do their best to satisfy the ...

In ordinary rst order logic, a valid inference in a language L is one in which the conclusion is true in every model of the language in which the premises are true. To accommodate inductive/uncertain/probabilistic/nonmonotonic inference, we weaken that demand to the demand that the conclusion be true in a large proportion of the models in which the relevant premises are true. More generally, we...

We show how and why it makes sense to use a relational formalisation instead of the usual functional one in the treatment of term graphs. Special attention is paid to term graphs with bound variables, that have, to our knowledge, never been formalised with such a generality before. Besides the novel treatment of term graphs themselves, we present an innovative relational homomorphism concept th...

Principles in foraging and standard associative learning theories motivate a model for Pavlovian conditioning. The model tracks distal and proximal scales of expected reward probabilities plus the strength of signal-reward association. A combined reward probability is developed by combining the distal and proximal estimates through their uncertainties. Possible neural structure equivalents to t...

Ala~traet--Errors-in-variables problems are considered for the case of three variables, where the underlying relations among the noise-free variables are linear, and covariance information for the noisy variables is available. The static problem where the variables are complex (which can arise when narrowband filtering is used) is analysed in detail. Some results are also presented for the case...