Dispersal is thought to be a key process underlying the high spatial diversity of tropical forests. Just how important dispersal is in structuring plant communities is nevertheless an open question because it is very difficult to isolate dispersal from other processes, and thereby measure its effect. Using a unique situation, the loss of vertebrate seed dispersers on the island of Guam and thei...

Leishmaniases are tropical and sub-tropical diseases for which classical drugs (i.e. antimonials) exhibit toxicity and drug resistance. Such a situation requires to find new chemical series with antileishmanial activity. This work consists in analyzing the structure of a validated target in Leishmania: the GDP-mannose pyrophosphorylase (GDP-MP), an enzyme involved in glycosylation and essential...

The spreading of knowledge depends on the access to the information and its immediate use. Models are useful to explain specific phenomena. The scientific community accepts some models in Biology after a period of time, once it has evidence to support it. The model of the structure and function of the DNA proposed by Watson & Crick (1953) was not the exception, since a few years later the DNA m...

In this work we consider how to enforce norms in the Situation Calculus based programming language Golog and its relatives. We define a notion of norm compliant sequence of actions with respect to norms prescribing some actions to be forbidden or obliged (ought-to-do norms), norms prescribing that a state-condition is forbidden (oughtto-be norms) and norms that are a form of deadline. We then s...

The concept of indirectness (using of tools) in automatic problem solving is investigated, and a formal approach is suggested within the framework of the Situation Calculus. The "Robot and Box" problem serves as an illustrative example throughout the paper.

The situation calculus is a logical formalism that has been extensively developed for planning. We apply the formalism in a complex multi-agent domain, modelled on the game of Clue. We find that the situation calculus, with suitable extensions, supplies a unified representation of (1) the interaction protocol, or structure of the game, (2) the dynamics of the knowledge and common knowledge of t...

Business Process Verification (BPV) works as one of the important functions in the emerging Business Process Management Systems. Current proposed approaches are not yet well applied because of the gap between formal models defined in the academia and informal models used in the industry. This paper attempts to propose a hybrid approach to solve this problem. XPDL will be used to describe busine...

Structural causal models offer a popular framework for exploring causal concepts. However, due to their limited expressiveness, structural models have difficulties coping with such concepts as actual (event-to-event) causation. In this paper, we propose a new type of causal model, based on embedding structural considerations in the language of situation calculus. By using situation calculus as ...

We add branching time to the linear discrete event calculus, which yields a formalism for commonsense reasoning that combines the benefits of the situation calculus and the event calculus. We characterize the precise relationship between the linear and branching versions of the discrete event calculus, and prove that a restricted version of the branching discrete event calculus is equivalent to...

When agents like mobile robots make observations while carrying out a course of actions, a formalization of the observed information is needed in order to reason about it. When doing so in the situation calculus, a seemingly straightforward approach turns out to be inappropriate since it leads to unintended results and has an unfortunate sensitivity with respect to different forms of successor ...