47092701
Loop formulas for circumscription
Clark's completion is a simple nonmonotonic formalism and a special case of many nonmonotonic logics. Recently there has been work on extending completion with "loop formulas" so that general cases of nonmonotonic logics such as logic programs (under the answer set semantics) and McCain-Turner causal logic can be characterized by propositional logic in the form of "comple(ion + loop formulas". In this paper, we show that the idea is applicable to McCarthy's circumscription in the propositional case. We also show how to embed propositional circumscription in logic programs and in causal logic, inspired by the uniform characterization of "completion + loop formulas".
18253568
Additive Fluents
An "additive" fluent is a fluent with numerical values such that the effect of several concurrently executed actions on it can be computed by adding the effects of the individual actions. We show how queries about additive fluents can be answered using the Causal Calculator. The examples discussed in this paper involve buying and selling, applying forces and moving groups of objects. The additive fluent mechanism can be used to instruct the Causal Calculator to generate more efficient plans.
6458022
Representing the Zoo World and the Traffic World in the language of the Causal Calculator
The work described in this report is motivated by the desire to test the expressive possibilities of action language C+. The Causal Calculator (CCALC) is a system that answers queries about action domains described in a fragment of that language. The Zoo World and the Traffic World have been proposed by Erik Sandewall in his Logic Modelling Workshop--an environment for communicating axiomatizations of action domains of nontrivial size.The Zoo World consists of several cages and the exterior, gates between them, and animals of several species, including humans. Actions in this domain include moving within and between cages, opening and closing gates, and mounting and riding animals. The Traffic World includes vehicles moving continuously between road crossings subject to a number of restrictions, such as speed limits and keeping a fixed safety distance away from other vehicles on the road. We show how to represent the two domains in the input language of CCALC, and how to use CCALC to test these representations.
30195525
Nondefinite vs. Definite Causal Theories
Nonmonotonic causal logic can be used to represent properties of actions, including actions with conditional and indirect effects, nondeterministic actions, and concurrently executed actions. The definite fragment of causal logic can be mapped to propositional logic by the process of completion, and this idea has led to the development of the Causal Calculator. In this note, we show how to turn arbitrary causal theories into definite theories without changing the sets of models. The translation consists of two parts: one is a set of definite rules which is obtained from the given theory by translating each rule one by one, in a modular way, and the other is a set of constraints similar to loop formulas for logic programs. Our result characterizes the semantics of causal logic in terms of propositional logic and tells us that an essential difference between the semantics of causal logic and the answer set semantics is related to the definition of a loop in each.
6731652
Nonmonotonic causal theories
The nonmonotonic causal logic defined in this paper can be used to represent properties of actions, including actions with conditional and indirect effects, nondeterministic actions, and concurrently executed actions. It has been applied to several challenge problems in the theory of commonsense knowledge. We study the relationship between this formalism and other work on nonmonotonic reasoning and knowledge representation, and discuss its implementation, called the Causal Calculator.
17626222
Controlling salinity in a potable water supply system using a constraint programming approach
Salinity is the relative concentration of salts in water. In a city of southern China, the local water supply company pumps water from a nearby river for potable use. During the winter dry season, the intrusion of sea water raises the salinity of the river to a high level and affects approximately the daily life of 450,000 residents of the city. In this paper, we report the application of constraint programming to optimize the logistical operations of the raw water system so as to satisfy the daily water consumption requirement of the city and to keep the potable salinity below a desirable level for as many days as possible. Our system has already been delivered to the water supply company for deployment
1639783
High performance asynchronous on-chip bus with multiple issue and out-of-order/in-order completion
In this paper, we propose a high performance asynchronous on-chip bus with multiple issue and in-order/out-of-order completion for a Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design. The proposed bus implementation can be characterized with distributed and modularized control units based on a layered architecture to support multiple issue and in-order/out-of-order completion. Simulation results reveal that throughputs of asynchronous on-chip buses with multiple issue and in-order/out-of-order completion increases by 31.3% / 34.3%, while power consumption overhead is only 6.76% / 3.98% respectively, compared to a simple asynchronous on-chip bus with only a single issue feature.
3264939
Identifying Interaction Sites in "Recalcitrant" Proteins: Predicted Protein and RNA Binding Sites in Rev Proteins of HIV-1 and EIAV Agree with Experimental Data
Protein-protein and protein nucleic acid interactions are vitally important for a wide range of biological processes, including regulation of gene expression, protein synthesis, and replication and assembly of many viruses. We have developed machine learning approaches for predicting which amino acids of a protein participate in its interactions with other proteins and/or nucleic acids, using only the protein sequence as input. In this paper, we describe an application of classifiers trained on datasets of well-characterized protein-protein and protein-RNA complexes for which experimental structures are available. We apply these classifiers to the problem of predicting protein and RNA binding sites in the sequence of a clinically important protein for which the structure is not known: the regulatory protein Rev, essential for the replication of HIV-1 and other lentiviruses. We compare our predictions with published biochemical, genetic and partial structural information for HIV-1 and EIAV Rev and with our own published experimental mapping of RNA binding sites in EIAV Rev. The predicted and experimentally determined binding sites are in very good agreement. The ability to predict reliably the residues of a protein that directly contribute to specific binding events--without the requirement for structural information regarding either the protein or complexes in which it participates--can potentially generate new disease intervention strategies.
16820775
Nonconvexity issues for Internet rate control with multiclass services: stability and optimality
In this paper, we investigate the problem of distributively allocating transmission rates to users on the Internet. We allow users to have concave as well as sigmoidal utility functions that are natural in the context of various applications. In the literature, for simplicity, most works have dealt only with the concave case. However, we show that when applying rate control algorithms developed for concave utility functions in a more realistic setting (with both concave and sigmoidal types of utility functions), they could lead to instability and high network congestion. We show that a pricing based mechanism that solves the dual formulation can be developed based on the theory of subdifferentials with the property that the prices "self-regulate" the users to access the resource based on the net utility. We discuss convergence issues and show that an algorithm can be developed that is efficient in the sense of achieving the global optimum when there are many users.
17427180
Analyses of multiple evidence combination
It hsa been known that different representations of a query ret rieve different sets of documents. Recent work suggests that significant improvements in retrieval performance can be achieved by combining multiple representations of an information need. However, little effort has been made to understand the reason why combining multiple sources of evidence improves retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we analyze why improvements can be achieved with evidence combination, and investigate how evidence should be combined. We describe a rationale for multiple evidence combination, and propose a combining method whose properties coincide wit h the rationale. We also investigate e the effect of using rank instead of similarity on retrieval effectiveness.