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We present advantages of the "intelligent matrix electrode" for providing selective correction of drop-foot in hemiplegic individuals. The matrix electrode which integrates stimulating and sensing parts could allow the emulation of the appropriate electrode shape and size; thereby, provision of selective stimulation that leads to functional movement and online adaptation of the electrode during the application. The need for selective stimulation follows recent findings about therapeutic effects of electrical stimulation in neurorehabilitation. The matrix electrode comprises small fields that can be made conductive and a controller that allows computerized selection of the fields being conductive. Here we present results from a study in nine hemiplegics. The matrix electrode was positioned over the peroneal nerve and primary dorsiflexor muscles and we estimated the movement of the foot by measuring the ankle joint angle. We found that the branched tree type shape and size of the electrode vary substantially when stimulating over the dorsiflexor muscles individuals in the study. We confirmed very high sensitivity to the position of small electrode when stimulating over the nerve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the biotope conditions, synchorology, floristic composition, coenotaxonomy and syndynamics of three thermophilous community types from SW Romania: Asplenio-Syringetum Jakucs 1959, Syringo-Carpinetum orientalis Jakucs 1959, Syringo-Genistetum radiatae Maloş 1972. The synthetic tables associated with the first two syntaxa contain original data as well as data of other authors. All phytocoenoses studied are characterized by high floristic richness. These three plant associations reach in Romania the northern limits of their distribution. We consider the origin and dynamics of communities for each plant association. Both their high species richness and important ecological function make these shrub communities a valuable natural resource worth preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We propose here to learn automata for the characterization of proteins families to overcome the limitations of the position-specific characterizations classically used in Pattern Discovery. We introduce a new heuristic approach learning non-deterministic automata based on selection and ordering of significantly similar fragments to be merged and on physico-chemical properties identification. Quality of the characterization of the major intrinsic protein (MIP) family is assessed by leave-one-out cross-validation for a large range of models specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present new careful semantics within Dung's theory of argumentation. Under such careful semantics, two arguments cannot belong to the same extension whenever one of them indirectly attacks a third argument while the other one indirectly defends the third. We argue that our semantics lead to a better handling of controversial arguments than Dung's ones in some settings. We compare the careful inference relations induced by our semantics w.r.t. cautiousness; we also compare them with the inference relations induced by Dung's semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reasoning in a non-trivial way from inconsistent pieces of information is a major challenge in artificial intelligence, and its importance is reflected by the number of techniques designed so far for dealing with inconsistency (especially the few ones reported in this handbook). Many of these techniques have been investigated in depth from a logical point of view, but far less to what concerns the computational complexity aspects. The purpose of this chapter is to present in a structured way the main complexity results identified so far for paraconsistent inference based on multi-valued propositional logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many solvers have been designed for s, the validity problem for Quantified Boolean Formulas for the past few years. In this paper, we describe a new branching heuristics whose purpose is to promote renamable Horn formulas. This heuristics is based on Hébrard's algorithm for the recognition of such formulas. We present some experimental results obtained by our qbf solver Qbfl with the new branching heuristics and show how its performances are improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is centered on the family of Dung's finite argumentation frameworks when the attacks relation is symmetric (and nonempty and irreflexive). We show that while this family does not contain any well-founded framework, every element of it is both coherent and relatively grounded. Then we focus on the acceptability problems for the various semantics introduced by Dung, yet generalized to sets of arguments. We show that only two distinct forms of acceptability are possible when the considered frameworks are symmetric. Those forms of acceptability are quite simple, but tractable; this contrasts with the general case for which all the forms of acceptability are intractable (except for the ones based on grounded or naive extensions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical inference consists in learning formal grammars for unknown languages when given sequential learning data. Classically this data is raw: Strings that belong to the language and eventually strings that do not. In this paper, we present a generic setting allowing to express domain and typing background knowledge. Algorithmic solutions are provided to introduce this additional information efficiently in the classical state-merging automata learning framework. Improvement induced by the use of this background knowledge is shown on both artificial and real data. Keywords: Automata Inference, Background Knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State Merging algorithms, such as Rodney Price's EDSM (Evidence-Driven State Merging) algorithm, have been reasonably successful at solving DFA-learning problems. EDSM, however, often does not converge to the target DFA and, in the case of sparse training data, does not converge at all. In this paper we argue that is partially due to the particular heuristic used in EDSM and also to the greedy search strategy employed in EDSM. We then propose a new heuristic that is based on minimising the risk involved in making merges. In other words, the heuristic gives preference to merges, whose evidence is supported by high compatibility with other merges. Incompatible merges can be trivially detected during the computation of the heuristic. We also propose a new heuristic limitation of the set of candidates after a backtrack to these incompatible merges, allowing to introduce diversity in the search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the Omphalos Context-Free Grammar Learning Competition held as part of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 2004. The competition was created in an effort to promote the development of new and better grammatical inference algorithms for context-free languages, to provide a forum for the comparison of different grammatical inference algorithms and to gain insight into the current state-of-the-art of context-free grammatical inference algorithms. This paper discusses design issues and decisions made when creating the competition. It also includes a new measure of the complexity of inferring context-free grammars, used to rank the competition problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents the first experimental results of an ongoing cooperation between medical, robotics and computer science teams aimed at optimizing the use of robotic systems in minimally invasive surgical interventions. The targeted intervention is the totally endoscopic coronary artery bypass graft (TECAB), performed using the daVinci™ system (by Intuitive Surgical, Inc.). An integrated and formalized planning and simulation tool for medical robotics is proposed, and experimental validation results on an artificial skeleton and heart are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a general method for studying some quotients of the special linear group SL2 over the integers, which are of fundamental interest in the field of statistical physics. Our method automatically helps in validating some conjectures due to physicists, such as conjectures stating that a set of equations completely describes a finite given quotient of SL2. In a first step, we show that in the cases we are interested in, the usual presentation of finitely generated groups with some constant generators and a binary concatenation can be turned into an equivalent one with unary generators. In a second step, when the completion of the transformed set of equations terminates, we show how to compute directly the associated normal forms automaton. According to the presence of loops, we are able to decide the finiteness of the quotient, and to compute its cardinality. When the quotient is infinite, the automaton gives some hints on what kind of equations are needed in order to insure the finiteness of the quotient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For GIS, SGML document servers and other highly specialized application domains, the systems integration problem is essential since the available software often is complex and would be costly to reimplement or to modify. In this paper we describe a two-level architecture for integrating software components based on partial data integration and user interface synchronization. We also present a prototype implementation of this architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simple and effective method for DFA induction from positive and negative samples is the state merging method. The corresponding search space may be tree-structured, considering two subspaces for a given pair of states: the subspace where states are merged and the subspace where states remain different. Choosing different pairs leads to different sizes of space, due to state mergings dependencies. Thus, ordering the successive choices of these pairs is an important issue. Starting from a constraint characterization of incompatible state mergings, we show that this characterization allows to achieve better choices, i.e. to reduce the size of the search tree. Within this framework, we address the issue of learning the set of all minimal compatible DFA's. We propose a pruning criterion and experiment with several ordering criteria. The prefix order and a new entropy based criterion have exhibit the best results in our test sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]