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This is a call for papers that should contribute to the unification of behavioral sciences and team management, focusing on the biological origin of cooperation and swarm intelligence, moving from biology to psychology and from sociology to political science, with the help of the theoretical tools of complex networks. This issue should shed light into the origin of ergodicity breaking and contribute to establishing a connection, still lacking theoretical support, between complexity properties that are expected to be correlated. Examples are: non-Poisson renewal events and multi-fractality; complexity matching and chaos synchronization; criticality and extended criticality of small size systems. Although the emphasis is on systems of small size, and especially on the search of the size maximizing both information transport and cooperation emergence, special attention will be devoted to the interaction between small groups and their larger societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifying conflicts is recognized as an important issue for handling inconsistencies. Indeed, an inconsistency measure can be employed to support knowledge engineers in building a consistent and usable knowledge base or providing insights on how to repair an inconsistent one. Good measures are supposed to satisfy a set of rational properties. However, defining sound properties is sometimes problematic. In this paper, we emphasize one such property, named dominance , rarely satisfied by syntactic measures. Based on prime implicates canonical representation, we first introduce the notion of conflicting variable and use it to refine an existing inconsistency measure defined by minimally unsatisfiable sets (MUSes). Then, we provide a semantics characterization allowing us to establish relationships with multi-valued semantics. Secondly, we propose a new measure based on the notion of deduced MUSes (DMUSes), to circumscribe the internal conflicts in a given knowledge base. We also prove that this measure satisfies a new but weaker form of dominance. Finally, we show how inconsistency measures based on hitting sets of minimal inconsistent sets can be extended using hitting sets of DMUSes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose an inversion-based methodology for the computation of a feedforward action for the propofol intravenous administration during the induction of hypnosis in general anesthesia. In particular, the typical initial bolus is substituted with a command signal that is obtained by predefining a desired output and by applying an input–output inversion procedure. The robustness of the method has been tested by considering a set of patients with different model parameters, which is representative of a large population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper deals with a computer programme offering a valid simulation of cognitive human processes related to representation changes while problem solving. An introductory and brief recollection of preceding contributions by psychologists, cognitive scientists and AI researchers provides the necessary background and motivation for our work. A relevant trend of the present research concerns the formal mathematical study of representation phenomena, including precisions about isomorphic and homomorphic representation changes. In order to simplify problem resolution processes, the implemented system performs certain representation changes, by making use of specific procedures which assign and modify a certain relevance value to every attribute involved in the problem representation, on behalf of their respective importance so as to actually solve the problem. The paper includes a full account of mathematical definitions and propositions involved in this system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Previous algorithms for unrestricted constraint satisfaction use reduction search, which inferentially removes values from domains in order to prune the backtrack search tree. This paper introduces partition search, which uses an efficient join mechanism instead of removing values from domains. Analytical prediction of quantitative performance of partition search appears to be intractable and evaluation therefore has to be by experimental comparison with reduction search algorithms that represent the state of the art. Instead of working only with available reduction search algorithms, this paper introduces enhancements such as semijoin reduction preprocessing using Bloom filtering. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]