Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions.     

Multilingual resources for NLP in the lexical markup framework (LMF)

Optimizing the production, maintenance and extension of lexical resources is one the crucial aspects impacting natural language processing (NLP). A second aspect involves optimizing the process leading to their integration in applications. With this respect, we believe that a consensual specification on monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexicons can be a useful aid for the various NLP actors. Within ISO, one purpose of Lexical Markup Framework (LMF, ISO-24613) is to define a standard for lexicons that covers multilingual lexical data.

Sorafenib delivery nanoplatform based on superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles magnetically targets hepatocellular carcinoma

Currently,sorafenib is the only systemic therapy capable of increasing overall survival of hepatocellular carcinoma patients.Unfortunately,its side effects,particularly its overall toxicity,limit the therapeutic response that can be achieved.Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) are very attractive for drug delivery because they can be targeted to specific sites in the body through application of a magnetic field,thus improving intratumoral accumulation and reducing adverse effects.Here,nanoformulations based on polyethylene glycol modified phospholipid micelles,loaded with both SPIONs and sorafenib,were successfully prepared and thoroughly investigated by complementary techniques.This nanovector system provided effective drug delivery,had an average hydrodynamic diameter of about 125 nm,had good stability in aqueous medium,and allowed controlled drug loading.Magnetic analysis allowed accurate determination of the amount of SPIONs embedded in each micelle.An in vitro system was designed to test whether the SPION micelles can be efficiently held using a magnetic field under typical flow conditions found in the human liver.Human hepatocellular carcinoma (HepG2) cells were selected as an in vitro system to evaluate tumor cell targeting efficacy of the superparamagnetic micelles loaded with sorafenib.These experiments demonstrated that this delivery platform is able to enhance sorafenib's antitumor effectiveness by magnetic targeting.The magnetic nanovectors described here represent promising candidates for targeting specific hepatic tumor sites,where selective release of sorafenib can improve its efficacy and safety profile.     

Detection of epileptic electroencephalogram based on Permutation Entropy and Support Vector Machines

The electroencephalogram (EEG) has proven a valuable tool in the study and detection of epilepsy. This paper investigates for the first time the use of Permutation Entropy (PE) as a feature for automated epileptic seizure detection. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to classify segments of normal and epileptic EEG based on PE values. The proposed system utilizes the fact that the EEG during epileptic seizures is characterized by lower PE than normal EEG. It is shown that average sensitivity of 94.38% and average specificity of 93.23% is obtained by using PE as a feature to characterize epileptic and seizure-free EEG, while 100% sensitivity and specificity were also obtained in single-trial classifications.     

Applying EuroWordNet to Cross-Language Text Retrieval

We discuss ways in which EuroWordNet (EWN) can be used in multilingual information retrieval activities, focusing on two approaches to Cross-Language Text Retrieval that use the EWN database as a large-scale multilingual semantic resource. The first approach indexes documents and queries in terms of the EuroWordNet Inter-Lingual-Index, thus turning term weighting and query/document matching into language-independent tasks. The second describes how the information in the EWN database could be integrated with a corpus-based technique, thus allowing retrieval of domain-specific terms that may not be present in our multilingual database. Our objective is to show the potential of EuroWordNet as a promising alternative to existing approaches to Cross-Language Text Retrieval.     

Stringency of regulation and innovation in waste management: an empirical analysis on EU countries

The transformation of waste into a valuable resource is a key process towards sustainable development and green growth and therefore represents a major concern for policy-makers. Technological innovation plays a crucial role in waste management and therefore understanding the way in which regulation may spur innovation in this domain constitute is crucial. This article aims at testing the weak version of the Porter hypothesis in waste management, by analysing the dynamic relationship between the stringency of environmental regulation and innovation in a European cross-country setting. Results confirm that the stringency of regulation positively affects innovation, but the effect is non-linear, suggesting the existence of an optimal cap to the stringency of regulation. Furthermore, the overall environmental conditions of the country, as well as the presence of highly polluting sectors hinder the development of environmental innovations.     

Logic Based Abstractions of Real-Time Systems

When verifying concurrent systems described by transition systems, state explosion is one of the most serious problems. If quantitative temporal information (expressed by clock ticks) is considered, state explosion is even more serious. We present a notion of abstraction of transition systems, where the abstraction is driven by the formulae of a quantitative temporal logic, called qu-mu-calculus, defined in the paper. The abstraction is based on a notion of bisimulation equivalence, called , n-equivalence, where is a set of actions and n is a natural number. It is proved that two transition systems are , n-equivalent iff they give the same truth value to all qu-mu-calculus formulae such that the actions occurring in the modal operators are contained in , and with time constraints whose values are less than or equal to n. We present a non-standard (abstract) semantics for a timed process algebra able to produce reduced transition systems for checking formulae. The abstract semantics, parametric with respect to a set of actions and a natural number n, produces a reduced transition system , n-equivalent to the standard one. A transformational method is also defined, by means of which it is possible to syntactically transform a program into a smaller one, still preserving , n-equivalence.     

Agent communication and artificial institutions

In this paper we propose an application-independent model for the definition of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multi-agent systems. Such a model of institutional reality makes us able also to define an objective and external semantics of a commitment-based Agent Communication Language (ACL). In particular we propose to regard an ACL as a set of conventions to act on a fragment of institutional reality, defined in the context of an artificial institution. Another contribution of the work presented in this paper is an operational definition of norms, a crucial component of artificial institutions. In fact in open systems interacting agents might not conform to the specifications. We regard norms as event-driven rules that when are fired by events happening in the system create or cancel a set of commitments. An interesting aspect of our proposal is that both the definition of the ACL and the definition of norms are based on the same notion of commitment. Therefore an agent capable of reasoning on commitments can reason on the semantics of communicative acts and on the system of norms.