A vector measure for the intelligence of a question-answering (Q-A) system

The problem of quantification of intelligence of humans, and of intelligent systems, has been a challenging and controversial topic. IQ tests have been traditionally used to quantify human intelligence based on results of test designed by psychologists. It is in general very difficult to quantify intelligence. In this paper the authors consider a simple question-answering (Q-A) system and use this to quantify intelligence. The authors quantify intelligence as a vector with three components. The components consist of a measure of knowledge in asking questions, effectiveness of questions asked, and correctness of deduction. The authors formalize these parameters and have conducted experiments on humans to measure these parameters

Typhoid fever & vaccine development: a partially answered question

Typhoid fever is a systemic disease caused by the human specific Gram-negative pathogen Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S Typhi). The extra-intestinal infections caused by Salmonella are very fatal. The incidence of typhoid fever remains very high in impoverished areas and the emergence of multidrug resistance has made the situation worse. To combat and to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by typhoid fever, many preventive measures and strategies have been employed, the most important being vaccination. In recent years, many Salmonella vaccines have been developed including live attenuated as well as DNA vaccines and their clinical trials have shown encouraging results. But with the increasing antibiotic resistance, the development of potent vaccine candidate for typhoid fever is a need of the hour. This review discusses the latest trends in the typhoid vaccine development and the clinical trials which are underway.

Governing the local networks in Indian agrarian societies-an MAS perspective

In a networked society, governing advocacy groups and networks through decentralized systems of policy implementation has been the interest of governance network literature. This paper addresses the topic of governing networks in the context of Indian agrarian societies by taking the case example of a welfare scheme for the Indian rural poor. We explore context-specific regulatory dynamics through the situated agent based architectural framework. The effects of various regulatory strategies that can be adopted by governing node are tested under various action arenas through experimental design. Results show the impact of regulatory strategies on the resource dependencies and asymmetries in the network relationships. This indicates that the optimal feasible regulatory strategy in networked society is institutionally rational and is context dependent. Further, we show that situated MAS architecture is a natural fit for institutional understanding of the dynamics (Ostrom et al. in Rules, games, and common-pool resources, 1994).