Fluorescent Logic Systems for Sensing and Molecular Computation: Structure-Activity Relationships in Edge-Detection

Molecular logic-based computation continues to throw up new applications in sensing and switching, the newest of which is the edge detection of objects. The scope of this phenomenon is mapped out by the use of structure-activity relationships, where several structures of the molecules and of the objects are examined. The different angles and curvatures of the objects are followed with good-fidelity in the visualized edges, even when the objects are in reverse video.

Mining Money: the generative capacities of scientific and legal knowledge practices in the making of resource economies

In 1997 a scandal associated with Bre-X, a junior mining firm, and its prospecting activities in Indonesia, exposed to public scrutiny the ways in which mineral exploration firms acquire, assess and report on scientific claims about the natural environment. At stake here was not just how investors understood the provisional nature of scientific knowledge, but also evidence of fraud. Contemporaneous mining scandals not only included the salting of cores, but also unreliable proprietary sample preparation and assay methods, mis-representations of visual field estimates as drilling results and ‘overly optimistic’ geological reports. This paper reports on initiatives taken in the wake of these scandals and prompted by the Mining Standards Task Force (TSE/OSC 1999). For regulators, mandated to increase investor confidence in Canada’s leading role within the global mining industry, efforts focused first and foremost upon identifying and removing sources of error and wilfulness within the production and circulation of scientific knowledge claims. A common goal cross-cutting these initiatives was ‘a faithful representation of nature’ (Daston and Galison 2010), however, as the paper argues, this was manifest in an assemblage of practices governed by distinct and rival regulative visions of science and the making of markets in claims about ‘nature’. These ‘practices of fidelity’, it is argued, can be consequential in shaping the spatial and temporal dynamics of the marketization of nature.

Decentralized Computation of Pareto Optimal Pure Nash Equilibria of Boolean Games with Privacy Concerns

In Boolean games, agents try to reach a goal formulated as a Boolean formula. These games are attractive because of their compact representations. However, few methods are available to compute the solutions and they are either limited or do not take privacy or communication concerns into account. In this paper we propose the use of an algorithm related to reinforcement learning to address this problem. Our method is decentralized in the sense that agents try to achieve their goals without knowledge of the other agents’ goals. We prove that this is a sound method to compute a Pareto optimal pure Nash equilibrium for an interesting class of Boolean games. Experimental results are used to investigate the performance of the algorithm.

Local Computation in Credal Networks

The goal of this contribution is to discuss local computation in credal networks — graphical models that can represent imprecise and indeterminate probability values. We analyze the inference problem in credal networks, discuss how inference algorithms can benefit from local computation, and suggest that local computation can be particularly important in approximate inference algorithms.