Matthew Parkinson Richard Bornat Cristiano Calcagno 9 DTR06-1.pdf

Hoare logic is bedevilled by complex and unmemorable side conditions on the use of variables. We define a logic free of side conditions, and show that it admits translations of proofs in Hoare logic, thereby showing that nothing is lost. Our work draws on ideas from separation logic: program variables are treated as resource and separated with *, rather than as logical variables in disguise. For clarity we exclude a treatment of the heap.

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Emmanuel Letier Jeff Kramer Jeff Magee Sebastian Uchitel 10 DTR06-2.pdf

Goal-oriented methods are increasingly popular for elaborating software requirements. They offer systematic support for incrementally building intentional, structural, and operational models of the software and its environment. Event-based transition systems on the other hand are convenient formalisms for modelling and reasoning about software behaviours at the architectural level. The paper combines these two works by presenting a technique .for translating formal specification of software operations built according to the KAOS goal-oriented method into event-based transition systems analysable by the LTSA toolset. The translation involves moving from a declarative, state-based, timed, synchronous formalism typical of requirements modelling languages to an operational, event-based, untimed, asynchronous one typical of architecture description languages. The derived model is used for the formal analysis and animation of KAOS operation models In LTSA. The translation process provides insights into the two complementary formalisms and raises questions about the use o f synchronous temporal logic for requirements specification.

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Krysia Broda Christopher J. Hogger 39 DTR06-3.pdf

A policy for a minimal reactive agent is a set of condition-action rules used to determine its response to perceived environmental stimuli. When the policy pre-disposes the agent to achieving a stipulated goal we call it a teleo-reactive policy. This paper presents a framework for constructing and evaluating teleo-reactive policies for one or more minimal agents, based upon discounted-reward evaluation of policy-restricted subgraphs of complete situation-graphs. The main feature of the method is that it exploits explicit and definite associations of the agent's perceptions with states. The combinatorial burden that would potentially ensue from such associations can be ameliorated by suitable use of abstractions. The framework allows one to plan for a number of agents by focusing upon the behaviour of a single representative of them. It allows for varied behaviour to be modelled, including communication between agents. Simulation results presented here indicate that the method affords a good degree of scalability and predictive power.

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Krysia Broda Christopher J. Hogger 12 DTR06-4.pdf

Abstraction is a valuable tool for dealing with scalability in large state space contexts. This paper addresses the design, using abstraction, of good policies for minimal autonomous agents applied within a situation-graph-framework. In this framework an agent's policy is some function that maps perceptual inputs to actions deterministically. A good policy disposes the agent towards achieving one or more designated goal situations, and the design process aims to identify such policies. The agents to which the framework applies are assumed to have only partial observability, and in particular may not be able to perceive fully a goal situation. A further assumption is that the environment may influence an agent's situation by unpredictable exogenous events, so that a policy cannot take advantage, of a reliable history of previous actions. The Bellman discount measure provides a means of evaluating situations and hence the overall value of a policy. When abstraction is used, the accuracy of the method can be significantly improved by modifying the standard Bellman equations. This paper describes the modification and demonstrates its power through comparison with simulation results.

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Alexander Artikis Marek Sergot Jeremy Pitt 39 DTR06-5.pdf

Electronic markets, dispute resolution and negotiation protocols are three types of application domains that can be viewed as open agent societies. Key characteristics of such societies are agent heterogeneity, conflicting individual goals and unpredictable behaviour. Members of such societies may fail to, or even choose not to, conform to the norms governing their interactions. It has been argued that systems of this type should have a formal, declarative, verifiable, and meaningful semantics. We present a theoretical and computational framework being developed for the executable specification of open agent societies. We adopt an external perspective and view societies as instances of normative systems. In this paper we demonstrate how the framework can be applied to specifying and executing a contract-net protocol. The specification is formalised in two action languages, the C+ language and the Event Calculus, and executed using respective software implementations, the Causal Calculator and the Society Visualiser. We evaluate our executable specification in the light of the presented case study, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the employed action languages for the specification of open agent societies.

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Istvan Maros 17 DTR06-6.pdf

Maros's GDPO algorithm for phase-1 of the dual simplex method possesses some theoretical features that have potentially huge computational advantages. This paper gives account of a computational analysis of GDPO. Experience of a systematic study involving 48 problems shows that the predicted performance advantages can materialize to a large extent making GDPO an indispensable tool for dual pahase-1.

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David J Thornley 10 DTR06-7.pdf

DNA sequencing using the fluoresence based Sanger method comprises interpretation of a sequence of signal peaks of varying size whose colour indicates the presence of a base. We have established that the ability to predict the variations effectively makes available novel error correction information which will improve sequencing efficacy. Our experiments so far have used basic models of the Sanger reaction chemistry and machine learning techniques. These have enabled us to make base calls just using context information, specfically ignoring the peak data at the base calling position. The 80% success rate of our blind experiments is striking, and will be improved by a more accurate model of trace behaviour. To this end, and to integrate the information into mainstream basecalling, we wish to develop an enzyme kinetics model susceptible to calibration of its component rates such that trace data can be accurately predicted. We describe DNA sequencing trace data, outline the trace prediction problem requirements on the model, and discuss model construction and calibration issues.

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David J Thornley 12 DTR06-8.pdf

The archetypal Savitzky-Golay convolutional filter matches a polynomial to even-spaced data and uses this to measure smoothed derivatives. We synthesize a scheme in which heterogeneous, anisotropic linearly separable basis functions combine to provide a general smoothing, derivative measurement and reconsruction function for point coulds in multiple dimensions using a linear operator in the form of a convolution kernel. We use a matrix pseudo inverse for examples, but note that QR factorization is more stable when free weighting is introduced.

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Alexei Yavlinsky Stefan Rüger 15 DTR06-9.pdf

This report presents a framework for improving the image index obtained by automated image annotation. Within this framework, the technique of keyword combination is used for fast image re-indexing based on initial automated annotations. It aims to tackle the challenges of limited vocabulary size and low annotation accuracies resulting from differences between training and test collections. It is useful for situations when these two problems are not anticipated at the time of annotation. We show that based on example images from the automatically annotated collection, it is often possible to find multiple keyword queries that can retrieve new image concepts which are not present in the training vocabulary, and improve retrieval results of those that are already present. We demonstrate that this can be done at a very small computational cost and at an acceptable performance tradeoff, compared to traditional annotation models. We present a simple, robust, and computationally efficient approach for finding an appropriate set of keywords for a given target concept. We report results on TRECVID 2005, Getty Image Archive, and Web image datasets, the last two of which were specifically constructed to support realistic retrieval scenarios.

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Roberto Amadio Iain Phillips 104 DTR06-10.pdf

This is the preliminary version of the proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency (Express'06), held in Bonn on 26 August 2006. It contains abstracts for invited talks by Robin Milner (joint with the Infinity and SOS workshops) and Hagen Völzer, together with seven contributed papers by the following authors: Diletta Cacciagrano, Flavio Corradini and Catuscia Palamidessi; Xu Wang and Marta Kwiatkowska; Ahmed Bouajjani, Jan Strejcek and Tayssir Touili; Vincent Danos, Jean Krivine and Pawel Sobocinski; Daniele Gorla; Lucy Saunders-Evans and Glynn Winskel; Luís Caires and Hugo Torres Vieira. The final version will appear in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science.

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