One recursively enumerable real α dominates another one β if there are nondecreasing recursive sequences of rational numbers (a[n] : n ∈ ω) approximating α and (b[n] : n ∈ ω) approximating β and a positive constant C such that for all n, C(α − a[n]) ≥ (β − b[n]). See [R. M. Solovay, Draft of a Paper (or Series of Papers) on Chaitin’s Work, manuscript, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 1974, p. 215] and [G. J. (...) Chaitin, IBM J. Res. Develop., 21 (1977), pp. 350–359]. We show that every recursively enumerable random real dominates all other recursively enumerable reals. We conclude that the recursively enumerable random reals are exactly the Ω-numbers [G. J. Chaitin, IBM J. Res. Develop., 21 (1977), pp. 350–359]. Second, we show that the sets in a universal Martin-Lof test for randomness have random measure, and every recursively enumerable random number is the sum of the measures represented in a universal Martin-Lof test. (shrink)

Cloud computing is rapidly gaining traction in business. It offers businesses online services on demand (such as Gmail, iCloud and Salesforce) and allows them to cut costs on hardware and IT support. This is the first paper in business ethics dealing with this new technology. It analyzes the informational duties of hosting companies that own and operate cloud computing datacenters (e.g., Amazon). It considers the cloud services providers leasing ‘space in the cloud’ from hosting companies (e.g, Dropbox, Salesforce). (...) And it examines the business and private ‘clouders’ using these services. The first part of the paper argues that hosting companies, services providers and clouders have mutual informational (epistemic) obligations to provide and seek information about relevant issues such as consumer privacy, reliability of services, data mining and data ownership. The concept of interlucency is developed as an epistemic virtue governing ethically effective communication. The second part considers potential forms of government restrictions on or proscriptions against the development and use of cloud computing technology. Referring to the concept of technology neutrality, it argues that interference with hosting companies and cloud services providers is hardly ever necessary or justified. It is argued, too, however, that businesses using cloud services (banks, law firms, hospitals etc. storing client data in the cloud, e.g.) will have to follow rather more stringent regulations. (shrink)

The central paradigm of arti?cial intelligence is rapidly shifting toward biological models for both robotic devices and systems performing such critical tasks as network management, vehicle navigation, and process control. Here we use a recent mathematical analysis of the necessary conditions for consciousness in humans to explore likely failure modes inherent to a broad class of biologically inspired computing machines. Analogs to developmental psychopathology, in which regulatory mechanisms for consciousness fail progressively and subtly understress, and toinattentional blindness, where a (...) narrow 'syntactic band pass' de?ned by the rate distortion manifold of conscious attention results in pathological ?xation, seem inevitable. Similar problems are likely to confront other possible architectures, although their mathematical description may be far less straightforward. Computing devices constructed on biological paradigms will inevitably lack the elaborate, but poorly understood, system of control mechanisms which has evolved over the last few hundred million years to stabilize consciousness in higher animals. This will make such machines prone to insidious degradation, and, ultimately, catastrophic failure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Michael Rescorla has argued that it makes sense to compute directly with numbers, and he faulted Turing for not giving an analysis of number-theoretic computability. However, in line with a later paper of his, it only makes sense to compute directly with syntactic entities, such as strings on a given alphabet. Computing with numbers goes via notation. This raises broader issues involving de re propositional attitudes towards numbers and other non-syntactic abstract entities.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL '97, held as the 1997 Annual Conference of the European Association on Computer Science Logic, EACSL, in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected after two rounds of refereeing from initially 92 submissions; also included are four invited papers. The book addresses all current aspects of computer science logics and its applications and thus presents the state (...) of the art in the area. (shrink)

monsters, virtual legends such as 2001’s HAL or Demon Seed’s Proteus are actually scary because of their mind. Without lingering on the philosophical debates on whether a certain type of mind can exist independent of its specific embodiment or whether any creature can understand a consciousness that is not like his own (recall Lem’s Solaris), the thing that makes HAL and Proteus so human is not so much their ability to think as their possessing something resembling human consciousness. The point (...) is that, whereas consciousness may or may not be required for an artificial agent to think, it is an essential element in creating anything resembling a human-like thinker that would pass the Turing Test. (shrink)

Computing, today more than ever before, is a multi-faceted discipline which collates several methodologies, areas of interest, and approaches: mathematics, engineering, programming, and applications. Given its enormous impact on everyday life, it is essential that its debated origins are understood, and that its different foundations are explained. On the Foundations of Computing offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the birth and evolution of computing, and it presents some of the most important technical results and philosophical problems (...) of the discipline, combining both historical and systematic analyses. -/- The debates this text surveys are among the latest and most urgent ones: the crisis of foundations in mathematics and the birth of the decision problem, the nature of algorithms, the debates on computational artefacts and malfunctioning, and the analysis of computational experiments. By covering these topics, On the Foundations of Computing provides a much-needed resource to contextualize these foundational issues. -/- For practitioners, researchers, and students alike, a historical and philosophical approach such as what this volume offers becomes essential to understand the past of the discipline and to figure out the challenges of its future. (shrink)

This book features papers from CEPE-IACAP 2015, a joint international conference focused on the philosophy of computing. Inside, readers will discover essays that explore current issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and philosophy of science from the lens of computation. Coverage also examines applied issues related to ethical, social, and political interest. -/- The contributors first explore how computation has changed philosophical inquiry. Computers are now capable of joining humans in exploring foundational issues. Thus, we can ponder machine-generated (...) explanation, thought, agency, and other quite fascinating concepts. The papers are also concerned with normative aspects of the computer and information technology revolution. They examine technology-specific analyses of key challenges, from Big Data to autonomous robots to expert systems for infrastructure control and financial services. -/- The virtue of a collection that ranges over philosophical questions, such as this one does, lies in the prospects for a more integrated understanding of issues. These are early days in the partnership between philosophy and information technology. Philosophers and researchers are still sorting out many foundational issues. They will need to deploy all of the tools of philosophy to establish this foundation. This volume admirably showcases those tools in the hands of some excellent scholars. -/- . (shrink)

This paper offers an account of what it is for a physical system to be a computing mechanism—a system that performs computations. A computing mechanism is a mechanism whose function is to generate output strings from input strings and (possibly) internal states, in accordance with a general rule that applies to all relevant strings and depends on the input strings and (possibly) internal states for its application. This account is motivated by reasons endogenous to the philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>computing, namely, doing justice to the practices of computer scientists and computability theorists. It is also an application of recent literature on mechanisms, because it assimilates computational explanation to mechanistic explanation. The account can be used to individuate computing mechanisms and the functions they compute and to taxonomize computing mechanisms based on their computing power. (shrink)

The paper analyses six ethical challenges posed by cloud computing, concerning ownership, safety, fairness, responsibility, accountability and privacy. The first part defines cloud computing on the basis of a resource-oriented approach, and outlines the main features that characterise such technology. Following these clarifications, the second part argues that cloud computing reshapes some classic problems often debated in information and computer ethics. To begin with, cloud computing makes possible a complete decoupling of ownership, possession and use of (...) data and this helps to explain the problems occurring when different providers of cloud computing retain or relinquish the right to use or own users‘ data. The problem of safety in cloud computing is coupled to that of reliability, insofar as users have to trust providers to preserve their data, applications and content in a reliable manner. It is argued that, in this context, data insurance could play an important role. Regarding fairness, the paper argues that cloud computing is already reshaping the nature of the Digital. Responsibility, accountability and privacy close the ethical analysis of cloud computing. In this case, the thesis is that the necessity to account for the actions of cloud computing users imposes delicate trade-offs between users‘ privacy and the traceability of their operations. (shrink)

This article shows how common morality can be helpful in clarifying the discussion of ethical issues that arise in computing. Since common morality does not always provide unique answers to moral questions, not all such issues can be resolved, however common morality does provide a clear answer to the question whether one can illegally copy software for a friend.

We are in the midst of a fundamental shift, as more enterprises start to use services enabled by cloud technologies. This will heavily impact IT services providers, who must now consider strategies for coping with profound changes in the marketplace or risk being left behind. This research will be of interest to IT services vendors, as well as consumers of IT services.

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to (...) the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B. We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?". (shrink)

In this report I provide an introduction to the burgeoning field of hypercomputation – the study of machines that can compute more than Turing machines. I take an extensive survey of many of the key concepts in the field, tying together the disparate ideas and presenting them in a structure which allows comparisons of the many approaches and results. To this I add several new results and draw out some interesting consequences of hypercomputation for several different disciplines.

A topological index is a numeric quantity related with the chemical composition claiming to correlate the chemical structure with different chemical properties. Topological indices serve to predict physicochemical properties of chemical substance. Among different topological indices, degree-based topological indices would be helpful in investigating the anti-inflammatory activities of certain chemical networks. In the current study, we determine the neighborhood second Zagreb index and the first extended first-order connectivity index for oxide network O X n, silicate network S L n, chain (...) silicate network C S n, and hexagonal network H X n. Also, we determine the neighborhood second Zagreb index and the first extended first-order connectivity index for honeycomb network H C n. (shrink)

The theme of this volume is the multi-faceted 'computational turn' that is occurring through the interaction of the disciplines of philosophy and computing. In computer and information sciences, there are significant conceptual and methodological questions that require reflection and analysis. Moreover, digital, information and communication technologies have had tremendous impact on society, which raises further philosophical questions. This book tries to facilitate the task to continuously work to ensure that its diversity of perspectives and methods proves a source of (...) strength and collaboration rather than a source of instability and disintegration. The first three contributions explore the phenomenon of virtual worlds. The next four focus on robots and artificial agents. Then a group of chapters discusses the relation between human mentality and information processing in computers and the final section covers a broad range of issues at the interface of computers and society. (shrink)

Precision agriculture is a breakthrough in digital farming technology, which facilitates the application of precise and exact amount of input level of water and fertilizer to the crop at the required time for increasing the yield. Since agriculture relies on direct rainfall than irrigation and the prediction of rainfall date is easily available from web source, the integration of rainfall prediction with precision agriculture helps to regulate the water consumption in farms. In this work, an edge computing model is (...) developed for predicting soil moisture in real time and managing the water usage in accordance with rain prediction. A soil moisture prediction hybrid algorithm has been developed that revolves around the decision-making techniques with live environmental parameters including weather parameters for the prediction of soil moisture through the impact of precipitation. Numerous algorithms with the combination of regression + clustering are estimated, and it is inferred that XGBoost + k-means outperforms other algorithmic combinations that is deployed in edge model. This model is used as an intermediary between the end IoT devices and cloud that results in the saving of computationally intensive processing performed on cloud servers. The servers located on a local edge network perform the developed algorithmic computations. Avoiding transmission over the cloud results in significant latency, response time, and computation power savings and therefore increases the efficiency of data transfer. The proposed edge computing model is implemented in Raspberry Pi as an edge, Heroku as cloud, and edge nodes as the combination of Pi with actuators and sensors. The monitored data from Pi are stored in MongoDB webserver that is controlled by Web dashboard. Finally, the developed model is implemented in cloud and edge where the edge server implementation performs better in terms of latency, bandwidth, throughput, response time, and CPU memory usage. (shrink)

influence. One of the principal characteristics that distinguishes Cognitive Science from more traditional studies of cognition within Psychology, is the extent to which it has been influenced by both the ideas and the techniques of computing. It may come as a surprise to the outsider, then, to discover that there is no unanimity within the discipline on either (a) the nature (and in some cases the desireabilty) of the influence and (b) what computing is –- or at least (...) on its. (shrink)

This dissertation examines aspects of the interplay between computing and scientific practice. The appropriate foundational framework for such an endeavour is rather real computability than the classical computability theory. This is so because physical sciences, engineering, and applied mathematics mostly employ functions defined in continuous domains. But, contrary to the case of computation over natural numbers, there is no universally accepted framework for real computation; rather, there are two incompatible approaches --computable analysis and BSS model--, both claiming to formalise (...) algorithmic computation and to offer foundations for scientific computing. -/- The dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, we examine what notion of 'algorithmic computation' underlies each approach and how it is respectively formalised. It is argued that the very existence of the two rival frameworks indicates that 'algorithm' is not one unique concept in mathematics, but it is used in more than one way. We test this hypothesis for consistency with mathematical practice as well as with key foundational works that aim to define the term. As a result, new connections between certain subfields of mathematics and computer science are drawn, and a distinction between 'algorithms' and 'effective procedures' is proposed. -/- In the second part, we focus on the second goal of the two rival approaches to real computation; namely, to provide foundations for scientific computing. We examine both frameworks in detail, what idealisations they employ, and how they relate to floating-point arithmetic systems used in real computers. We explore limitations and advantages of both frameworks, and answer questions about which one is preferable for computational modelling and which one for addressing general computability issues. -/- In the third part, analog computing and its relation to analogue (physical) modelling in science are investigated. Based on some paradigmatic cases of the former, a certain view about the nature of computation is defended, and the indispensable role of representation in it is emphasized and accounted for. We also propose a novel account of the distinction between analog and digital computation and, based on it, we compare analog computational modelling to physical modelling. It is concluded that the two practices, despite their apparent similarities, are orthogonal. (shrink)

Collecting, comparing, and computing molecular sequences are among the most prevalent practices in contemporary biological research. They represent a specific way of producing knowledge. This paper explores the historical development of these practices, focusing on the work of Margaret O. Dayhoff, Richard V. Eck, and Robert S. Ledley, who produced the first computer-based collection of protein sequences, published in book format in 1965 as the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure. While these practices are generally associated with the rise (...) of molecular evolution in the 1960s, this paper shows that they grew out of research agendas from the previous decade, including the biochemical investigation of the relations between the structures and function of proteins and the theoretical attempt to decipher the genetic code. It also shows how computers became essential for the handling and analysis of sequence data. Finally, this paper reflects on the relationships between experimenting and collecting as two distinct “ways of knowing” that were essential for the transformation of the life sciences in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics often include a timeline stretching into the future in which they predict the convergence between human and artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, for example, predicts that in a mere 100 years humans and intelligent machines will become indistinguishable from one another, both ceasing to have permanent corporeal forms. This article argues that the one thing we can know for sure about the future is that when it arrives, it will be different from what we imagined. (...) The cultural work that predictions like Kurzweil’s perform is less to prognosticate the future than to shape our understanding of what it means to be human in the present. Working from the ‘sense-think-act’ paradigm foundational to work in artificial intelligence and robotics, this article argues that predictions in all three areas (sensing, thinking, acting) feed back to affect how the human is envisioned in the present. The reconfigurations these predictions bring about are to downplay consciousness, embodied cognition, and evolutionary inertia. The article concludes by critically evaluating contemporary resistances to the posthuman, especially in the writings of Rodney Brooks and Francis Fukuyama. (shrink)

At its beginnings Humanities Computing was characterized by a primary interest in methodological issues and their epistemological background. Subsequently, Humanities Computing practice has been prevailingly driven by technological developments and the main concern has shifted from content processing to the representation in digital form of documentary sources. The Digital Humanities turn has brought more to the fore artistic and literary practice in direct digital form, as opposed to a supposedly commonplace application of computational methods to scholarly research. As (...) an example of a way back to the original motivations of applied computation in the humanities, a formal model of the interpretive process is here proposed, whose implementation may be contrived through the application of data processing procedures typical of the so called artificial adaptive systems. (shrink)

Computing and information, and their philosophy in the broad sense, play a most important scientific, technological and conceptual role in our world. This book collects together, for the first time, the views and experiences of some of the visionary pioneers and most influential thinkers in such a fundamental area of our intellectual development.

We show that the number of types of sequences of tuples of a fixed length can be calculated from the number of 1-types and the length of the sequences. Specifically, if κ≤λ, then sup ‖M‖=λ|Sκ|=|)κ. We show that this holds for any abstract elementary class with λ-amalgamation. No such calculation is possible for nonalgebraic types. However, we introduce a subclass of nonalgebraic types for which the same upper bound holds.

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16–26 trajectory features during a choice-reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, (...) film clips, or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10-fold cross-validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from “known” participants could predict nearly 10%–20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of “unknown” participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users. (shrink)

'Affective computing' is a branch of computing concerned with the theory and construction of machines which can detect, respond to, and simulate human emotional states. This book presents an interdisciplinary exploration of this rapidly expanding field, aimed at those in psychology, computational neuroscience, computer science, and AI. A Blueprint for Affective Computing: A sourcebook and manual is the very first attempt to ground affective computing within the disciplines of psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy. This book illustrates (...) the contributions of each of these disciplines to the development of the ever-growing field of affective computing. In addition, it demonstrates practical examples of cross-fertilization between disciplines in order to highlight the need for integration of computer science, engineering and the affective sciences. (shrink)

Affective computing adopts a computational approach to study affect. We highlight the AC approach towards automated affect measures that jointly model machine-readable physiological/behavioral signals with affect estimates as reported by humans or experimentally elicited. We describe the conceptual and computational foundations of the approach followed by two case studies: one on discrimination between genuine and faked expressions of pain in the lab, and the second on measuring nonbasic affect in the wild. We discuss applications of the measures, analyze measurement (...) accuracy and generalizability, and highlight advances afforded by computational tipping points, such as big data, wearable sensing, crowdsourcing, and deep learning. We conclude by advocating for increasing synergies between AC and affective science and offer suggestions toward that direction. (shrink)