Wilfried Sieg. Calculations by Man and Machine: Mathematical Presentation.

This paper argues that we should take into account the process of historical transmission to enrich our understanding of material culture. More specifically, I want to show how the rewriting of history and the invention of tradition impact material objects and our beliefs about them. I focus here on the transmission history of the mechanical calculator invented by the German savant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz repeatedly described his machine as functional and wonderfully useful, but in reality it was never (...) finished and didn't fully work. Its internal structure also remained unknown. In 1879, however, the machine re-emerged and was reinvented as the origin of all later calculating machines based on the stepped drum, to protect the priority of the German Leibniz against the Frenchman Thomas de Colmar as the father of mechanical calculation. The calculator was later replicated to demonstrate that it could function ‘after all’, in an effort to deepen this narrative and further enhance Leibniz's computing acumen. (shrink)

This paper explores how calculative cultures shape perceptions of models and practices of model use in the financial industry. A calculative culture comprises a specific set of practices and norms concerning data and model use in an organizational setting. Drawing on interviews with model users working in algorithmic securities trading, I argue that the introduction of complex machine-learning models changes the dynamics in calculative cultures, which leads to a displacement of human judgment in quantitative finance. In this paper, I (...) distinguish between three calculative cultures: an idealistic culture of undivided trust in models, a pragmatic culture of skepticism toward model accuracy, and a pragmatic idealist culture of early stage skepticism and implementation and production-phase idealism. Based on the empirical material, the analysis engages with examples of each of the three calculative cultures. The study contributes to the social studies of finance and science and technology studies more broadly by showing how perceptions of models shape and are shaped through model work in data-intensive, computerized finance. (shrink)

This study investigates the performance of 21 monolingual and 56 bilingual children aged 5;6-9;0 on German-LITMUS-sentence-repetition (SRT; Hamann et al., 2013) and nonword-repetition-tasks (NWRT; Grimm et al., 2014), which were constructed according to the LITMUS-principles (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings; Armon-Lotem et al., 2015). Both tasks incorporate complex structures shown to be cross-linguistically challenging for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and aim at minimizing bias against bilingual children while still being indicative of the presence of language impairment across (...) language combinations. Given the great variability in bilingual language exposure and the potential effect of language experience on language performance in bilingual children, we examined whether background variables related to bilingualism, particularly, the degree language dominance as measured by relative amount of use and exposure, could compromise the diagnostic accuracy of the German-LITMUS-SRT and NWRT. We further investigated whether a combination of the two tasks provides better diagnostic accurracy. To address this, we used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, the Partitioning-Around-Medoids (PAM), for deriving a clinical category for the children as ±language-impaired based on performance scores on SRT and/or NWRT while withholding information about their clinical status based on standardized assessment in L1/L2. Subsequently, we calculated diagnostic accuracy and investigated which background variables (age of onset, length of exposure, degree of language-dominance, socio-economic-status, and risk factors for SLI) best explained clinical-group-membership yielded from the PAM-analysis based on NWRT and/or SRT scores. Results show that although language-dominance influences the performance of bilingual typically-developing children, especially in the SRT, the diagnostic accuracy of the tools is not compromised by language dominance: while risk factors for SLI were significant predictors for clinical group membership in all models, language dominance did not contribute at all to explaining clinical cluster membership as typically-developing or SLI based on any of the combinations of the SRT and NWRT variables. Additionally, results confirm that a combination of SRT scored by correct target structure and the structurally more complex language-dependent part of the NWRT yields better diagnostic accuracy than single measures and is only sensitive for risk factors for SLI and not to dominance levels or SES. (shrink)

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these (...) intuitive judgements are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines. (shrink)

In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons’s attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons’s attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of the moral (...) sciences into material and ‘real’ as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole’s logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage’s two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind. This comparison of the attitudes to mental science of Jevons and Marshall provides a foundation from which the differing conceptions of economic theory of the two men can be established.Keywords: Alfred Marshall; Charles Babbage; George Boole; John Venn; Logic; Psychology. (shrink)

The common view that the notion of a Turing machine is directly relevant to AI is criticised. It is argued that computers are the result of a convergence of two strands of development with a long history: development of machines for automating various physical processes and machines for performing abstract operations on abstract entities, e.g. doing numerical calculations. Various aspects of these developments are analysed, along with their relevance to AI, and the similarities between computers viewed in this way (...) and animal brains. This comparison depends on a number of distinctions: between energy requirements and information requirements of machines, between ballistic and online control, between internal and external operations, and between various kinds of autonomy and self-awareness. The ideas are all intuitively familiar to software engineers, though rarely made fully explicit. Most of this has nothing to do with Turing machines or most of the mathematical theory of computation. But it has everything to do with both the scientific task of understanding, modelling or replicating human or animal intelligence and the engineering applications of AI, as well as other applications of computers. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article présente l’analyse d’une expérience de construction de savoirs mathématiques en rapports avec les machines, dans les années 1950 et 1960, à une époque où le calcul analogique cohabitait avec le calcul digital (c’est-à-dire le futur « ordinateur », terme introduit dans la langue française pour désigner principalement les « digital computers »). Les mathématiques en jeu relèvent des théories des systèmes dynamiques, c’est-à-dire des outils mathématiques construits pour comprendre la dynamique de différents types de systèmes, qu’ils soient (...) mathématiques, physiques, biologiques, mécaniques, etc. L’objet du présent article est à la fois un groupe de chercheurs, leurs pratiques de « mathématiques pour l’ingénieur », leurs efforts pour construire des calculateurs analogiques (mécanique ou électronique) pour étudier la dynamique, le programme baptisé « Dynamique théorique » qu’ils se sont fixés, et l’épistémologie des mathématiques sous-tendant leur pratique. (shrink)

Review of Dowek, Gilles, Computation, Proof, Machine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015. Translation of Les Métamorphoses du calcul, Le Pommier, Paris, 2007. Translation from the French by Pierre Guillot and Marion Roman.

Hauser argues that his pocket calculator (Cal) has certain arithmetical abilities: it seems Cal calculates. That calculating is thinking seems equally untendentious. Yet these two claims together provide premises for a seemingly valid syllogism whose conclusion - Cal thinks - most would deny. He considers several ways to avoid this conclusion, and finds them mostly wanting. Either we ourselves can't be said to think or calculate if our calculation-like performances are judged by the standards proposed to rule out Cal; (...) or the standards- e.g., autonomy and self-consciousness- make it impossible to verify whether anything or anyone (save oneself) meets them. While appeals to the intentionality of thought or the unity of minds provide more credible lines of resistance, available accounts of intentionality and mental unity are insufficiently clear and warranted to provide very substantial arguments against Cal's title to be called a thinking thing. Indeed, considerations favoring granting that title are more formidable than is generally appreciated. Rapaport's comments suggest that, on a strong view of thinking, mere calculating is not thinking (and pocket calculators don't think), but on a weak, but unexciting, sense of thinking, pocket calculators do think. He closes with some observations on the implications of this conclusion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

We only regard a system or a process as being “scientific” if it displays the three predominant characteristics of the natural sciences: predictability, repeatability and quantifiability. This by definition precludes intuition, subjective judgement, tacit knowledge, heuristics, dreams, etc. in other words, those attributes which are peculiarly human. Furthermore, this is resulting in a shift from judgment to calculation giving rise, in some cases, to an abject dependency on the machine and an inability to disagree with the outcome or even (...) question it. To tolerate such a situation could be seen as an abdication of professional responsibility. In complex technological and scientific environments, it is sometimes said that those who make best use of computers already know what the answer is (in ball park terms) before the calculation. (shrink)

Machines were introduced as calculating devices to simulate operations carried out by human computers following fixed algorithms. The mathematical study of (paper) machines is the topic of our essay. The first three sections provide necessary logical background, examine the analyses of effective calculability given in the thirties, and describe results that are central to recursion theory, reinforcing the conceptual analyses. In the final section we pursue our investigation in a quite different way and focus on principles that govern the (...) operations of physically realizable machines. (shrink)

The claims that Dr. F. H. George makes on behalf of his machines are obscurely stated. Does he claim that a machine has been made and has actually produced a kind of response which is incalculable, given the specification to which it has been built and also the prescribed conditions, what is put in for the particular performance in question? “Incalculable” does not mean that nobody has bothered to calculate, but that somebody has bothered, that the calculations show that (...) the response in question is not among the calculated ones, that it is not chance or mechanical breakdown, but a specific response to something specific among the given conditions. If he could substantiate this claim, then I would reluctantly agree that some machines are cleverer and more thoughtful than I thought possible, and some men sillier and less thoughtful, for they deliberately design machines to do they know not what. (shrink)

Throughout what is now the more than 50-year history of the computer many theories have been advanced regarding the contribution this machine would make to changes both in the structure of society and in ways of thinking. Like other theories regarding the future, these should also be taken with a pinch of salt. The history of the development of computer technology contains many predictions which have failed to come true and many applications that have not been foreseen. While we (...) must reserve judgment as to the question of the impact on the structure of society and human thought, there is no reason to wait for history when it comes to the question: what are the properties that could give the computer such far-reaching importance? The present book is intended as an answer to this question. The fact that this is a theoretical analysis is due to the nature of the subject. No other possibilities are available because such a description of the properties of the computer must be valid for any kind of application. An additional demand is that the description should be capable of providing an account of the properties which permit and limit these possible applications, just as it must make it possible to characterize a computer as distinct from a) other machines whether clocks, steam engines, thermostats, or mechanical and automatic calculating machines, b) other symbolic media whether printed, mechanical, or electronic and c) other symbolic languages whether ordinary languages, spoken or written or formal languages. This triple limitation, however, (with regard to other machines, symbolic media and symbolic languages) raises a theoretical question as it implies a meeting between concepts of mechanical-deterministic systems, which stem from mathematical physics, and concepts of symbolic systems which stem from the description of symbolic activities common to the humanities. The relationship between science and the humanities has traditionally been seen from a dualistic perspective, as a relationship between two clearly separate subject areas, each studied on its own set of premises and using its own methods. In the present case, however, this perspective cannot be maintained since there is both a common subject area and a new - and specific - kind of interaction between physical and symbolic processes. (shrink)

The tape is divided into squares, each square bearing a single symbol—'0' or '1', for example. This tape is the machine's general-purpose storage medium: the machine is set in motion with its input inscribed on the tape, output is written onto the tape by the head, and the tape serves as a short-term working memory for the results of intermediate steps of the computation. The program governing the particular computation that the machine is to perform is also (...) stored on the tape. A small, fixed program that is 'hard-wired' into the head enables the head to read and execute the instructions of whatever program is on the tape. The machine's atomic operations are very simple—for example, 'move left one square', 'move right one square', 'identify the symbol currently beneath the head', 'write 1 on the square that is beneath the head', and 'write 0 on the square that is beneath the head'. Complexity of operation is achieved by the chaining together of large numbers of these simple atoms. Any universal Turing machine can be programmed to carry out any calculation that can be performed by a human mathematician working with paper and pencil in accordance with some algorithmic method. This is what is meant by calling these machines 'universal'. (shrink)

After a century of cinema, accounts of this cultural form see it as divided between documentation and animation (the real and the magical). Yet the challenge that cinema presented in terms of a relocation of perception from the eye to the machine has become occluded. The shock of cinema in its earliest manifestations resided in the body of the spectator, no longer the site of primary perception, but dependent on an other (the camera, the projector) lacking in human qualities. (...) This article argues that the newly configured body–machine relationship provided by cinema became a marginalized feature of cinematic culture, an ex-centric cinema relegated to the sub-fields of science and educational film. In the mid-20th century the project surfaces spectacularly in the work of pioneering designers Charles and Ray Eames, most poignantly in their film Powers of Ten (first made in 1968, remade in 1977), a journey into the cosmos and back again into the body of a man. Bringing together discourses of space travel, cartography, physics and cinema, the film moves us towards an understanding of visual culture as an apparatus of calculated possibilities, where visualization replaces representation. If we take the Powers of Ten as a non-representational film, an ex-centric cinematic practice, we uncover non-linear and non-representational ways of apprehending the relationship between bodies and matter. This literal line of flight is one path that cinema may have taken. Its presence, however, is detectable outside of the cinema, in the software programs of electronic cartography copyrighted as Google Earth. The human body is not made virtual by its engagement with calculated visualization but is in turn part of the field of enquiry, equally porous, and definable in various scales and in different dimensions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Black Notebooks, Heidegger ascribes in 1938/9 to the Jewish race an “empty rationality and calculative ability,” in his view the cause of its “worldlessness.” To assess this characterisation, I present Heidegger’s theories of history as a decline in Being and Time and in his later history of Being. For this purpose, I discuss his notions of Rechnen, Machenschaft, and Geviert, several existentialia from Being and Time, and Heidegger’s identification of modern machination and modern technology. Furthermore, I examine Heidegger’s (...) attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust. I present his alignment of the unconcealment of modernity and the Jewish race, and compare his theory of machination with the texts “Positionality” and “The Question concerning Technology”. Heidegger’s notes about the Jews in the Black Notebooks after 1944 confirm that he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently,” as I already argued in a paper from 1995. (shrink)

In a 1955 lecture the physicist Richard Feynman reflected on the place of doubt within scientific practice. ‘Permit us to question, to doubt, to not be sure’, proposed Feynman, ‘it is possible to live and not to know’. In our contemporary world, the science of machine learning algorithms appears to transform the relations between science, knowledge and doubt, to make even the most doubtful event amenable to action. What might it mean to ‘leave room for doubt’ or ‘to live (...) and not to know’ in our contemporary culture, where the algorithm plays a major role in the calculability of doubts? I propose a posthuman mode of doubt that decentres the liberal humanist subject. In the science of machine learning algorithms the doubts of human and technological beings nonetheless dwell together, opening onto a future that is never fully reduced to the single output signal, to the optimised target. (shrink)

Machines were introduced as calculating devices to simulate operations carried out by human computors following fixed algorithms: this is true for the early mechanical calculators devised by Pascal and Leibniz, for the analytical engine built by Babbage, and the theoretical machines introduced by Turing. The distinguishing feature of the latter is their universality: They are claimed to be able to capture any algorithm whatsoever and, conversely, any procedure they can carry out is evidently algorithmic. The study of such "paper (...) machines" by mathematical means is the topic of our contribution. This is not only in accord with its usual understanding in computer science, but conceptually and historically right, when we recall the purpose for which Turing machines were introduced. (shrink)

My pocket calculator (Cal) has certain arithmetical abilities: it seems Cal calculates. That calculating is thinking seems equally untendentious. Yet these two claims together provide premises for a seemingly valid syllogism whose conclusion -- Cal thinks -- most would deny. I consider several ways to avoid this conclusion, and find them mostly wanting. Either we ourselves can't be said to think or calculate if our calculation-like performances are judged by the standards proposed to rule out Cal; or the standards (...) -- e.g., autonomy and self-consciousness -- make it impossible to verify whether anything or anyone (save myself) meets them. While appeals to the intentionality of thought or the unity of minds provide more credible lines of resistance, available accounts of intentionality and mental unity are insufficiently clear and warranted to provide very substantial arguments against Cal's title to be called a thinking thing. Indeed, considerations favoring granting that title are more formidable than generally appreciated. (shrink)

A wide range of expressions are predicable literally or primarily only of human beings and of creatures that behave like them. The English word 'mind' is connected primarily with the intellect and the will. To have a mind to do something is to be inclined or tempted to do it, and to have half a mind to do something is to be sorely tempted, perhaps against one's better judgement. Artificial‐intelligence scientists insist that they are already building machines that can think (...) and see, recognize and identify, make choices and decisions. Chess‐playing machines can 'beat' chess‐masters, and computers can 'calculate' far more efficiently and quickly than mathematicians. Machines, unlike living creatures, do not have a body, although they are bodies. Machines and their parts have purposes and functions: viz. those which they were designed to fulfil. (shrink)

The aim of Dimitris Vardoulakis’s paper, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, is to provide the foundation for a critique of aimless action by tracing its genesis to Heidegger’s putative misinterpretation of Aristotelian phronēsis (practical wisdom) in the 1920s. Inasmuch as ‘the ineffectual’—the name Vardoulakis gives to action devoid of ends—plays a crucial role in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, he thereby seeks to diagnose and to provide an aetiology of (...) an illness afflicting contemporary thought. In my response, I will first argue that, while Vardoulakis is right to identify an emphasis on the ineffectual in Heidegger, he is mistaken about its origin. Heidegger does not strip phronēsis of instrumentality, nor does he mistranslate Nichomachean Ethics 1139a31–32. Second, I trace an alternative source for the ineffectual, which is not simply a negative alternative to technological machination but stems from a positive experience of what Meister Eckhart, and Heidegger in his wake, called life without why. Finally, I look at a couple of texts, including one discussed by Vardoulakis, in which even the later Heidegger is not entirely dismissive of calculative instrumentality but instead assigns the latter to a secondary, restricted site of competence. (shrink)

La thèse de Church-Turing stipule que toute fonction calculable est calculable par une machine de Turing. En distinguant, à la suite de nombreux auteurs, une forme algorithmique de la thèse de Church-Turing portant sur les fonctions calculables par un algorithme d’une forme empirique de cette même thèse, portant sur les fonctions calculables par une machine, il devient possible de poser une nouvelle question : les limites empiriques du calcul sont-elles identiques aux limites des algorithmes? Ou existe-t-il un moyen (...) empirique d’effectuer un calcul qu’aucun algorithme ne permet d’effectuer? Je montrerai ici la pertinence philosophique de cette question. Elle interroge la capacité de processus symboliques comme les calculs à simuler certains processus empiriques. Elle permet également d’étudier le statut épistémologique des calculs réalisés par des machines. S’il existait une fonction calculable par une machine sans être calculable par un algorithme, il existerait un problème mathématique qui serait soluble par un dispositif empirique, sans être soluble par aucune méthode mathématique a priori. (shrink)

After the First World War mathematics and the organisation of ballistic computations at Aberdeen Proving Ground changed considerably. This was the basis for the development of a number of computing aids that were constructed and used during the years 1920 to 1950. This article looks how the computational organisation forms and changes the instruments of calculation. After the differential analyzer relay-based machines were built by Bell Labs and, finally, the ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers, was built, to satisfy (...) the need for computational power in ballistics during the second World War. (shrink)

In this article, a mixed integer linear program model is proposed for the production, lot sizing, and scheduling of automotive plastic components to minimize the setup, inventory, stockout, and backorder costs, by taking into account injection molds as the main index to schedule on parallel flexible injection machines. The proposed MILP considers the minimum and maximum inventory capacities and penalizes stockout. A relevant characteristic of the modeled problem is the dependence between mold setups to produce plastic components. The lot sizing (...) and scheduling problem solution results in the assignment of molds to machines during a specific time period and in the calculation of the number of components to be produced, which is often called lot size, following a sequence-dependent setup time. Depending on the machine on which the mold is setup, the number of units to be produced will be distinct because machines differ from one another. The stock coverage, defined in demand days, is also included in the MILP to avoid backorders, which is highly penalized in the automotive supply chain. Added to this, the proposed model is extended by considering setup common operators to respond to and fulfill the constraints that appear in automotive plastic enterprises. In this regard, the MILP presented solves a lot-sizing and scheduling problem, emerged in a second-tier supplier of a real automotive supply chain. Finally, this article validates the MILP by performing experiments with different sized instances, including small, medium, and large. The large-sized dataset is characterized by replicating the amount of data used in the real enterprise, which is the object of this study. The goodness of the model is evaluated with the computational time and the deviation of the obtained results as regards to the optimal solution. (shrink)

The rapid pace of development over the last few decades in the domain of machine learning mirrors the advances made in the field of quantum computing. It is natural to ask whether the conventional machine learning algorithms could be optimized using the present-day noisy intermediate-scale quantum technology. There are certain computational limitations while training a machine learning model on a classical computer. Using quantum computation, it is possible to surpass these limitations and carry out such calculations in (...) an optimized manner. This study illustrates the working of the quantum support vector machine classification model which guarantees an exponential speed-up over its typical alternatives. This research uses the quantum SVM model to solve the classification task of a malignant breast cancer diagnosis. This study also demonstrates a comparative analysis of distinct forms of SVM algorithms concerning their time complexity and performances on standard evaluation metrics, namely accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, to exemplify the supremacy of quantum SVM over its conventional variants. (shrink)

This article traces the relationship between neoliberal thought and neural networks through the work of Friedrich Hayek, Donald O. Hebb, and Frank Rosenblatt. For all three, networked systems could accomplish acts of evolution, change, and learning impossible for individual neurons or subjects—minds, machines, and economies could therefore all autonomously evolve and adapt without government. These three figures, I argue, were also symptoms of a broader reconceptualization of reason, decision making, and “freedom” in relation to the state and technology that occurred (...) throughout the 1950s–1970s. I also argue that this genealogy of decision-making underpins contemporary relations between machine learning, reactionary politics, and neoliberal economics. (shrink)

The very rapid developments in the field of computers in the last few years have made it possible to solve, with their aid, problems utterly new in character. The first "generation" of electronic computers, in the 1950's, was one of capricious and cumbersome vacuum-tube devices, but even it brought a fundamental change in our notions of the kind of tasks machines were capable of solving. The second "generation" - transistorized computers - is a substantial improvement. More compact and dependable, these (...) machines have come into wide use in the control of various processes. Today the third "generation" is in birth, consisting of microminiaturized computers employing solid-state circuits. Such computers are no larger than a small suitcase and it is supposed, not without reason, that in the future they will become pocket-size. It is clear that these possibilities create an utterly new situation. Whereas formerly there was still some validity in posing the question of a clear-cut division of functions between man and a large stationary computer that carried out certain calculations on his instructions, today the question of man-computer interaction takes the center of the stage. (shrink)

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes (...) deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment. (shrink)

Background and ObjectivesFocal cortical dysplasia is a type of malformations of cortical development and one of the leading causes of drug-resistant epilepsy. Postoperative results improve the diagnosis of lesions on structural MRIs. Advances in quantitative algorithms have increased the identification of FCD lesions. However, due to significant differences in size, shape, and location of the lesion in different patients and a big deal of time for the objective diagnosis of lesion as well as the dependence of individual interpretation, sensitive approaches (...) are required to address the challenge of lesion diagnosis. In this research, a FCD computer-aided diagnostic system to improve existing methods is presented.MethodsMagnetic resonance imaging data were collected from 58 participants. Morphological and intensity-based features were calculated for each cortical surface and inserted into an artificial neural network. Statistical examinations evaluated classifier efficiency.ResultsNeural network evaluation metrics—sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy—were 96.7, 100, and 98.6%, respectively. Furthermore, the accuracy of the classifier for the detection of the lobe and hemisphere of the brain, where the FCD lesion is located, was 84.2 and 77.3%, respectively.ConclusionAnalyzing surface-based features by automated machine learning can give a quantitative and objective diagnosis of FCD lesions in presurgical assessment and improve postsurgical outcomes. (shrink)

On présente trois projets de théories des machines: la « mécanologie » de l’architecte Jacques Lafitte (1932), inspirée de l’évolution biologique; l’ «Analyse mécanique» de Louis Couffignal, spécialiste des machines à calculer (1938), qui préfigure l’analyse fonctionnelle; et la théorie algébrique des machines du mathématicien Jacques Riguet (début des années 1950). À cette période, les trois hommes sont membres du Cercle d’études cybernétiques. On s’intéresse au dialogue des projets, aux axes d’unification et de divergence, aux styles, aux stratégies et postulats (...) de ces trois candidats à la généralisation convergeant vers la référence constituée par la cybernétique. (shrink)

Dans l'un des rares textes de Wittgenstein où il est question des machines de Turing, l'auteur écrit que celles-ci « sont les hommes, qui calculent ». L'étrangeté apparente de l'aphorisme disparaît si l'on dissipe certaines confusions fréquentes relatives aux machines de Turing. Une fois éclairci le sens littéral de ce passage des Remarques sur la philosophie de la psychologie, on peut s'interroger sur ce que Wittgenstein veut dire, dans le § 1096. Comme souvent chez l'auteur, on peut lire dans ce (...) paragraphe une remarque grammaticale qui vise à éclaircir une difficulté philosophique : la possibilité de définir ce qu'est un calcul. (shrink)

In this research work, a user-friendly decision support framework is developed to analyze the behavior of Pakistani students in academics. The purpose of this article is to analyze the performance of the Pakistani students using an intelligent decision support system (DSS) based on the three-level machine learning (ML) technique. The neural network used a three-level classifier approach for the prediction of Pakistani student achievement. A self-recorded dataset of 1,011 respondents of graduate students of English and Physics courses are used. (...) The ten interviews along with ten questions were conducted to determine the perception of the individual student. The chi-squared ( χ ) \left(\chi ) test was applied to test statistical significancy of the questionnaire. The statistical calculations and computation of data were performed by using the statistical package of IBMM SPSS version 21.0. The seven different algorithms were tested to improve the data classification. The Java-based environment was used for the development of numerous prediction classifiers. C4.5 algorithm shows the finest accuracy, whereas Naïve Bayes (NB) algorithm shows the least. The results depict that the classifier’s efficiency was improved by using a three-level proposed scheme from 83.2% to 88.8%. This prediction has shown remarkable results when compared with the individual level classifier technique of ML. This improvement in the accuracy of DSSs is used to identify more efficiently the gray areas in the education stratum of Pakistan. This will pave a path for making policies in the higher education system of Pakistan. The presented framework can be deployed on different platforms under numerous operating systems. (shrink)

This paper presents an effort to induce a Bayesian belief network (BBN) from crime data, namely the national crime victimization survey (NCVS). This BBN defines a joint probability distribution over a set of variables that were employed to record a set of crime incidents, with particular focus on characteristics of the victim. The goals are to generate a BBN to capture how characteristics of crime incidents are related to one another, and to make this information available to domain specialists. The (...) novelty associated with the study reported in this paper lies in the use of a Bayesian network to represent a complex data set to non-experts in a way that facilitates automated analysis. Validation of the BBN’s ability to approximate the joint probability distribution over the set of variables entailed in the NCVS data set is accomplished through a variety of sources including mathematical techniques and human experts for appropriate triangulation. Validation results indicate that the BBN induced from the NCVS data set is a good joint probability model for the set of attributes in the domain, and accordingly can serve as an effective query tool. (shrink)