The Problem of Monotonicity and the Skeleton

The premise p of a reasoning is usually a complex statement reflecting the information of departure and consisting in the conjunction of other statements, p = p1 · (p2 · (…(pn). Such p can be written without parenthesis provided conjunction is associative, and then with the possibility of placing the sub-indexes in any ordering if it is commutative; on the contrary neither parenthesis, nor ordering can be avoided.

Fuzziness, Philosophy, and Medicine

In his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, a book that in our view is qualified to be the starting point of a new discourse in the fields of Theoretical Medicine and Philosophy of Medicine, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh uses two scientific theories that are studied and regarded in many specific sectors of hard and human sciences but not globally well-known in Philosophy of Medicine: Fuzzy Set Theory and Structuralism. This opening contribution briefly discusses those approaches, and introduces the musing, ideas, counterpoints and contributions from many other authors, among them philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and researchers from different and competing disciplines, that constitute t…

Common Reasoning in a Computational Context

In the field of Computation Science, ‘Commonsense Reasoning’ usually expresses the formalization of Logic systems in order to efficiently automate replication of human performances. This is done by employing methodologies from Computational Learning, and deals with the construction of information of both deductive and inductive nature. The process often happens in an ecologic, natural context (i.e., in the real world, not in an artificial laboratory setting), and in presence of incomplete and imprecise information.

A Few Remarks on the Roots of Fuzziness Measures

In the forty years from the introduction of Fuzzy Entropy, fuzziness measures has been employed in many different fields pertaining both hard and soft sciences, from medicine to art, from engineering to linguistics. If we look back at the road traveled, we can safely state that on of the main reasons for this enduring presence, and maybe the most underrated, is the truly uniqueness of the concept of fuzziness. Far from a reminiscence, this consideration is more of a projection on the future of fuzziness: we strongly believe that the innovation implicit in the concept, while having sometime hindered in the past its perception as a powerful paradigm and tool for the hard science community, wi…

Quasi-transitivity

Seeing ordinary reasoning in the setting of the Poincaré continua by means of T-Indistinguishability Operators, opens a window towards the possibility of considering alternative types of transitivity. Let us concentrate on the so called quasi-transitive law.

The Reciprocal Influences among Motivation, Personality Traits, and Game Habits for Playing Pokémon GO

This article reports a study exploring motivations of Pokémon Game use, individual differences related to personality traits, and game habits. First, it analyzed Pokémon GO motivations through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) by administering online the Pokémon GO Motivational Scale to a group of Italian gamers (N = 560). Successively, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted testing three factorial models of Pokémon Game motivations on a selected random sample (N = 310). Results showed a three-factor model of Pokémon GO Game motivations (i.e. Personal Needs, Social Needs and Recreation), accounting for 68.9% of total variance plus a general higher order factor that best fits the…

Computational Intelligence and Citizen Communication in the Smart City

Information and communication are at the core of the intelligent city of tomorrow, and the key components of a smart city cannot prescind from data exchanges and interconnectedness. Citizen communication is an integral part of the smart city’s development plans: freedom of information and involvement in collective decisions, e-democracy and decision-making feedback can be greatly enhanced in an intelligent city, and, among other smart city components, foster a new era of participation and wise decisions. In this contribution we describe the methodologies that can be implemented in order to correctly develop automatic recognition systems for citizen communication, paying special attention to…

Varieties of Vagueness, Fuzziness and a few foundational (and ontological) questions

In this paper we discuss the multifaceted nature of vagueness, the limits of (standard) set theory in dealing with the foundational aspects that a really innovating theory of vagueness should manifest, and the difficul- ties in outlining the possible features that such a type of new formalism should exhibit in order to be able to deal with such innovative aspects. We shall highlight some aspects of the role that Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) can play in this process.

Having the Final Say: Machine Support of Ethical Decisions of Doctors

Machines that support highly complex decisions of doctors have been a reality for almost half a century. In the 1950s, computer-supported medical diagnostic systems started with “punched cards in a shoe box”. In the 1960s and 1970s medicine was, to a certain extent, transformed into a quantitative science by intensive interdisciplinary research collaborations of experts from medicine, mathematics and electrical engineering; This was followed by a second shift in research on machine support of medical decisions from numerical probabilistic to knowledge based approaches. Solutions of the later form came to be known as (medical) expert systems, knowledge based systems research or Artificial In…

Facebook as a Small World: a topological hypothesis

Facebook is becoming a pervasive entity as its social, cultural and media ramifications grow deep and entrenched in our daily life. Its nature of a complex system of interactions, bearing a strong similarity to networks built through individual choices and systems shaped by evolu- tionary pressure, makes it an interesting target for research. Scale-free Small World networks, recently popularized by Barabasi, are a topological class pertaining to both these domains, whose members have resilience to disruption and short intermediate connections between nodes. In this paper we show that the topological structure of a specific subset of Facebook, gathered using data from a self-report online qu…

The Fuzzy Logic Gambit as a Paradigm of Lotfi’s Proposals

Lotfi Zadeh, in discussing the future directions the discipline should have taken, has insisted in highlighting what he called `the Fuzzy Logic Gambit' , whose basic idea is that, when dealing with the solution of a problem through the use of Fuzzy Logic, two different type of precisions exist: ``precision in value'', which is connected to the ability of measuring reality, and ``precision in meaning'', which is what we want to attain when dealing with the real world. While the final goal of Fuzzy Logic is to provide some degree of precision to what is less precise in nature, he has brilliantly suggested that this can be obtained by bartering between precision in value and precision in meani…

Fuzziness and social life: Informal notions, formal definitions

A clear bidirectional path exists between everyday social and cultural life and the formal notions of uncertainty. If in recent times there has been a resurgence of the contribution of the formal notions of fuzziness and vagueness to disciplines such as aesthetics, medicine and more generally humanities, it is also true that concepts and phenomena from everyday reality are continually and usefully reused in order to build formal definitions that are more akin to the essence of things. In this paper, some notions connected with the handling of uncertainty, and particularly with FST, are outlined with the aim of benefitting the spontaneous emergence of new paths toward an unified theory of un…

Agents Displacement in Arbitrary Geometrical Spaces: An Evolutionary Computation based Approach

In many different social contexts, communication allows a collective intelligence to emerge. However, a correct way of exchanging information usually requires determined topological configurations of the agents involved in the process. Such a configuration should take into account several parameters, e.g. agents positioning, their proximity and time efficiency of communication. Our aim is to present an algorithm, based on evolutionary programming, which optimizes agents placement on arbitrarily shaped areas. In order to show its ability to deal with arbitrary bi-dimensional topologies, this algorithm has been tested on a set of differently shaped areas that present concavities, convexities …

Preferential Biases for Texts That Include Neuroscientific Jargon

The results of an experiment of preferential biases for texts that include neuroscientific jargon are presented. Such preferential bias has been reported even when the presented jargon is meaningless. In a variation of the well-known Weisberg et al. experiment, a group of undergraduate students ( N = 150; females 48%, males 52%, other 0%; M age = 22.4 year, SD = 2.6) chose between two possible explanations for a psychological phenomenon: a correct explanation or a circular restatement of facts. Unrelated neuroscientific terms were added to one of the explanations. Participants were asked to choose the correct explanation. There was a statistically significant preference for the explanation …

Fuzziness, Cognition and Cybernetics: a historical perspective

In the present paper, we connect some old reflections about the relationships existing between the theory of fuzzy sets and cybernetics with modern, contemporary analyses of the crucial (better: unavoidable) role that fuzziness plays in the attempts at scientifically describing aspects of information sciences. The connection, which has a basic conceptual origin, has been triggered also by the recent 50th anniversary of Norbert Wiener’s death which has been instrumental in looking again at some crucial aspects of the birth of information sciences in the midst of the last century. Fuzzy sets are an essential part of this revolution and share all the innovations as well as the difficulties of …

Symmetry as an Intrinsically Dynamic Feature

Symmetry is one of the most prominent spatial relations perceived by humans, and has a relevant role in attentive mechanisms regarding both visual and auditory systems. The aim of this paper is to establish symmetry, among the likes of motion, depth or range, as a dynamic feature in artificial vision. This is achieved in the first instance by assessing symmetry estimation by means of algorithms, putting emphasis on erosion and multi- resolution approaches, and confronting two ensuing problems: the isolation of objects from the context, and the pertinence (or lack thereof) of some salient points, such as the centre of mass. Next a geometric model is illustrated and detailed, and the problem …

The Webbed Emergence of Fuzzy Sets and Computer Science Education from Electrical Engineering

Historically, Computer science emerged from electrical engineering and from mathematics in the 1960s. From the content of some unpublished documents and also some rather less-well-known papers by Lotfi A. Zadeh it is argued that the emergences of Computer science and Fuzzy Set Theory have been interlinked. Zadeh’s task as Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department in Berkeley in the 1960s, his activities in Education of Engineering and his creation of the theory of Fuzzy sets generated his view on the scientific discipline of Com- puter science as a fuzzy set. This view could establish a new approach to history and philosophy of science.

Personality Variables as Predictors of Facebook Usage

This study investigates the role of personality factors as predictors of Facebook usage. Data concerning Facebook usage and personality factors from 654 Facebook users were gathered using a web survey. Using path analysis, the results showed Openness was a predictor of Facebook early adoption, Conscientiousness with sparing use, Extraversion with long sessions and abundant friendships, and Neuroticism with high frequency of sessions. The possible role of Agreeableness in predicting low session frequency and friendships needs further validation.

Birkhoff's aesthetics, Arnheim's entropy. Some remarks on complexity and fuzzy entropy in arts

A judgement of aesthetic in arts is, by sheer consensus, a daunting task that requires evaluation of a whole host of endogenous and exogenous cultural factors. A few of them can actually provide very useful hints in tackling foundational problems in Information Science in a more natural setting than what is usually provided by a typical engineering stance. This interaction can however work the other way about, as instruments from the Information and Computer Science toolkit may help in focusing the less explored features of art and its evaluation. When all the social, historical, hermeneutical and political considerations are stripped from the living flesh of the piece, we lose most of wha…

Face Expression Recognition through Broken Symmetries

Security systems, criminology, physical access control and man-machine interactions are examples of applications where recognition of human faces may be crucial. In the present paper a new signature, based on a measure of axial symmetry called DST, is proposed as a significant feature to analyze facial expressions. The measure of symmetry is an elaborate difference between the internal and external symmetry kernels of an object. The idea here is to use the evolution of the symmetry measure of a face over an ordered set of its sub-images. We claim that different evolutionary trends will represent different face expressions. The proposed signature has been tested on several face databases (ps…

A REST-based framework to support non-invasive and early coeliac disease diagnosis

The health sector has traditionally been one of the early adopters of databases, from the most simple Electronic Health Record (formerly Computer-Based Patient Record) systems in use in general practice, hospitals and intensive care units to big data, multidata based systems used to support diagnosis and care decisions. In this paper we present a framework to support non-invasive and early diagnosis of coeliac disease. The proposed framework makes use of well-known technologies and techniques, both hardware and software, put together in a novel way. The main goals of our framework are: (1) providing users with a reliable and fast repository of a large amount of data; (2) to make such reposi…

"The human use of human beings": Interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and all that in biophysics and beyond.

Abstract Biophysics, just by looking at its name, indicates an interdisciplinary scientific activity, although the notion of interdisciplinarity, as such, seems to be not widely or specifically discussed by biophysicists. The same seems to have happened as well in the early stages of the development of cybernetics, notably in Norbert Wiener's writings. This situation seems to contrast with what has happened in subsequent developments of cybernetics ideas, notably in general system theory and cognitive sciences. After a few general reflections on the notion of interdisciplinarity, its sophisticated variants and the path leading to the birth of cognitive science, we shall refer to Wiener's th…

Introduction

In the intention of the authors, this booklet does not want to be a textbook; instead, it contains some reflections that aim to guide ‘Computing with Words and Percep- tions’, Zadeh’s final view on his Fuzzy Logic, towards its future as a new science of both Language and Reasoning. Towards an experimental and theoretical science concerning the Natural Phenomena of Language, Thinking and Reasoning, in rela- tionship with Neurosciences, whose possibilities are foreseen by the authors.

A Formal Skeleton of Commonsense Reasoning

After referring several times to Commonsense or Ordinary Reasoning, let’s devote a few pages to present a (minimal) mathematical model of it that can be seen as the ‘Skeleton’ of Reasoning, since it is defined by a set of few, simple laws appearing in the models of particular and specialized modes of reasoning like, for instance: Boolean Algebras for the reasoning with precise concepts; Orto-modular lattices for the reasoning with the concepts of Quantum Physics; and also in the so called Algebras of Fuzzy Sets for the reasoning with imprecise concepts, and among them De Morgan-Kleene algebras. All these models have interesting applications.

Designing Cognitive Cities

The following text intends to give an introduction into some of the basic ideas which determined the conception of this book. Thus, the first part of this article introduces the terms “City”, “Smart City” and “Cognitive City”. The second part gives an overview of design theories and approaches such as Action Design Research and Ontological Design (a concept in-the-making), in order to deduce from a theoretical point of view some of the principles that needs to be taken into account when designing the Cognitive City. The third part highlights some concrete techniques that can be usefully applied to the problem of citizen communication for Cognitive Cities (namely Metaheuristics, Fuzzy Sets a…

Fuzziness in Italy – Traces of a scattered history

The history of Fuzziness in Italy is varied and scattered among a num- ber of research groups. As a matter of fact, “fuzziness” spread in Italy through a sort of spontaneous diffusion, and, also subsequently, no one felt the need to cre- ate some “national” common structure like an Association or similar things. Since a cohesive retelling would be next to impossible, a few members of the Italian fuzzy community have been asked to recount their experience and express their hopes for the future.

Conclusions for Part II

Human beings are animals endowed with a great curiosity. They continuously ask themselves how things are, where they come from, and where they go to. Questioning is at the origins of reasoning; and possibly, without the capability of self-questioning and guessing, neither directed thinking, nor reasoning, will exist. Their existence makes them a matter of study.

Logics for Cognitive Sciences: how questions arising from Cognitive Sciences could benefit from a logic approach

Cognitive Sciences can be seen as one of the paradigms that have replaced each other along the last seventy years, in order to promote interdisciplinarity. Logic in Cognitive Sciences presents itself with a double role: as a formal tool for studying and modelling some problems and questions, as well as a topic to be understood in itself. In this contribution some brief hints at where in Cognitive Science a tighter, more imprecise Logic should apply are given.

A fuzzy approach to the evaluation of image complexity

The inherently multidimensional problem of evaluating the complexity of an image is of a certain relevance in both computer science and cognitive psychology. Computer scientists usually analyze spatial dimensions in order to deal with automatic vision problems, such as feature extraction. Psychologists seem more interested in the temporal dimension of complexity, as a means to explore attentional models. Is it possible to define, by merging both approaches, a more general index of visual complexity? The aim of this paper is the definition of objective measures of image complexity that fits with the so named perceived time. Towards the end we have defined a fuzzy mathematical model of visual…

Fuzziness, Cognition and Cybernetics: an outlook on future

In the present paper, we connect some old reflections about the relationships existing between the theory of fuzzy sets and cybernetics with modern, contemporary analyses of the crucial (better: unavoidable) role that fuzziness plays in the attempts at scientifically describing aspects of information sciences. The connection, which has a basic conceptual origin, has been triggered also by the recent 50th anniversary of Norbert Wiener’ death which has been instrumental in looking again at some crucial aspects of the birth of information sciences in the midst of last Century. Fuzzy sets are an essential part of this revolution and share all the innovations as well as the difficulties of this …

THE INFLUENCE OF TEXTURE SYMMETRY IN MARKER POINTING: EXPERIMENTING WITH HUMANS AND ALGORITHMS

Symmetry plays a fundamental role in aiding the visual system, to organize its environmental stimuli and to detect visual patterns of natural and artificial objects. Various kinds of symmetry exist, and we will discuss how internal symmetry due to textures influences the choice of direction in visual tasks. Two experiments are presented: the first, with human subjects, deals with the effect of textures on preferences for a pointing direction. The second emulates the performances obtained in the first through the use of an algorithm based on a physic metaphor. Results from both experiments are shown and comment.

Specificities and Vagaries of Medicine from the Viewpoint of Hard Sciences

Among many other beautiful reflections on the ontology of medicine, in his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, Sadegh Zadeh promotes Fuzzy Sets Theory among the basic instruments of logic for medical understanding, highlights the importance of vagueness in the medical language and as an intrinsic property of medical epistemology, and invokes the clear advantages of a medical fuzzy taxonomy to overcome the binary concept of being healthy/ill. We briefly discuss these aspects, relating them to the peculiarity of Fuzziness as the only purely scientific notion among the foundational tools needed to define an analytic philosophy of medicine more concerned with an explicatum of the notio…

Fuzziness: Came for the View, Stayed for the Same

The first time I came across Fuzzy Sets, my first point of contact with Soft Computing, I was a young and inexperienced student of Computer Science in my hometown University. I had just completed the first semester, and as an aside of an image processing curriculum a loud-spoken, very kinetic lecturer spent a couple of hours introducing us to the mysteries of the idea of degree and Fuzzy arithmetic. The whole thing had a sort of secret sect bent, something like the secret tools that the powers to be don’t want you to know and use – a probably unwitting attitude I have seen many times in the community and that has harmed more than helped, but that on an unexperienced and young student as mys…

Fuzzy Set Theory as a Methodological Bridge between Hard Sciences and Humanities

In this paper, we will investigate the possible role of fuzzy set theory (FST), and more generally the ensemble of technologies and theoretical approaches known as soft computing, as a methodological bridge between hard sciences and humanities. We will try, building on previous works, to investigate the “family links” between these disciplines and show how FST may be of help in promoting a connection between the “two cultures”. We will discuss Carnap and his paradox of explication, the dilemma between imagination and rigor according to Bateson, the problem of interdisciplinarity, and the consequences of precision and exactness. C

A very brief history of soft computing: Fuzzy Sets, artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computation

This paper gives a brief presentation of history of Soft Computing considered as a mix of three scientific disciplines that arose in the mid of the 20th century: Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Neural Networks, and Evolutionary Computation. The paper shows the genesis and the historical development of the three disciplines and also their meeting in a coalition in the 1990s.

Early usage of Pokémon Go and its personality correlates

Pokmon Go is a popular augmented reality mobile game. Players find imaginary creatures by wandering into the real world, which can then be collected and used in combat. In this paper an assessment of Pokmon Go early usage in the Italian community and of its correlates with the Big Five personality traits is given. The resulting profile of early PG player is one of a more Introverted, close person with high agreeability and conscientiousness. Extraversion and Stability are positively correlated with the collection part of the game, while Agreeableness is a negative predictor thereof. Openness is correlated to the level of proficiency. Display Omitted We assess Pokmon Go early usage and its c…

Conclusions for Part I

Thanks to thinking, memory, and language, human beings can dedicate a non-minor part of their time to tell, themselves or the others, events, descriptions, true or imagined histories, etc. Part of the human conversation consists in telling, and most of the times reasoning starts from the self-telling of something.

Some reflections on Fuzzy Set Theory as an Experimental Science

The aim of this paper is to open a critical discussion on the claim, recently presented in the community and especially heralded by Enric Trillas, that fuzzy logic should be seen as an “experimental science”. The first interesting aspect of such remark is whether and in which way such position has consequences on the real development of the research, or if it is simply a (different) way of looking at the same phenomenon. As a consequence, we investigate the possible connection to Zadeh’s distiction between Fuzzy logic in a restricted sense and in a general sense. We shall argue that Trillas’s claim not only strongly supports the necessity for such a distinction, but provides a path of inves…

Logic and Computational Aspects of Computing with Speculations

A novel, alternative approach to the fundamental logic of common- sense reasoning extending the concepts put forward by Lotfi A. Zadeh’s Computing with Words has been recently advanced by Enric Trillas, based on the idea that in order to allow for creativity in automated reasoning, the standard operations of inducing and abducing must be complemented by guessing, or speculating. In this paper, after a recall of Trillas’ skeleton formal model, a reflection is made on the computational aspects of such approach. As computational complexity of such approach generally increases exponentially, hints are given on how to tackle such growth and render more manageable the mechanisation of commonsense…

An Overview of the Fuzzy Calculi

What has been discussed up to now allows us to assume that the roots of fuzzy sets are in Language and, thus, that Fuzzy Logic deals with both Language and Commonsense Reasoning. Fuzzy Logic’s main goal is the representation of statements whose meaning is not precise, but it can as well capture the case in which statements are precise.

In the Future Everyone Will Be a Fuzzy Set: Enric Trillas, FST as an Experimental Science and the Relationship with Theory of Concepts

Enrique Trillas Ruiz has had a long association with Italy, and for ten years now has been in the Scientific committee of WILF, the International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic born and breed in our country; it was not until WILF 2009, which our research group organised in Terrasini (Palermo) and in which organising committee I sat, that I become aware of the “complementary soul” of Enric’s work. Up to that point I had stumbled upon his papers on fuzzy operators and logic, mostly the joint works of him and Claudi Alsina, such as [1, 2, 21], but my research interest at the time seemed to me away and far apart from the ensemble of symbols and logical implication: I was trying to use the elements of …

50(ish) years of Fuzzy Logic in Europe In memory of Lotfi Asker Zadeh

Network of Concepts and Ideas

We present the results of an experiment designed to investigate the way information is organized and stored in the human brain. In particular, we are using controlled stimuli to reverse engineer the networks of ideas and concepts in order to answer the following questions. (1) Are the networks of ideas and concepts in the human brain invoked by verbal and visual stimuli distinct from each other? The answer appears to be no for the network of ideas and inconclusive for the network of concepts. (2) What is the topology of these networks? Our experimental results show that both are small-world networks, with the network of ideas being random and the network of concepts scale-free.

Out of a creative jumble of ideas in the middle of last Century: Wiener, interdisciplinarity, and all that

Is Biophysics an interdisciplinary science? In order to answer this rhetorical question, it can be useful to look back at history of disciplines, as well as that of the scientific institutions helping their development. In this contribution some aspects of the unusual hodgepodge of concepts involving Biophysics, the legacy of Cybernetics, cognitive science and the central figure of Norbert Wiener are presented and discussed.

Modelling the Effects of Internal Textures on Symmetry Detection Using Fuzzy Operators

Symmetry is a crucial dimension which aids the visual system, human as well as artificial, to organize its environment and to recognize forms and objects. In humans, detection of symmetry, especially bilateral and rotational, is considered to be a primary factor for discovering and interacting with the surrounding environment. Rotational symmetry detecting can be affected by less-known factors, such as the stimulus internal texture. This paper explores how fuzzy operators can be usefully employed in modeling the effects of the internal texture on symmetry detection. To this aim, we selected two symmetry detection algorithms, based on different computational models, and compared their output…

Attentional vs computational complexity measures in observing paintings

Because of the great heterogeneity of subjects and styles, esthetic perception delineates a special and elusive field of research in vision, which represents an interesting challenge for cognitive science tools. With specific regard to the role of visual complexity, in this paper we present an experiment aimed to measure this dimension in a heterogeneous set of paintings. We compared perceived time complexity measures - based on a temporal estimation paradigm - with physical and statistical properties of the paintings, obtaining a strong correlation between psychological and computational results.

Looking for Some Historical Roots

Knowledge comes from the observation that what surrounds us is provoked by the questions people poses when thinking on it; is reachecorrespondingd thanks to reasoning, and usually through establishing hypotheses and further testing them and their consequences against the reality. Speculation lays at the basic level of both ‘thinking on it’, and ‘establishing and testing hypotheses’.

The Dimensions of Facebook Addiction as Measured by Facebook Addiction Italian Questionnaire and Their Relationships with Individual Differences

Abstract The studies reported analyze the factorial structure of Facebook Addiction Italian Questionnaire (FAIQ), a variant of 20-item Young's Internet Addiction Test (IAT). In Study 1, we tested FAIQ psychometric properties using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). In Study 2, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to verify the FAIQ factorial structure identified through EFA. Results from CFA confirm the presence of a four-factor model accounting for 58 percent of total variance, plus a general higher order factor that best fits the data. Further relationships between FAIQ factor scores, personality, and Facebook usage have been explored.

A Fuzzy Approach to the Role of Symmetry in Shape Formation: The Illusion of the Scalene Triangle

The main purposes of this work are to demonstrate the role of directional symmetry as a second order principle that polarizes the perception of the shape and to show how this preference can be easily encoded in an algorithm using a fuzzy operator for symmetry detection. The role of grouping in influencing shape perception and the role of directional symmetry was demonstrated through small triangles that create a large triangle. The specific questions answered in the psychophysical experiments were the following: Can the grouping by similarity influence both the pointing and the shape of the small and the large isosceles triangles? Conversely, can the shape of the large triangle influence th…

Fifty Fuzzily Gone, Many More to Go: An Appreciation of Fuzziness’ Present and an Outlook on What May Come

Fifty years of Fuzziness represents a good chance to look back on the rich history of the discipline and the scientists that were part of this history, and at the long and varied course of one of the few really innovative, disruptive ideas of the last century, including the development of its many applications. But instead we would like to take this interesting opportunity to discuss the present state of affairs, especially in relation to the application of Fuzziness to the cognitive domain. From such reflections a possible path is defined toward the evolution of Fuzziness, under the umbrella of computational intelligence, toward an all-encompassing experimental science of language, reasoni…

Recognizing the Emergent and Submerged Iceberg of the Celiac Disease: ITAMA Project-Global Strategy Protocol.

Coeliac disease (CD) is frequently underdiagnosed with a consequent heavy burden in terms of morbidity and health care costs. Diagnosis of CD is based on the evaluation of symptoms and anti-transglutaminase antibodies IgA (TGA-IgA) levels, with values above a tenfold increase being the basis of the biopsy-free diagnostic approach suggested by present guidelines. This study showcased the largest screening project for CD carried out to date in school children (n=20,000) aimed at assessing the diagnostic accuracy of minimally invasive finger prick point-of-care tests (POCT) which, combined with conventional celiac serology and the aid of an artificial intelligence-based system, may eliminate t…

Fuzziness as an experimental science: an homage to Claudio Moraga

In this contribution we collect a few considerations and remarks on such apparently unrelated topics as: an early paper by Norbert Wiener on the Nature of Mathematics; mathematical logic’s heritage on the formalization of reasoning; cognitive aspects on the modalities of drawing conclusions. We hope that reading the present paper will show that they are, neverthless, related in some way at least for what regards the problem of reasoning in the presence of uncertainty, showing a network of concepts that can help considering again the innovating aspects of fuzziness—in our opinion a more than fit homage to Claudio Moraga’s interdisciplinary approach to fuzziness.

John Horton Conway

Matematico inglese, e tanto altro. Verrà certamente ricordato per il gioco della vita: terrore dei primi sistemisti per la sottrazione di prezioso tempo macchina a lavori più “seri”; geniale invenzione ai confini tra matematica e informatica, tra teoria del caos e gioco; un insieme di regole limitate e comprensibili che sorprendentemente danno vita ad un sistema con il potere di una macchina di Turing uni- versale, che ancora oggi produce interessanti spunti di ricerca in settori scientifici tanto diversi quali la biologia e la fisica, l’economia e la biochimica.

Towards the Improvement of Citizen Communication Through Computational Intelligence

When dealing with problems that arise from collective sharing of resources in metropolitan areas (i.e., energy, pollution, traffic, health) most of the interaction between citizens and local governance is usually carried out through the use of natural languages. Digital technologies allows smart cities residents to communicate with a broad range of experts (e.g. bureaucrats, legislators, urbanists, etc.) that routinely use technical terminology seldom accessible to the layperson, or linguistic styles that are not immediately understandable. Although information technology should encourage citizen participation in governance at many levels, the different levels of knowledge possessed by the …

Experimental modeling for a natural landing of fuzzy sets in new domains

In this paper we plan to touch upon (and briefly discuss) some (out of the many) contributions done by Enric Trillas to Fuzzy Sets Theory. We have carefully chosen, from the abundant panorama we have been allowed to gaze at in the years, two different but intertwined topics of a more methodological character, which—as such—are, obviously, not only outside the topics massively developed by the scientific community in this field but also not in the mainstream of Enric’s investigations. We picked up them, however, since we believe that they are related to a crucial problem for the further developments of fuzzy research in the subsequent years. In this perspective, they represent a very signifi…

Verso le Città Cognitive. Un esempio di classificatore fuzzy: il bot parcheggiatore

Le città cognitive (Portmann, Seising e Tabacchi, 2017) sono una possibile evoluzione delle smart cities (Portmann e Fingers, 2016). Nella progettazione di una città cognitiva si tiene conto, oltre che della rete di sensori ed attuatori che contribuiscono alla condivisione dei dati, anche del rapporto tra la città ed il cittadino; a questo fine sono utilizzate una serie di tecnologie proprie della Computational Intelligence (Kacprzyk e Pedrycz, 2015), quali Metaeuristiche, Algoritmi evolutivi e genetici e metodologie Soft Computing per includere nel dialogo non solo vaste moli di dati, ma la possibilità di analisi introspettive che utilizzino come interfaccia da e verso gli utenti i linguag…

On the Evaluation of Images Complexity: A Fuzzy Approach

The inherently multidimensional problem of evaluating the complexity of an image is of a certain relevance in both computer science and cognitive psychology. Computer scientists usually analyze spatial dimensions, to deal with automatic vision problems, such as feature-extraction. Psychologists seem more interested in the temporal dimension of complexity, to explore attentional models. Is it possible, by merging both approaches, to define an more general index of visual complexity? We have defined a fuzzy mathematical model of visual complexity, using a specific entropy function; results obtained by applying this model to pictorial images have a strong correlation with ones from an experime…

Omaggio a Penrose

Fine teorico, e profondo conoscitore della mente umana e delle sue relazioni con le strutture naturali, Penrose ha però un posto nel cuore degli artisti, dei grafici e degli architetti almeno per due costruzioni grafiche che portano il suo nome.

Theory of Computation, Fuzziness and a physics of the immaterial

In this paper we advance three clear-cut proposals as a contribution to the discussion on the role of notions of Computation and Fuzziness as a bridge between Hard and Soft Sciences. We suggest that an important difference between the two great fami- lies of science lies in their subject or research having a grounding in nature or not, and that Theory of Computation is a glaring exception to this classifi- cation, being a textbook hard science but dealing with the immaterial. We further advance that such unicity is strongly connected with Church-Turing thesis, and discuss about the role of Computation and Fuzziness as pillars of immaterial sciences

Towards a fuzzy-linguistic based social network sentiment-expression system

Liking allows users of Social Networks, blogs and online magazines to express their support of posts and artifacts by a simple click. Such function is very popular but lacks semantic power, and some platforms have augmented it by allowing to choose a pictographic depiction corresponding to a feeling. What is gained in depth is lost in simplicity, and the wide acceptance liking has enjoyed did not carried to the sentiment version. We outline a sentiment-expression hybrid system based on textual analysis and linguistic fuzzy Markov chains overcoming the intrinsic limitations of liking without burdening the user with complex choices.

Back to “Reasoning”

Is rigor always strictly related to precision and accuracy? This is a fundamental question in the realm of Fuzzy Logic; the first instinct would be to answer in the positive, but the question is much more complex than it appears, as true rigor is obtained also by a careful examination of the context, and limiting to a mechanical transfer of techniques, procedures and conceptual attitudes from one domain to another, such as from the pure engineering feats or the ones of mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, does not guarantee optimal results. Starting from this question, we discuss some implications of going back to the very concept of reasoning as it is used in natural languag…

Technology and human sciences: A dialogue to be constructed or a common tread to be rediscovered?

In this contribution we begin to discuss the thesis that an analysis of the similarities and differences of typical methodologies of human sciences, technology and hard sciences show some unforeseen but strong similarities between human sciences and technologies. In this context fuzzy sets ideas provide useful tools which help to render the analysis more quantitative but without loosing the connection with a purely descriptive analysis. These kinds of considerations would have been hardly conceivable in the setting of XIX Century conception of science. It is the development of Information sciences that has allowed these problems to emerge. In this paper we shall then briefly outline the gen…

Future is where concepts, theories and applications meet (also in fuzzy logic)

No one knows where the future lies, and the idea of serendipity in science is now raised to something of a tropism. This does not impede our will to predict, if not the exact events, at least the short–term trends in the disciplines we live and breathe, and to point at the (subjective) glaring chances for a bright future. This volume is a clear example of the need that any living scientific discipline has for constant regrouping and redirection, in a never–ending process of consolidating results and finding new paths. In this contribution we will try and focus on a number of areas of fuzzy logic and, by extension, in the whole word of uncertainty, where (in our opinion) a number of interest…

Introduction

‘Natural Reasoning’, that with which lay people decide their daily actions, also called Ordinary, Everyday, or Commonsense Reasoning, can be seen as ruled by the universal laws defining its formal ‘skeleton’.

A fuzzy methodology to alleviate information overload in elearning

Some aspects of eLearning experience can be en- hanced in a very natural way by using the basic tools offered by fuzzy logic. As a matter of exam- ple, consider the uncontrolled growth of informa- tion produced in a collaborative-oriented context, in which each participant (e.g. students, teachers) is able to insert and share new contents (e.g. com- ments, texts) concerning a university course. All the incrementally added pieces of information can be evaluated in several ways: by the intervention of a “dictator” (e.g. the teacher), using a rating form, or even according to the frequency of access. As contents rapidly become unusable for the effects of information overload, basic tools of fu…

Towards a Modelization of the elusive Concept of Wisdom using Fuzzy Techniques

After having been a term of reflection in philosophy as well as psychology for ages, the fascination with human wisdom finally reaches the realms of computer science. In comparison to the first philosophical definition attempts, that date back to Aristotle (384 BC – 322BC), the efforts in information science during the late 1980s seem quite recent. Nevertheless have there been astonishing new insights provided by cognitive science since those first formal modelizations were designed – findings that strongly suggest a reconsideration of our current formalization of wisdom in the computer science domain. We suggest to establish a new, integrated view on the concept of wisdom, using the insigh…