ABSTRACT:We extend the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) poverty-alleviation approach by recognizing the poor as valuable suppliers—specifically of intellectual property. Although the poor possess huge reserves of intellectual property, they are unable to participate in global knowledge networks owing to their illiteracy and poverty. This is a crippling form of social exclusion in today’s growing knowledge economy because it adversely affects their capabilities for advancement at several levels. Providing the poor access to global knowledge networks as rightful participants—as suppliers of (...) intellectual property—leads to poverty alleviation as a result of their increased social inclusion, not only through economic benefits, but also through the poor’s improved well-being as a result of their increased self-esteem and dignity. Using concepts from social network theory, we develop a poverty-alleviation approach to harness and integrate the intellectual property of the poor into global knowledge networks through trust-based partnerships among the poor, non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations. (shrink)

This open access book explains how leading business organizations attempt to achieve the responsible and ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced information technologies. These technologies can produce tremendous insights and benefits. But they can also invade privacy, perpetuate bias, and otherwise injure people and society. To use these technologies successfully, organizations need to implement them responsibly and ethically. The question is: how to do this? Data ethics management, and this book, provide some answers. -/- The authors interviewed (...) and surveyed data ethics managers at leading companies. They asked why these experts see data ethics as important and how they seek to achieve it. This book conveys the results of that research on a concise, accessible way. -/- Much of the existing writing on data and AI ethics focuses either on macro-level ethical principles, or on micro-level product design and tooling. The interviews showed that companies need a third component: data ethics management. This third element consists of the management structures, processes, training and substantive benchmarks that companies use to operationalize their high-level ethical principles and to guide and hold accountable their developers. Data ethics management is the connective tissue makes ethical principles real. It is the focus of this book. -/- This book should be of use to organizations that wish to improve their own data ethics management efforts, legislators and policymakers who hope to build on existing management practices, scholars who study beyond compliance business behavior, and members of the public who want to understand better the threats that AI poses and how to reduce them. (shrink)

We describe a categorial system (PPTS) based on partial proof trees(PPTs) as the building blocks of the system. The PPTs are obtained byunfolding the arguments of the type that would be associated with a lexicalitem in a simple categorial grammar. The PPTs are the basic types in thesystem and a derivation proceeds by combining PPTs together. We describe theconstruction of the finite set of basic PPTs and the operations forcombining them. PPTS can be viewed as a categorial system incorporating someof (...) the key insights of lexicalized tree adjoining grammar, namely the notionof an extended domain of locality and the consequent factoring of recursionfrom the domain of dependencies. PPTS therefore inherits the linguistic andcomputational properties of that system, and so can be viewed as a ’middleground‘ between a categorial grammar and a phrase structure grammar. We alsodiscuss the relationship between PPTS, natural deduction, and linear logicproof-nets, and argue that natural deduction rather than a proof-net systemis more appropriate for the construction of the PPTs. We also discuss howthe use of PPTs allows us to ’localize‘ the management of resources, therebyfreeing us from this management as the PPTs are combined. (shrink)

Market-based social governance schemes that establish standards of conduct for producers and traders in international supply chains aim to reduce the negative socioenvironmental effects of globalization. While studies have examined how characteristics of social governance schemes promote socially responsible producer behavior, it has not yet been examined how these same characteristics affect consumer behavior. This is a crucial omission, because without consumer demand for socially produced products, the reach of the social benefits is likely to be limited. We develop a (...) comprehensive model that links twocharacteristics of market-based social governance schemes—(1) stringency and enforcement of requirements, and (2) promotion—to two conditions required for governance schemes to generate significant social benefits: (1) socially responsible behavior of participating firms; and (2) consumer demand for socially produced products which, in turn, expands products produced according to social governance schemes, and thus, the quantity of social benefits. We discuss market-based social governance schemes in the context of fair trade coffee. (shrink)

We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion–attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or high-load task with a string of letters presented against a happy, sad or neutral face (in a circular form) as the background. Participants were asked to identify the face that appeared in the (...) critical trial. Results indicate an interaction between emotion and load. First, identification of faces with happy expression was better than chance and unaffected by load. Second, performance was worse than chance for faces with sad expression in the high-load condition, indicating inhibition of unattended sad distractor faces in the critical trial. This indicates that inhibitory processes during a difficult attentional task under divided attention influence subsequent perception of distractor stimuli especially sad faces. The results have implications for the theories of selective attention as well as the role of emotions in conscious perception. (shrink)

The questions of how human beings produce and comprehend language continue to engage a variety of researchers and scholars, and it is becoming increasingly clear that only interdisciplinary approaches will yield productive answers. This complex issue of discourse processing is the subject of this volume, and the contributors address it from the varying perspectives of cognitive psychology linguistics, and computer science. The chapters provide a fascinating overview of emerging theories in the new discipline of cognitive science. A useful introductory chapter (...) by the editors explains the relationships of chapters to one another and outlines the long-term implications of the work they report. (shrink)

We describe a categorial system (PPTS) based on partial proof trees(PPTs) as the building blocks of the system. The PPTs are obtained byunfolding the arguments of the type that would be associated with a lexicalitem in a simple categorial grammar. The PPTs are the basic types in thesystem and a derivation proceeds by combining PPTs together. We describe theconstruction of the finite set of basic PPTs and the operations forcombining them. PPTS can be viewed as a categorial system incorporating someof (...) the key insights of lexicalized tree adjoining grammar, namely the notionof an extended domain of locality and the consequent factoring of recursionfrom the domain of dependencies. PPTS therefore inherits the linguistic andcomputational properties of that system, and so can be viewed as a middleground between a categorial grammar and a phrase structure grammar. We alsodiscuss the relationship between PPTS, natural deduction, and linear logicproof-nets, and argue that natural deduction rather than a proof-net systemis more appropriate for the construction of the PPTs. We also discuss howthe use of PPTs allows us to localize the management of resources, therebyfreeing us from this management as the PPTs are combined. (shrink)

In setting up a formal system to specify a grammar formalism, the conventional (mathematical) wisdom is to start with primitives (basic primitive structures) as simple as possible, and then introduce various operations for constructing more complex structures. An alternate approach is to start with complex (more complicated) primitives, which directly capture some crucial linguistic properties and then introduce some general operations for composing these complex structures. These two approaches provide different domains of locality, i.e., domains over which various types of (...) linguistic dependencies can be specified. The latter approach, characterized as complicate locally, simplify globally (CLSG), pushes non‐local dependencies to become local, i.e., they arise in the basic primitive structures to start with.The CLSG approach has led to some new insights into syntactic description, semantic composition, language generation, statistical processing, and psycholinguistic phenomena, all these with possible relevance to the cognitive architecture of language. In this paper, we will describe these results in an introductory manner making use of the framework of lexicalized tree‐adjoining grammar (LTAG), a key example of the CLSG approach, thereby describing the interplay between formal analysis on the one hand and linguistic and processing issues on the other hand. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

This paper brings a developmental perspective to the discussion of a longstanding issue surrounding the proper characterization of presuppositions. On an influential view (Stalnaker in Synthese 22(1–2):272–289, 1970; Stalnaker, in Milton, Unger (eds) Semantics and philosophy, New York University Press, New York, 1974; Karttunen in Theor Linguist 1:181–194, 1974), formal presuppositions reflect admittance conditions: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes _p_ is admitted by a conversational context _c_ only if _p_ is common ground in _c_. The theory distinguishes two (...) modes of satisfying this formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of an uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, the theory has been criticized (among other things) on methodological grounds (see e.g. Gazdar in Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form, Academic Press, New York, 1979): the availability of accommodation makes it difficult to empirically examine the notion of presupposition as admittance conditions because a central tenet—pragmatic infelicity results whenever _c_ does not entail _p_—may be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of language users. In this paper, we argue that child language presents an opportunity to avoid this intrinsic difficulty. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance. Furthermore and more tellingly, we also find that even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children fail to accommodate presuppositions in an adult-like manner. This pattern of behavior, we argue, is expected under the admittance theory: in a population where the interference from accommodation is reduced, the impact of failing to satisfy the formal admittance conditions becomes directly observable. (shrink)

What ought one to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement? Faced with this question, one naturally hopes for an answer that is principled, general, and intuitively satisfying. We want to argue that this is a vain hope. Our claim is that a satisfying answer will prove elusive because of non-transparency: that there is no condition such that we are always in a position to know whether it obtains. When we take seriously that there is nothing, including our own (...) minds, to which we have assured access, the familiar project of formulating epistemic norms is destabilized. In this paper, we will show how this plays out in the special case of disagreement. But we believe that a larger lesson can ultimately be extracted from our discussion: namely, that non-transparency threatens our hope for fully satisfying epistemic norms in general. (shrink)

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin-for-error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two-part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two-part defence are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin-for-error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti-luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous. (shrink)

We introduce LTAG-spinal, a novel variant of traditional Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with desirable linguistic, computational and statistical properties. Unlike in traditional LTAG, subcategorization frames and the argument-adjunct distinction are left underspecified in LTAG-spinal. LTAG-spinal with adjunction constraints is weakly equivalent to LTAG. The LTAG-spinal formalism is used to extract an LTAG-spinal Treebank from the Penn Treebank with Propbank annotation. Based on Propbank annotation, predicate coordination and LTAG adjunction structures are successfully extracted. The LTAG-spinal Treebank makes explicit semantic relations (...) that are implicit or absent from the original PTB. LTAG-spinal provides a very desirable resource for statistical LTAG parsing, incremental parsing, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing. This treebank has been successfully used to train an incremental LTAG-spinal parser and a bidirectional LTAG dependency parser. (shrink)

. The problem of reconstructing digital images from degraded measurements is regarded as a problem of importance in various fields of engineering and imaging science. The main goal of denoising is to restore a noisy image to produce a visually high quality image. In this paper, we propose a novel transform domain technique that uses multispinning for image denoising. The proposed method uses multiple cyclic shifted versions of an image, where each of them would capture more detail information during decomposition. (...) Discrete wavelet transform and contourlet transform in association with multispinning is used. The results are compared with traditional transform and spatial domain techniques. The visual and quantitative evaluation suggests that the proposed method yields better results. (shrink)

Current EEG research emphasizes gamma band coherence as a signature of functional integration, that is, the solution to the binding problem. We note that spatial patterns of coherent neural activity are also observed at other EEG frequencies. If these oscillations reflect Nunez's resonant modes, they offer a solution to the binding problem that emerges naturally from the architecture of cortical connections.

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

We examined proactive and reactive control effects in the context of task-relevant happy, sad, and angry facial expressions on a face-word Stroop task. Participants identified the emotion expressed by a face that contained a congruent or incongruent emotional word. Proactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of previous trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Reactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of current (...) trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Previous trial negative emotions exert greater influence on proactive control than the positive emotion. Sad faces in the previous trial resulted in greater reduction in the Stroop interference for happy faces in the current trial. However, current trial angry faces showed stronger adaptation effects compared to happy faces. Thus, both proactive and reactive control mechanisms are dependent on emotional valence of task-relevant stimuli. (shrink)

We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about (...) the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every. (shrink)

Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets. Similarly, originating sense...

Since Turing proposed the first test of intelligence, several modifications have been proposed with the aim of making Turing’s proposal more realistic and applicable in the search for artificial intelligence. In the modern context, it turns out that some of these definitions of intelligence and the corresponding tests merely measure computational power. Furthermore, in the framework of the original Turing test, for a system to prove itself to be intelligent, a certain amount of deceit is implicitly required which can have (...) serious security implications for future human societies. In this article, we propose a unified framework for developing intelligence tests which takes care of important ethical and practical issues. Our proposed framework has several important consequences. Firstly, it results in the suggestion that it is not possible to construct a single, context independent, intelligence test. Secondly, any measure of intelligence must have access to the process by which a problem is solved by the system under consideration and not merely the final solution. Finally, it requires an intelligent agent to be evolutionary in nature with the flexibility to explore new algorithms on its own. (shrink)

. This paper endeavors to formalize imperatives that convey actions. Imperatives, unlike propositions, do not hold the value of true or false. Peter Vranas proposed an alternate logical formalism in the literature of imperative logic with three values, namely: Satisfaction (), Violation () and Avoidance (). Although this formalism takes into account the conditional imperatives, it does not address imperatives from the perspective of actions. According to Mīmāṁsā, the prime motive of an imperative is to carry out action so as (...) to reach the goal. This paper modifies the notion of Vranas' imperative logic using Mīmāṁsā principles. The resulting imperative formalism, focusing on action representation, is presented with syntax, deduction rules and semantic tables. The effectiveness of this representation is demonstrated in the area of artificial intelligence planning. (shrink)