We investigate the semantics of messages, and argue that the meaning ofa message is naturally and usefully given in terms of how it affects theknowledge of the agents involved in the communication. We note thatthis semantics depends on the protocol used by the agents, and thus not only the message itself, but also the protocol appears as a parameter in the meaning. Understanding this dependence allows us to give formal explanations of a wide variety of notions including language dependence, implicature, (...) and the amount of information in a message. (shrink)

This book discusses major milestones in Rohit Jivanlal Parikh’s scholarly work. Highlighting the transition in Parikh’s interest from formal languages to natural languages, and how he approached Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, it traces the academic trajectory of a brilliant scholar whose work opened up various new avenues in research. This volume is part of Springer’s book series Outstanding Contributions to Logic, and honours Rohit Parikh and his works in many ways. Parikh is a leader in the realm of ideas, offering (...) concepts and definitions that enrich the field and lead to new research directions. Parikh has contributed to a variety of areas in logic, computer science and game theory. In mathematical logic his contributions have been in recursive function theory, proof theory and non-standard analysis; in computer science, in the areas of modal, temporal and dynamic logics of programs and semantics of programs, as well as logics of knowledge; in artificial intelligence in the area of belief revision; and in game theory in the formal analysis of social procedures, with a strong undercurrent of philosophy running through all his work.This is not a collection of articles limited to one theme, or even directly connected to specific works by Parikh, but instead all papers are inspired and influenced by Parikh in some way, adding structures to and enriching “Parikh-land”. The book presents a brochure-like overview of Parikh-land before providing an “introductory video” on the sights and sounds that you experience when reading the book. (shrink)

Objective tests of olfaction are widely available to aid in the assessment of olfaction. Their clearest role is in the characterization of olfactory changes, either reported by or suspected in a patient. There is a rapidly growing literature concerned with the association of olfactory changes with certain neuropsychiatric conditions and the use of olfactory testing to supplement conventional assessments in clinical and research practice is evolving. Neural pathways important for olfactory processing overlap extensively with pathways important for cognitive functioning, and (...) especially those important for executive functioning, many of which are concentrated in the frontal lobes. Previous work has identified associations between performance on certain olfactory tests and executive functioning and behavioral measures. More recently, similar associations have also been identified in non-clinical samples, raising new questions as to the utility of olfactory test scores as proxy measures for non-olfactory phenomena. In this systemic review, we sought to identify studies, both clinical and non-clinical, that investigated the associations of olfaction with performance on tasks sensitive to frontal lobe functioning. Our search criteria led to the identification of 70 studies published in English. We examined in detail and tabulated the data from these studies, highlighted each study's key findings, and critically evaluated these studies. We use the results of this review to reflect on some of the current and future challenges concerning the use of olfactory testing in clinical neuropsychiatric practice and research and speculate on the potential benefits of administering phonemic fluency in combination with olfactory testing to enhance its predictive value. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this qualitative study we examine the role of caste, class, and Dalit janitorial labor in the aftermath of floods in Chennai, India, in 2015. Drawing from a variety of sources including interviews, social media, and news coverage, we studied how Dalit janitors were treated during the performance of janitorial labor for cleaning the city. Our study focuses on two theoretical premises: caste-based social relations reproduce inequalities by devaluing Dalit labor as ‘dirty work’; and Dalit subjectivities, labor, and sufferings including (...) occupational hazards become invisible and ungrievable forcing Dalits to provide a counter narrative to preserve the memory of their trauma and dignity injuries. We find that the discursive construction of janitorial labor as dirty work forced Dalit janitors to work in appalling and unsafe working conditions. Janitors suffered several dignity injuries in terms of social exclusion and a lack of recognition for their efforts and accomplishments. Specifically, we examine various ways through which caste, dirty work, and dignity intersected in the narrative accounts of Dalit janitors. We also explore memory and how processes of remembering and forgetting affected the dignity claims of Dalit janitors. (shrink)

. Speaker recognition has been an active research area for many years. Methods to represent and quantify information embedded in speech signal are termed as features of the signal. The features are obtained, modeled and stored for further reference when the system is to be tested. Decision whether to accept or reject speakers are taken based on parameters of the data modeling techniques. Real world offers various degradations to the signal that hamper the signal quality. The degradations may be due (...) to ambient background noise, reverberation or multispeaker scenario. This paper presents a survey of various feature extraction, data modeling methods, metrics that are used to take the decisions and methods that can be used to preprocess the degraded data that have been used to perform the task of speaker recognition. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the single-channel dereverberation methods suitable for distant speech recognition application. The dereverberation methods are mainly classified based on the domain of enhancement of speech signal captured by a distant microphone. Many single-channel speech enhancement methods focus on either denoising or dereverberating the distorted speech signal. There are very few methods that consider both noise and reverberation effects. Such methods are discussed under a multistage approach in this article. The article concludes with a hypothesis that (...) the methods that do not require an a priori reverberation impulse response is desirable in varying the environmental conditions for DSR applications such as intelligent home and office environments, humanoid robots, and automobiles rather than the methods that require an a priori reverberation impulse response. (shrink)

In this paper, using Ambedkar’s pioneering vision for engaged Buddhism, we developed the notion of radical interdependence, which consists of four interrelated processes: dialogical recognition; negating invisibilities; dignity as an embodied praxis; ordinary cosmopolitanism. Our research primarily focused on women janitors’ lives in a Mumbai Mall using this conception. Our participants experienced four different kinds of dignity injuries. They used various strategies to preserve personal, intersubjective, and processual dignities. We also found horizontal and vertical ordinary cosmopolitanism strategies to bridge social (...) boundaries between colleagues and mall customers. We further discuss the implications of radical interdependence for organizational research. (shrink)

Reasoning about equilibria in normal form games involves the study of players’ incentives to deviate unilaterally from any profile. In the case of large anonymous games, the pattern of reasoning is different. Payoffs are determined by strategy distributions rather than strategy profiles. In such a game each player would strategise based on expectations of what fraction of the population makes some choice, rather than respond to individual choices by other players. A player may not even know how many players there (...) are in the game. Logicising such strategisation involves many challenges as the set of players is potentially unbounded. This suggests a logic of quantification over player variables and modalities for player deviation, but such a logic is easily seen to be undecidable. Instead, we propose a propositional modal logic using player types as names and implicit quantification over players. With modalities for player deviation and transitive closure, the logic can be used to specify game equilibrium and interesting patterns of reasoning in large games. We show that the logic is decidable and present a complete axiomatisation of the valid formulas. (shrink)

We study term modal logics, where modalities can be indexed by variables that can be quantified over. We suggest that these logics are appropriate for reasoning about systems of unboundedly many reasoners and define a notion of bisimulation which preserves propositional fragment of term modal logics. Also we show that the propositional fragment is already undecidable but that its monodic fragment is decidable, and expressive enough to include interesting assertions.

When we reason about strategic games, implicitly we need to reason about arbitrary strategy profiles and how players can improve from each profile. This structure is exponential in the number of players. Hence it is natural to look for subclasses of succinct games for which we can reason directly by interpreting formulas on the (succinct) game description rather than on the associated improvement structure. Priority separable games are one of such subclasses: payoffs are specified for pairwise interactions, and from these, (...) payoffs are computed for strategy profiles. We show that equilibria in such games can be described in Monadic Least Fixed Point Logic (MLFP). We then extend the description to games over arbitrarily many players, but using the monadic least fixed point extension of existential second order logic. (shrink)

In large anonymous games, payoffs are determined by strategy distributions rather than strategy profiles. If half the players choose a strategy a, all of them get a certain payoff, whereas if only one-third of the players choose that strategy, the players choosing may get a different payoff. Strategizing in such a game by a player involves reasoning about not who does what but what fraction of the population makes the same choice as that player.We present a simple modal logic to (...) reason about such strategization in large games. Since actual numbers are irrelevant, a player need not even know how many others are in the game, thus leading to the consideration of games with unboundedly many players. The logic we consider is the propositional modal fragment of a first order modal logic. We show that it has a bounded agent property, giving us a decision procedure for satisfiability. We also present a complete axiomatization of the valid formulas. The logic admits a natural model checking algorithm and bisimulation characterization. The logic with quantification over players is more appropriate, but is undecidable. (shrink)

Circadian rhythms are responsible for 24‐hour oscillations in diverse biological processes. While the central genes governing circadian pacemaker rhythmicity have largely been identified, clock‐controlled output molecules responsible for regulating rhythmic behaviors remain largely unknown. Two recent reports from McDonald and Rosbash1 and Claridge‐Chang et al.2 address this issue. By identifying a large number of genes whose mRNA levels show circadian oscillations, the reports provide important new information on the biology of circadian rhythm. In addition, the reports illustrate both the power (...) and limitations of microarray‐based methods for profiling mRNA expression on a genomic scale. BioEssays 24:494–498, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Preface of Festschrift on the occasion of Professor Rohit Parikh's 60th birthday.

We suggest that developing automata theoretic foundations is relevant for knowledge theory, so that we study not only what is known by agents, but also the mechanisms by which such knowledge is arrived at. We define a class of epistemic automata, in which agents’ local states are annotated with abstract knowledge assertions about others. These are finite state agents who communicate synchronously with each other and information exchange is ‘perfect’. We show that the class of recognizable languages has good closure (...) properties, leading to a Kleene-type theorem using what we call regular knowledge expressions. These automata model distributed causal knowledge in the following way: each agent in the system has a partial knowledge of the temporal evolution of the system, and every time agents synchronize, they update each other’s knowledge, resulting in a more up-to-date view of the system state. Hence we show that these automata can be used to solve the satisfiability problem for a natural epistemic temporal logic for local properties. Finally, we characterize the class of languages recognized by epistemic automata as the regular consistent languages studied in concurrency theory. (shrink)

This Collection Of Twenty Essays Dealing With A Wide Variety Of Authors And Texts Concentrates On The Concept Of Self.

It is generally believed that through one-person one vote the diverse groups within society would be integrated into a shared identity. But the multiculturalists- Kymlicka, Parekh, Taylor, Young- argue that in well established democracies, some groups like African-American, indigenous peoples, ethnic and religious minorities and women feel marginalized and as a remedy, propose measures that the political system could mirror the distinct cultural identity of the different people. The critics of multiculturalism- Miller, Barry- argue that Liberalism accommodates cultural plurality and (...) stresses on the need for shared identity and common public space, which multiculturalism overlooks. (shrink)

Downsizing remains a topic of great interest to both academics and practitioners. Yet, the impact of layoff decisions on perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has hardly been studied. We examine the impact of responsibility of business leaders making these layoff decisions, and characteristics of the downsizing implementation on convergence and divergence in (1) CSR perceptions, (2) victims’ perceptions of fairness, and (3) survivor commitment, in four countries. Using an experimental design, sixteen scenarios were distributed to (1) 163 managers in (...) Estonia, (2) 152 MBA students in India and 125 MBA students in France, and (3) 186 (non-traditional) undergraduate students in the USA. Results suggest that when top managers are attributed with the responsibility for downsizing, the resulting perceptions of CSR are negative. A similar pattern of results is obtained for victims’ perceptions of fairness and survivor commitment. In addition, although there are differences in effect-size based on differences in power distance, these results hold good (are similar) across the four countries, from four different society clusters. We discuss implications, limitations, and future research directions. (shrink)

Specific inhibition of gene expression by antisense agents provides the basis for rational drug discovery based on molecular targets. Due to the specificity of Watson‐Crick base‐pair hybridization, antisense oligodeoxynucleotides have been used extensively in attempts to inhibit gene expression in both in vitro and in vivo models. Analogues modified from normal phosphodiester oligodeoxynucleotides have entered clinical trials against diseases including AIDS and cancer. Although the precise mechanism of action of these drugs has not been clarified, these oligodeoxynucleotides offer considerable promise (...) as novel molecular therapeutics. We review the recent attempts to harness the therapeutic potential of these oligodeoxynucleotides and appraise the near‐term prospects for antisense technology. (shrink)

The Tattvabindu of Vacaspatimisra with the commentary called Tattvavibhavand of Paramesvara II of Payyur Bhattamana. This edition of Vacaspatimisra's Tattvabindu and of its commentary Tattvavibhavana by Paramesvara II is based on (1) a transcript of a manuscript Tattvavibhavana preserved in the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, and (2) the Benares Edition of the Tattvabindu. Since the commentator has made it a rule to quote the full text by parts before commenting on it. Vacaspatimisra's Tattvabindu is a short and highly difficult (...) text. In his characteristically rhythmic and stately diction, Vacaspatimisra reviews in the Tattvabindu, the vaiyakarana doctrine of Sphota, mainly as expounded by Bhartrhari and Mandanamisra, and amplifies and reaffirms Kumarila's criticism of Sphota doctrine. The elaborate and scholarly introduction, giving a historical sketch of the Mimamsa literature, and the thoroughgoing analysis of the Tattvabindu, in English, which the learned editor has prefixed to his edition of the work. (shrink)

We study repeated normal form games where the number of players is large. We argue that it is interesting to look at such games as being divided into subgames, each of which we call a neighbourhood. The structure of such a game is given by a graph G whose nodes are players and edges denote visibility. The neighbourhoods are maximal cliques in G. The game proceeds in rounds where in each round the players of every clique X of G play (...) a strategic form game among each other. A player at a node v strategises based on what she can observe, i.e., the strategies and the outcomes in the previous round of the players at vertices adjacent to v. Based on this, the player may switch strategies in the same neighbourhood, or migrate to another neighbourhood.We are interested in addressing questions regarding the eventual stability of such games. We incrementally impose constraints on the ‘types’ of the players. First, we look at players who are unconstrained in their strategising abilities, in that, players who may use unbounded memory. We then consider the case of memoryless players. We show that in both these cases the eventual stability of the game can be characterised in terms of potentials. We then introduce a simple modal logic in which the types of the players can be specified. We show that when the players play according to these specified types, it can be effectively decided whether the game stabilises. Finally, we look at the important heuristic of imitation. Simple imitative strategies can be specified in the logic introduced by us. We show that in a population of optimisers and imitators, we can decide how ‘worse-off’ the imitators are by playing imitative strategies rather than optimal ones. (shrink)

As the annual air passenger traffic in India is increasing steeply, an environmental impact assessment on important cities connected by air is becoming increasingly indispensable. This study proposes an innovative screening method that uses a modified Environmental Vulnerability Index. This modified EVI calculator includes aviation-related parameters and can be used to assess the environmental vulnerabilities of political states and cities, in addition to countries as is being already done. This study also suggests the need to include aspects of human comfort (...) in the screening process through the use of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamical software and large eddy simulations which can be used to estimate forces experienced by aircraft of different sizes during in-flight turbulence for various weather conditions. A comparative analysis is presented on how changing the size of the aircraft operating in a particular route between the cities of Chennai and Bengaluru has better implications on both passenger comfort and the environment. It is observed that if commercial airlines incorporated fewer medium-sized aircraft, there would be a significant reduction in the environmental vulnerability of the two connected cities. (shrink)