Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1978decision making;

Experimentation in machine discovery

KEKADA, a system that is capable of carrying out a complex series of experiments on problems from the history of science, is described. The system incorporates a set of experimentation strategies that were extracted from the traces of the scientists' behavior. It focuses on surprises to constrain its search, and uses its strategies to generate hypotheses and to carry out experiments. Some strategies are domain independent, whereas others incorporate knowledge of a specific domain. The domain independent strategies include magnification, determining scope, divide and conquer, factor analysis, and relating different anomalous phenomena. KEKADA represents an experiment as a set of independent and dependent entities, with apparatus variables and a goal. It represents a theory either as a sequence of processes or as abstract hypotheses. KEKADA's response is described to a particular problem in biochemistry. On this and other problems, the system is capable of carrying out a complex series of experiments to refine domain theories. Analysis of the system and its behavior on a number of different problems has established its generality, but it has also revealed the reasons why the system would not be a good experimental scientist

The Creation and Detection of Arbitrary Photon Number States Using Cavity QED

No description supplie

Discovering qualitative empirical laws

In this paper we describe GLAUBER, an AI system that models the scientific discovery of qualitative empirical laws. We have tested the system on data from the history of early chemistry, and it has rediscovered such concepts as acids, alkalis, and salts, as well as laws relating these concepts. After discussing GLAUBER we examine the program's relation to other discovery systems, particularly methods for conceptual clustering and language acquisition

On the Behavioral and Rational Foundation of Economic Theory

Existing uncertainties about the correct explanations for economic growth and business cycles cannot be settled by aggregative analysis within the neoclassical framework. Current disputes in theory rest largely on ad hoc, casually empirical, assumptions about departures from perfect rationality under uncertainty. Such disputes can only be settled by painstaking microeconomic empirical study of human decision making and problem solving. Microeconomic research of the kinds that are required can receive powerful guidance from the theories of human thinking that have been developed and tested over the past twenty five years by cognitive psychologists

A statistical mechanics framework for the large-scale structure of turbulent von K{\'a}rm{\'a}n flows

In the present paper, recent experimental results on large scale coherent steady states observed in experimental von K{\'a}rm{\'a}n flows are revisited from a statistical mechanics perspective. The latter is rooted on two levels of description. We first argue that the coherent steady states may be described as the equilibrium states of well-chosen lattice models, that can be used to define global properties of von K{\'a}rm{\'a}n flows, such as their temperatures. The equilibrium description is then enlarged, in order to reinterpret a series of results about the stability of those steady states, their susceptibility to symmetry breaking, in the light of a deep analogy with the statistical theory of Ferromagnetism. We call this analogy "Ferro-Turbulence

The No-Binding Regime of the Pauli-Fierz Model

The Pauli-Fierz model $H(\alpha)$ in nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamics is considered. The external potential $V$ is sufficiently shallow and the dipole approximation is assumed. It is proven that there exist constants $0<\alpha_-< \alpha_+$ such that $H(\alpha)$ has no ground state for $|\alpha|<\alpha_-$, which complements an earlier result stating that there is a ground state for $|\alpha| > \alpha_+$. We develop a suitable extension of the Birman-Schwinger argument. Moreover for any given $\delta>0$ examples of potentials $V$ are provided such that $\alpha_+-\alpha_-<\delta$.Comment: 18 pages and 1 figur

Open Annotations on Multimedia Web Resources

Many Web portals allow users to associate additional information with existing multimedia resources such as images, audio, and video. However, these portals are usually closed systems and user-generated annotations are almost always kept locked up and remain inaccessible to the Web of Data. We believe that an important step to take is the integration of multimedia annotations and the Linked Data principles. We present the current state of the Open Annotation Model, explain our design rationale, and describe how the model can represent user annotations on multimedia Web resources. Applying this model in Web portals and devices, which support user annotations, should allow clients to easily publish and consume, thus exchange annotations on multimedia Web resources via common Web standards.Comment: 20 page