Abstract: Antidepressants are psychiatric agents used for the treatment of different types of depression being at present amongst the most commonly prescribed drug, while their effectiveness and adverse effects are the subject of many studies and competing claims. Having studied five QSAR models predicting the biological activities of 18 antidepressants, already approved for clinical treatment, in interaction with the serotonin transporter (SERT), we attempted to establish the membrane ions’ contributions (sodium, potassium, chlorine and calcium) supplied by donor/acceptor hydrogen bond character and electrostatic field to the antidepressant activity. Significant cross-validated correlation (0.5–0.6) and the fitted correlation (0.7–0.82) coefficients were obtained indicating that the models can predict the antidepressant activity of compounds. Moreover, considering the contribution of membrane ions (sodium, potassium and calcium) and hydrogen bond donor character, we have proposed a library of 24 new escitalopram structures, some of them probably with significantly improved antidepressant activity in comparison with the parent compound.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present an integrated Internet-based package for teaching the fundamentals of motion control by using a wide range of resources: theory, videos, simulators, games, quizzes, and a remote lab. The package is aimed at automation technicians, pupils at vocational schools and students taking an introductory course in automatic control, and was designed to complement traditional teaching methods and not as a substitute for them. The scope of this package was also chosen to complement the control engineering curriculum. The evaluation data collected from the users suggest that this strategy gave very good results and raised the interest of learners.
Abstract: This paper presents an innovative cognitive robotics laboratory course based on the latest developments in mobile robotics, communication networks, software agents, and educational technologies. The hybrid educational strategy combines simulation and experiments on real robots, as well as in-class experiments and remote control over the Internet, while the students are assisted by human tutors and artificial software agents. Evaluation data demonstrate the validity and attractiveness of this approach.
Abstract: A P system represents a distributed and parallel computing model in which basic data structures are multi-sets, strings or numerical variables. Numerical P systems have been introduced for possible applications in economics. A simulator for numerical P systems (SNUPS) has been designed, implemented and made available to the scientific community by the authors of this paper. SNUPS allows the development of a wide range of applications, from modeling and simulation of ordinary differential equations, to design and simulation of computational blocks for cognitive architectures and of membrane controllers for autonomous mobile robots. This paper introduces a new class of membrane computing systems, that of enzymatic numerical P systems, in which enzyme-like variables allow the existence of more than one production function in each membrane. The way this new type of deterministic numerical P systems works and the corresponding implementation in SNUPS are detailed, together with an illustrative example.
Abstract: Emotions are key factors in the cognitive and social development of human beings. Robot artists are emotional robots that express themselves using various forms of art. Their goal must be to evoke an aesthetic experience in the audience. Emotion recognition from text is an active field of research which produced several detection methods during the last years. This paper presents the development of a cognitive system that extracts the dominant emotion from a literary text and transposes it into a graphical form using a drawing robot. This comes in the general context of a project aiming at developing robot artists capable of expressing artistic emotions.
Abstract: We live in an era of digital competition. That means that the world is facing rapid and impressive developments that are fueled by rapid advances in digital communications, digital satellite technologies, worldwide web, virtual reality, and computer and learning technologies. As a major area of interest, intelligent control will have to benefit from these important developments. Our paper presents some directions for integrating advanced technologies in intelligent control research and teaching
Abstract: Intelligent systems which perform tasks autonomously are required in many fields such as factories, nuclear power plants, space robots, and medical fields. Such systems must have many kinds of abilities such as sensing, perception, knowledge acquisition, decision making, learning, inference and acting functions, and they have to integrate these abilities so as to adapt to external unknown environments and given tasks. Recently, computational intelligence including neural networks, fuzzy systems and genetic algorithms has been discussed for realising human intelligence. The paper presents the major advanced techniques of building complex hybrid systems for intelligent control. An experimental environment which integrates these paradigms is proposed. Its main function is to assist the human designer in choosing the best strategy of developing an intelligent control system by making an “optimal” combination of these above mentioned four paradigms
Abstract: New methods for designing and analyzing fuzzy controllers are required. Some architectures for integrating genetic algorithms with fuzzy logic controllers, the so called hybrid geno-fuzzy controllers, are introduced and discussed. A new hybrid geno-fuzzy controller based on the algebraic model of the fuzzy controller is proposed. Genetic algorithms are shown to be able to deduce the algebraic model of a simple fuzzy controller used for controlling a truck backer-upper system. The genetic algorithm is further used to tune the coefficients of the deduced algebraic model. The presented results indicate that the hybrid geno-fuzzy controller is superior to a conventional fuzzy controller
