The Soar Cognitive Architecture

The Soar Cognitive Architecture PDF

Author: John E. Laird

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0262538539

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The definitive presentation of Soar, one AI's most enduring architectures, offering comprehensive descriptions of fundamental aspects and new components. In development for thirty years, Soar is a general cognitive architecture that integrates knowledge-intensive reasoning, reactive execution, hierarchical reasoning, planning, and learning from experience, with the goal of creating a general computational system that has the same cognitive abilities as humans. In contrast, most AI systems are designed to solve only one type of problem, such as playing chess, searching the Internet, or scheduling aircraft departures. Soar is both a software system for agent development and a theory of what computational structures are necessary to support human-level agents. Over the years, both software system and theory have evolved. This book offers the definitive presentation of Soar from theoretical and practical perspectives, providing comprehensive descriptions of fundamental aspects and new components. The current version of Soar features major extensions, adding reinforcement learning, semantic memory, episodic memory, mental imagery, and an appraisal-based model of emotion. This book describes details of Soar's component memories and processes and offers demonstrations of individual components, components working in combination, and real-world applications. Beyond these functional considerations, the book also proposes requirements for general cognitive architectures and explicitly evaluates how well Soar meets those requirements.

Making News at The New York Times

Making News at The New York Times PDF

Author: Nikki Usher

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0472900226

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Making News at The New York Times is the first in-depth portrait of the nation’s, if not the world's, premier newspaper in the digital age. It presents a lively chronicle of months spent in the newsroom observing daily conversations, meetings, and journalists at work. We see Page One meetings, articles developed for online and print from start to finish, the creation of ambitious multimedia projects, and the ethical dilemmas posed by social media in the newsroom. Here, the reality of creating news in a 24/7 instant information environment clashes with the storied history of print journalism, and the tensions present a dramatic portrait of news in the online world. This news ethnography brings to bear the overarching value clashes at play in a digital news world. The book argues that emergent news values are reordering the fundamental processes of news production. Immediacy, interactivity, and participation now play a role unlike any time before, creating clashes between old and new. These values emerge from the social practices, pressures, and norms at play inside the newsroom as journalists attempt to negotiate the new demands of their work. Immediacy forces journalists to work in a constant deadline environment, an ASAP world, but one where the vaunted traditions of yesterday's news still appear in the next day's print paper. Interactivity, inspired by the new user-computer directed capacities online and the immersive Web environment, brings new kinds of specialists into the newsroom, but exacts new demands upon the already taxed workflow of traditional journalists. And at time where social media presents the opportunity for new kinds of engagement between the audience and media, business executives hope for branding opportunities while journalists fail to truly interact with their readers.

Bite-Sized Operations Management

Bite-Sized Operations Management PDF

Author: Mark S. Daskin

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 3031024931

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This text is an introduction to Operations Management. Three themes are woven throughout the book: optimization or trying to do the best we can, managing tradeoffs between conflicting objectives, and dealing with uncertainty. After a brief introduction, the text reviews the fundamentals of probability including commonly used discrete and continuous distributions and functions of a random variable. The next major section, beginning in Chapter 7, examines optimization. The key fundamentals of optimization—inputs, decision variables, objective(s), and constraints—are introduced. Optimization is applied to linear regression, basic inventory modeling, and the newsvendor problem, which incorporates uncertain demand. Linear programming is then introduced. We show that the newsvendor problem can be cast as a network flow linear programming problem. Linear programming is then applied to the problem of redistributing empty rental vehicles (e.g., bicycles) at the end of a day and the problem of assigning students to seminars. Several chapters deal with location models as examples of both simple optimization problems and integer programming problems. The next major section focuses on queueing theory including single-and multi-server queues. This section also introduces a numerical method for solving for key performance metrics for a common class of queueing problems as well as simulation modeling. Finally, the text ends with a discussion of decision theory that again integrates notions of optimization, tradeoffs, and uncertainty analysis. The text is designed for anyone with a modest mathematical background. As such, it should be readily accessible to engineering students, economics, statistics, and mathematics majors, as well as many business students.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes