Urban Soundscapes in the Imaginaries of Native Digital Users: Guidelines for Soundscape Design

We present an experiment run along the lines of a pilot experiment in China based on collages and narratives to illustrate the participants’ experience with urban sceneries. Its aim was to develop a conceptual model based on narrative analysis that linked objects of the environment to the perceived properties of the soundscape. Participants in groups of two were free to clip any image they wanted from a selection of magazines—the same for all groups within each country—and free to add comments or drawings on their collages. Then, they had to present their collages to the other participants, and the presentations were recorded and transcribed. The structural semantic model that underlies the descriptions of the collages and narratives is presented. The results of the analysis were comparable with previous studies, since ideal urban environments should be calm, quiet and green, but urban environments should also promote cultural activities and the possibility to escape outside the city. The analysis also allowed for attaining the emotions created by soundscapes. Thus, the semantic model can be used as a conceptual model for a soundscape, from which guidelines for soundscape planning and design can be derived, as well as suggestions for innovative soundscapes.

TaDA Live: Compositional Reasoning for Termination of Fine-grained Concurrent Programs

We present TaDA Live, a concurrent separation logic for reasoning compositionally about the termination of blocking fine-grained concurrent programs. The crucial challenge is how to deal with abstract atomic blocking : that is, abstract atomic operations that have blocking behaviour arising from busy-waiting patterns as found in, for example, fine-grained spin locks. Our fundamental innovation is with the design of abstract specifications that capture this blocking behaviour as liveness assumptions on the environment. We design a logic that can reason about the termination of clients that use such operations without breaking their abstraction boundaries, and the correctness of the implementations of the operations with respect to their abstract specifications. We introduce a novel semantic model using layered subjective obligations to express liveness invariants and a proof system that is sound with respect to the model. The subtlety of our specifications and reasoning is illustrated using several case studies.

Semantic models for assessing the influence of a combination of factors on the development of diseases

The analysis of approaches and solutions to the problem of risk assessment and prognosis of conditions and development of diseases is presented. It is shown that the implementation of software services on various platforms complicates the possibility of their comprehensive use and the choice between the available solutions. This has risen the urgency of creating a unified semantic model of diseases that integrates various methods and approaches to solving this problem and accumulates knowledge about risks and prognosis in a unified information space. A new semantic model is proposed to take into account influence of a combination of factors on development of various events that threaten health and life. The feature of the model is its independence from a specific disease or a group of diseases, which allows it to be used in various branches of medicine. This model has been tested on the IACPaaS platform. A software solver has been implemented that allows generating a clear explanation based on the knowledge base and analysis of the patient's electronic medical record. The application of the new model for the formation of knowledge is shown on the example of risk assessment and prognosis of cardiovascular events.

Semantic and Pragmatic Structures in Chomsky’s Binding Theory

The central question that this paper attempts is to describe the conditions under which the anaphor can be determined grammatically or contextually. The issue at hand is whether anaphoric forms can be distinguished from indexical ones within Binding theory. The syntactic representation of bindees are characterized by the use of indices. But what role does the context play in assigning co-referential or non-coreferential properties to anaphors? Furthermore, ellipses are also context-bound. An elliptical structure is indexical, rather than anaphoric. The study analyzes the syntactic structures of Chomsky’s Binding theory within Bolinger’s (1979) semantic model Meaning and Form. It seeks the support of other semanticists in order to fill possible semantic gaps in Binding theory. Keywords: binding theory, elliptical structures, meaning and form model

MODELING OF SYSTEM FOR MONITORING OF RISKS IN THE TRANSPORT

The article deals with the actual problems of modeling the processes for monitoring risks in transport. This monitoring involves determining the state of transport objects, as well as procedures for minimizing the consequences of situations caused by the onset of risks. The article discusses the problems of effective creation of system for monitoring of risks in transport based on the use of appropriate models. The article proposes modeling this system based on situational-semantic model. The approach proposed would contribute to recognition of risks and generation of management decisions to eliminate their consequences. The proposed situational-semantic model allows: to predict the behavior of complex transport objects and transport infrastructure objects; take into account the possibility of emergence of new transport objects and processes for ensuring their functioning in conditions of minimizing possible risks; respond adequately to local and global factors of influence on transport objects; dynamically change the structure of the system; take into account new data to predict the development and improvement of relevant transport objects; predict the development of processes to ensure minimization of risks and the consequences of them.

Towards Automated Semantic Explainability of Multimedia Feature Graphs

Multimedia feature graphs are employed to represent features of images, video, audio, or text. Various techniques exist to extract such features from multimedia objects. In this paper, we describe the extension of such a feature graph to represent the meaning of such multimedia features and introduce a formal context-free PS-grammar (Phrase Structure grammar) to automatically generate human-understandable natural language expressions based on such features. To achieve this, we define a semantic extension to syntactic multimedia feature graphs and introduce a set of production rules for phrases of natural language English expressions. This explainability, which is founded on a semantic model provides the opportunity to represent any multimedia feature in a human-readable and human-understandable form, which largely closes the gap between the technical representation of such features and their semantics. We show how this explainability can be formally defined and demonstrate the corresponding implementation based on our generic multimedia analysis framework. Furthermore, we show how this semantic extension can be employed to increase the effectiveness in precision and recall experiments.