Ethics, Science and Society: Challenges for BioPolitics is an international project of academic research, scientific dissemination, and social and political responsibility, sponsored by the Luso-American Development Foundation. Its main objective is to stress the importance of this triptych-style approach – ethics, science, society – to address some of the current and major challenges facing human

As autonomous robots expand their application beyond research labs and production lines, they must work in more flexible and less well defined environments. To escape the requirement for exhaustive instruction and stipulated preference ordering, a robot’s operation must involve choices between alternative actions, guided by goals. We describe a robot that learns these goals from humans by consider

We approach the semantics of prepositions from the perspective of conceptual spaces. Focusing on purely spatial locative and directional prepositions, we analyze both types of prepositions in terms of polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates. This makes it possible to demonstrate that the property of convexity holds quite generally in the domain of prepositions of location and direction,

While “meaning negotiation” has become an ubiquitous term, its use is often confusing. A negotiation problem implies not only a convenience to agree, but also diverging interest on what to agree upon. It implies agreement but also the possibility of (voluntary) disagreement. In this chapter, we look at meaning negotiation as the process through which agents starting from different preferred concep

Pointing is a typical means of directing a human's attention to a specific object or event. Robot pointing behaviours that direct the attention of humans are critical for human-robot interaction, communication and collaboration. In this paper, we describe an experiment undertaken to investigate human comprehension of a humanoid robot's pointing behaviour. We programmed a NAO robot to point to mark

Classical conditioning is important in humans to learn and predict events in terms of associations between stimuli and to produce responses based on these associations. Social robots that have a classical conditioning skill like humans will have an advantage to interact with people more naturally, socially and effectively. In this paper, we present a novel classical conditioning mechanism and desc

Background:Nurses and physicians in nephrology settings provide care for patients with end-stage kidney disease receiving hemodialysis treatment along a complex illness trajectory.Aim:The aim was to explore physicians’ and nurses’ perspectives on the trajectories toward the end of life involving decisions regarding hemodialysis withdrawal for patients with end-stage kidney disease.Research design

Background: Semantic dementia (SD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterised by progressive language problems falling within the clinicopathological spectrum of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). The development of disease-modifying agents may be facilitated by the relative clinical and pathological homogeneity of SD, but we need robust monitoring biomarkers to measure their efficacy. I

This work covers qualitative and quantitative requirements with regard to material propertiesfor cutting tools to be able to resist and balance the various interactive mechanisms that causethe wear of the cutting edge and put limits its tool life. In metal cutting, tool life T combinedwith the cutting data (cutting speed, feed and depth of cut) controls largely the manufacturingcost and related co

Current global models of the carbon (C) cycle consider only vertical gas exchanges between terrestrial or oceanic reservoirs and the atmosphere, thus not considering the lateral transport of carbon from the continents to the oceans. Therefore, those models implicitly consider all of the C which is not respired to the atmosphere to be stored on land and hence overestimate the land C sink capability

The Arctic is warming at twice the global average speed, and the warming-induced increases in biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) emissions from Arctic plants are expected to be drastic. The current global models' estimations of minimal BVOC emissions from the Arctic are based on very few observations and have been challenged increasingly by field data. This study applied a dynamic ecosyst

Monoterpenes emitted from plants have an important role in atmospheric chemistry through changing atmospheric oxidative capacity, forming new particles and secondary organic aerosols. The emission rates and patterns can be affected by changing climate. In this study, emission responses to six years of climatic manipulations (elevated CO2, extended summer drought and night-time warming) were invest

Biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions from subarctic ecosystems have shown to increase drastically in response to a long-term temperature increase of only 2°C. We assessed whether this increase takes place already after 3 years of warming and how the increase changes over time. To test this, we measured BVOC emissions and CO2 fluxes in a field experiment on a subarctic wet heath, whe