Today’s society is largely connected and many real life applications lend themselves to be modeled as multi-agent systems. Although such systems as well as their models are desirable, e.g. for reasons of stability or parallelism, they are highly complex and therefore difficult to understand or predict. Multi-agent learning has been acknowledged to be indispensable to control or find solutions f...

This article deals with cost optimization of one-way concrete slabs according to the most recent American Concrete Institute code of practice (ACI 318-M08). The objective is to minimize the total cost of the slab including costs of concrete and reinforcement bars while satisfying all the design requirements. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used for solving the constrained optimization prob...

The mechanosensory lateral line system of fishes detects water motions within a few body lengths of the source. Several types of artificial stimuli have been used to probe lateral line function in the laboratory, but few studies have investigated the role of flow sensing in benthic feeding teleosts. In this study, we used artificial flows emerging from a sandy substrate to assess the contributi...

In-situ aluminum matrix composite is the innovation of high performance material technology and it has superior interfacial integrity and thermodynamic stability between the matrix and reinforcement. During synthesis, the ZrB2 particle is formed by exothermic reaction within the aluminum melt. As a result, small, fine and oxide free reinforcements are formed. Excessive temperature released from...

We evaluated the discrimination acquisition of individuals with developmental disabilities under immediate and delayed reinforcement. In Experiment 1, discrimination between two alternatives was examined when reinforcement was immediate or delayed by 20 s, 30 s, or 40 s. In Experiment 2, discrimination between 2 alternatives was compared across an immediate reinforcement condition and a delayed...

Aluminum Matrix composites (AMCs) are light weight, high-strength materials with potential application in areas such as automobile, aerospace, defence, engineering and other industries. AMCs are projected to significantly reduce the overall weight of the vehicles and aircraft while maintaining satisfactory structural strength. Reinforcement of micron or nano-sized range particles with aluminium...

Reinforcement contingencies and social reinforcement are ubiquitous phenomena in applied behavior analysis. This discussion paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, reinforcement contingencies are discussed in terms of the necessary and sufficient conditions for reinforcement effects. Response-stimulus dependencies, conditional probabilities, and contiguity are discussed as pos...

This study uses a curve-fitting approach to evaluate the effects of drugs on reinforced responding in rats. The subjects obtained reinforcement according to a series of five different variable-interval schedules (a five-component multiple schedule). For each rat, pimozide, a neuroleptic, decreased response rate, and the decrease was associated with (1) a decrease in the estimated asymptotic res...

Basic researchers, but not most applied researchers, have assumed that the behavior-decelerating effects of noncontingent reinforcement result at least partly from adventitious reinforcement of competing behaviors. The literature contains only sketchy evidence of these effects because few noncontingent reinforcement studies measure alternative behaviors. A laboratory model is presented in which...