We motivate and introduce an extension of the well-known cumulative constraint which deals with time and volume dependent cost of resources. Our research is primarily interested in scheduling problems under time and volume variable electricity costs, but the constraint equally applies to manpower scheduling when hourly rates differ over time and/or extra personnel incur higher hourly rates. We ...

Building artificial agents able to autonomously learn new skills and to easily adapt in different and complex environments is an important goal for robotics and machine learning. We propose that providing reinforcement learning artificial agents with a learning signal that resembles the characteristic of the phasic activations of dopaminergic neurons would be an advancement in the development o...

Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a...

The CT scanners on the market offer a multitude of procedure protocols that enable many clinical questions to be answered quickly. CT scanners can be used to image all parts of the body, some common uses in our hospital include; acute inflammatory bowel diseases; acute appendicitis, trauma including head, spine and skeletal trauma, renal diseases including congenital, inflammatory and neoplasti...

Most studies on influence maximization focus on one-shot propagation, i.e. the influence is propagated from seed users only once following a probabilistic diffusion model and users’ activation are determined via single cascade. In reality it is often the case that a user needs to be cumulatively impacted by receiving enough pieces of information propagated to her before she makes the final purc...

Cumulative life damage is an old concept of considerable face validity, which has attracted more scientific interest in the fields of sociology and psychology than in medicine over the years. The research examines the interconnectivity of the many factors which shape the development of individuals or institutions over time. By focussing on time, context and process, life course research highlig...