Independent Agents Research Articles

Dengue determinants: Necessities and challenges for universal dengue vaccine development.

Dengue illness can range from mild illness to life-threatening haemorrhage. It is an Aedes-borne infectious disease caused by the dengue virus, which has four serotypes. Each serotype acts as an independent infectious agent. The antibodies against one serotype confer homotypic immunity but temporary protection against heterotypic infection. Dengue has become a growing health concern for up to one third of the world's population. Currently, there is no potent anti-dengue medicine, and treatment for severe dengue relies on intravenous fluid management and pain medications. The burden of dengue dramatically increases despite advances in vector control measures. These factors underscore the need for a vaccine. Various dengue vaccine strategies have been demonstrated, that is, live attenuated vaccine, inactivated vaccine, DNA vaccine, subunit vaccine, and viral-vector vaccines, some of which are at the stage of clinical testing. Unfortunately, the forefront candidate vaccine is less than satisfactory, and its performance depends on serostatus and age factors. The lessons from clinical studies depicted ambiguity concerning the efficacy of dengue vaccine. Our study highlighted that viral structural heterogeneity, epitope accessibility, autoimmune complications, genetic variants, genetic diversities, antigen competition, virulence variation, host-pathogen specific interaction, antibody-dependent enhancement, cross-reactive immunity among Flaviviruses, and host-susceptibility determinants not only influence infection outcomes but also hampered successful vaccine development. This review integrates dengue determinants allocated necessities and challenges, which would provide insight for universal dengue vaccine development.

Contemplating on the Nature of Selfhood in DoC Patients: Neurophenomenological Perspective.

Medical well-regarded policy recommendations for patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) are almost exclusively relied on behavioural examination and evaluation of higher-order cognition, and largely disregard the patients' self. This is so because practically establishing the presence of self-awareness or Selfhood is even more challenging than evaluating the presence of consciousness. At the same time, establishing the potential (actual physical possibility) of Selfhood in DoC patients is crucialy important from clinical, ethical, and moral standpoints because Selfhood is the most central and private evidence of being an independent and free agent that unites intention, embodiment, executive functions, attention, general intelligence, emotions and other components within the intra-subjective frame (first-person givenness). The importance of Selfhood is supported further by the observation that rebooting of self-awareness is the first step to recovery after brain damage. It seems that complex experiential Selfhood can be plausibly conceptualized within the Operational Architectonics (OA) of brain-mind functioning and reliably measured by quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) operational synchrony.

Advanced control framework of regenerative electric heating with renewable energy based on multi-agent cooperation

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems have accounted for a significant proportion of building energy growth. It is crucial to develop efficient HVAC systems based on renewable energy (RE) utilization to reduce energy costs (EC) and carbon emissions. However, HVAC system regulation is meeting a huge challenge owing to the randomness of RE and fluctuation of demand-side load. Aiming to tackle this problem, a multi-agent cooperative optimization control framework based on deep reinforcement learning was proposed to achieve the optimal match between the supply and demand sides of the regenerative electric heating system. Then, the dueling double deep Q-network and deep deterministic policy gradient method were applied to achieve the discrete and continuous control of independent agents, respectively, and value-decomposition network was exploited to realize the above agents' cooperative optimization. Meanwhile, to further improve the stability, efficiency, and flexibility of the optimization control framework, the feasible action screening mechanism, prioritized experience replay mechanism, and regulation mechanism based on occupant behavior were introduced. According to simulation results, in contrast to the baseline model, the reduction of thermal discomfort duration, unconsumed RE, and EC under the control of the multi-agent cooperative optimization framework can reach 84.86%, 70.79%, and 16.08%, respectively.

A Sustainable Academic Journey in the Middle East: An Exploratory Study of Female College Students’ Self-Efficacy and Perceived Social Support

In a society that is set to move from a patriarchal, gender-segregated workforce to one characterized by gender equity, female college students are the focal agents of change. Thus, they were selected to examine the contribution that perceived social support of women toward other women plays in their self-efficacy (i.e., confidence in one’s abilities) and academic performance (as measured by class grades). Self-reports were used to collect information about perceived social support, its nature and sources, and general self-efficacy from a sample of 131 female college students (age range: 18–24). Regression analyses were used to examine the participants’ responses. Surprisingly, the stronger the perceived positive social support reported by the respondents, the lower their academic performance. The contribution of the sources of negative social support (i.e., criticism) to either performance or self-efficacy was contingent on its being either received or given. Namely, explaining the criticism that women receive from other women by attributing it to their social environment was linked to higher performance, whereas explaining the criticism that women generate toward other women by attributing it to their social environment was linked to lower self-efficacy. However, the more likely women were to respond to criticism of women in person or via social media, the higher their self-efficacy. It was concluded that, for the selected sample, the contribution of social support, either positive or negative, to self-confidence and performance might depend on the extent to which female students perceive themselves as independent agents capable of self-determination in an environment making steps toward gender equity.

Агенція образу

Horst Bredekamp is an art historian and representative of the science of images (Bildwissenschaft), known for his research on the image agency. In the two reviewed works, the image appears as an independent agent that operates in the political space and essentially creates this political space. In the study "Image Act. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency" (2018), Bredekamp attempts to systematize the methods of image action. The types of acts singled out by the researcher exist outside of linear chronology and are ways of manifesting an image. The image can combine several different types of acts. First, Bredekamp considers the image as a determinant of man as a species, a manifestation of the cognitive revolution, man's ability to act of differentiation, and his ability to transform nature. Despite this, the researcher goes to the meaning of Charles Darwin's teaching "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872) to develop the concept of "pathosformel" (pathosformel) of Aby Warburg. After all, Brellekamp concludes images of nature continue human images, not oppose them. The second of the analyzed works, "Leviathan: Body politic as visual strategy in the work of Thomas Hobbes" (2020), is built around the analysis of the frontispiece to Hobbes's treatise "Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil" (1651). Bredekamp constructs research by involving an impressive source complex, thus demonstrating that a work of art is both an actor involved in society. Combining the analysis of these two works in one text makes it possible to see how Bredekamp's theory can be applied to the specific source material.

Повышение эффективноститушения природных пожаров лесными огнетушителями

Patrolling recreation areas and extinguishing un-extinguished fires is one of the effective methods of preventing forest fires. Portable knapsack forest fire extinguishers are the most common due to their simplicity and ease of use by technical means of extinguishing forest fires. Their common disadvantages are low efficiency and high consumption of extinguishing agents. The purpose of the study is to increase the efficiency of extinguishing wildfires with the help of knapsack forest fire extinguishers based on the development of constructive and technical solutions and technological techniques that ensure economical use of fire extinguishing agents. The article presents studies of the characteristics of sprayed water and steam-water mixture affecting the extinguishing efficiency. The optimal ratio of the design parameters of the developed knapsack forest fire extinguishers is given. The concentration of water vapor in the air of more than 35% is sufficient to stop the process. Experimentalstudies confirm that sprayed water and steam-water mixtures are effective as independent extinguishing agents, and as a means of creating support strips. When creating support strips, the thickness of the condensate film should be at least 0.1 mm. The effective speed of a patroller with a steam generator should be 1.5‑2.5 km/h.

СОРБЦИЯ КАДМИЯ И СВИНЦА ВЕЩЕСТВАМИ, ПЕРСПЕКТИВНЫМИ ДЛЯ СОЗДАНИЯ КОМПОЗИЦИОННЫХ ПРЕПАРАТОВ НА ОСНОВЕ ГЕКСАЦИАНОФЕРРАТОВ

The development of new drugs and feed additives to reduce the accumulation of anthropogenic and natural toxicants (heavy metals, radionuclides, mycotoxins, pesticides, etc.) in the body of farm animals and livestock products remains an urgent task. One of the ways to solve it is to create multifunctional products containing ferrocyanides (hexacyanoferrates) of transition metals as active substances. In medicine and veterinary medicine, enterosorbents based on compounds of this class are used as independent pharmacological agents, and in the form of composite preparations, which are obtained by fixing ferrocyanides on carrier substances of different origin and chemical composition. To study the possibility of using certain substances as carriers in the creation of new composite preparations and to assess their effect on the detoxification properties of ferrocyanides, the sorption efficiency of a number of mineral and organic substances with respect to Cd and Pb was studied. It was found that the background content of Cd and Pb in the tested substances does not exceed the maximum permissible levels of these toxicants in feed, feed additives and veterinary preparations. Under in vitro conditions, the biomass of the fungus Inonotus obliquus (chaga), the preparations ferrocin, bifezh and KhZh-90, zeolite tuff shivyrtuin, smectite dioctahedral, white soot and chitosan succinate have the greatest efficiency of Cd and Pb sorption (with respect to Cd – 50.4-89.0%, Pb – 58.3-95.1%). The combined presence of Cd and Pb reduces the sorption capacity of most of the tested substances by 1.6-63.6%.

Jeju Divers as Models of Modern Korean Women in Korean Media Under the Japanese Colonial Rule

This study examines the challenging lives and roles of Jeju divers as independent modern women reflected in Korean media during the Japanese colonial era, by analyzing the articles in Maeil-shinbo, the only Korean newspaper at the time. Jeju woman divers were registered as UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016 and have great significance as a leading model in the beginning of modern Korean women. In previous studies, Jeju divers have been treated as a unique lifestyle and cultural construct formed in the special environment of the island region. However, they pursued a pioneering and progressive life despite the double oppressive structure of the colonial rule and the feudal tradition that restrained women. They became independent economic agents by enduring extreme labor in the dangerous environment of the deep sea, and also resisted power without being silent about the exploitation and oppression of the colonists. And through the organization of voluntary decision-making bodies, they themselves protected their rights and interests in economic activities.

Influence of concurrent administration of the methanol leaf extract ofLeptadenia hastata(Pers) decne (Apocynaceae) with metformin on blood glucose in diabetic rats

Objectives:Leptadenia hastata(Pers) Decne (Apocynaceae) is a common medicinal plant used in northern Nigeria either singly or together with conventional drugs to treat diabetes. This study investigated the influence of concurrent administration of the methanol leaf extract ofL. hastatawith metformin in streptozotocin/ nicotinamide-induced diabetic rats.Materials and Methods:Possible synergistic activity between the extract and metformin was assessed using 3 models of synergy analysis (Loewe additivity, Bliss independent and highest single agent [HSA] models). Eleven groups of Wistar rats (eight animals per group) consisting of ten groups of diabetic rats and one normal control group were used in this study. Six groups were administered with either the extract or metformin at three different doses each (50, 150 and 500 mg/kg for the extract and 30, 100 and 300 mg/kg for metformin), while another three groups were co-administered with the extract and metformin at three different ratios each (50 mg/kg: 30 mg/ kg, 150 mg/kg: 100 mg/kg and 500 mg/kg: 300 mg/kg). An oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) was conducted at baseline and on day 14.Result:The results revealed that the extract-metformin combination brought about a synergistic reduction in the total area under the OGTT curve (based on Loewe and HSA models) as well as a synergistic reduction in blood glucose (based on Loewe, Bliss and HSA models).Conclusion:The methanol leaf extract ofL. hastataproduced a synergistic antidiabetic activity in streptozotocin/ nicotinamide-induced diabetic rats when combined with metformin.

Impact of customer bounded rationality on on-demand service platforms

We consider an on-demand platform connecting independent agents and delay-sensitive boundedly rational customers. By adopting a queueing-game framework, we analyze the equilibrium joining behaviors of customers and agents, the platform’s optimal pricing strategy, and the resulting profit and social welfare. Moreover, we investigate how the bounded rationality level affects these results. We obtain the following main insights. First, when customers are irrational, the positive externality between the agents and the customers becomes weak. In other words, increasing the same number of agents attracts fewer boundedly rational customers than fully rational ones. Second, we distinguish two types of equilibria in terms of agent participation: one in which all or none of the agents participate and the other in which it is possible that a fraction of the agents may participate. We show that in the latter case, a social planner and a platform can easily align their goals since they are affected by the bounded rationality in the same direction. We attribute the insight to the interactions among the cross-side effect, bounded rationality, and the pooling effect embedded in a queueing system. Next, we characterize the platform’s optimal pricing decisions and prove that the increase in the bounded rationality level does not always lead to higher optimal prices and wages. Finally, we examine the agent side bounded rationality and the social welfare maximizing decisions in the extended models.

“Equally worthy of divine providence”: Women as Sponsors of Monasteries and Independent Social Agents in Epirus, 1204–1393

Abstract This article investigates the strategies of monastic patronage employed by women in medieval Epirus. It looks at how royal and noble women effectively applied this traditional tool of public engagement to a variety of ends—a display of political claims, self-representation, networking, and a rise in the social hierarchy. Recognizing the gradual changes in the public perception of female sponsors, it measures their actions against their perception by male writers and elucidates the most common ways of women’s involvement, from participation in traditional family projects to independent endowment acts distinguished by personal agendas. It also attempts to shed some light on the underrepresentation of female monastic institutions in the region that compelled the local women to offer donations almost exclusively to male foundations. This study considers that the main reason for the patronesses’ behavior was the longevity of prominent institutions and their ability to ensure the donors’ continuous commemoration.

The moral teacher in global transition: The 2022 Kohlberg Memorial Lecture

ABSTRACT According to Kohlberg, a moral teacher is an independent moral agent capable of addressing moral dilemmas based on general principles of justice. In addition to moral reasoning, teachers require competencies in moral sensitivity, moral motivation, and the implementation of morality. In the current period of global transition, moral sensitivity in teaching is particularly emphasized along with the skills to identify culture-invariant and culture-dependent moral factors. In this lecture, the role of the moral teacher is explored in the context of current global crises and everyday moral dilemmas in teaching. Purposefulness and professional ethics are identified as important assets for a moral teacher during the current global transition.

Defining success and failure in the hospitality industry's microenterprises: A study of Indonesian street food vendors

Based on the understanding that every vendor is an independent agent with unique interests and values, this study explores the meaning of success and failure for street food vendors. Twenty-five online unstructured interviews with active and former street food vendors were conducted. Thematic analysis was utilised to identify various definitions of success and failure. In this modern society, capitalism has had a strong influence on how entrepreneurs view success and failure. However, this study found that the meaning of success and failure for street food vendors can be individually specific and complex. The definition of success for street food vendors includes better quality of life, business growth, and altruistic goals. In comparison, street food vendors defined failure as business failure and personal economic failure. These definitions should be seen as interrelated concepts, with vendors having multiple perceptions of success and failure.

Performances of Legitimate Expertise Among Life Coaches: Three Rhetorical Strategies

In the global crisis of expertise, experts are often viewed with skepticism. This article zooms in to this crisis to analyze how life coaches seek professional legitimacy and verbally perform their expertise by navigating a tension between asserting their authority and cultivating their clients’ agency. Performances of expertise are a range of verbal practices and rhetorical strategies that are co-produced and shaped through interacting with clients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at three life coaching training schools in Israel, I show that life coaches perform their expertise through the following strategies: (1) defining the problem that coaching addresses as simple, significant, and mendable; (2) using authoritative charismatic speech to define clients as powerful, independent agents who are their own life experts; and (3) creating reflexive experiences of self-revelation by using semi-intelligible jargon. Finally, the study advances the understanding of expertise as performances inextricable from clients’ sense of agency.

Modeling post-shock emergency transfers with the participation of connected-and-autonomous vehicles

This paper presents a new pathway towards the public health resilience, through the development of a principled understating on the post-hazard emergency transfer of the injured population across densely-populated urban communities, considering the deployment of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Given the influence on the system resilience of several parameters such as the number and distribution of CAVs, the initial geographic distribution of the injured and the spatiotemporal evolution of the functionality of the integrated hospital-road networks, a multi agent-based modelling (ABM) framework has been established to identify relevant patterns and bottlenecks in injured transfers across hazard-impacted urban communities. In such an ABM framework, each individual vehicle, transferring an injured inhabitant, is modelled as an independent agent, whose traveling is shaped by pre-defined behavioral attributes, while the interplay among those agents is also considered, throughout the entire transfer campaign. Based on a hypothetically catastrophic earthquake scenario, such an ABM framework is employed to model the city-scale, post-shock transfer across Tangshan city, located in one of the most earthquake-prone regions of China. The simulation outcome reveals that the information sharing with regard to the real-time functionality of the local hospital system plays a strategically crucial role, to the avoidance of uncoordinated and prolonged transfers. Furthermore, owing to their capability of intelligent route planning, the participation of CAVs can substantially bolster the rapidity and effectiveness of post-shock transfer campaigns.

Co-optimization of robotic design and skill inspired by human hand evolution

During evolution of the human hand, evolutionary morphology has been closely related to behavior in complicated environments. Numerous researchers have revealed that learned skills have affected hand evolution. Inspired by this phenomenon, a co-optimization approach for underactuated hands is proposed that takes grasping skills and structural parameters into consideration. In our proposal, hand design, especially the underactuated mechanism, can be parameterized and shared with all the local agents. These mechanical parameters can be updated globally by the independent agents. In addition, we also train human-like ‘feeling’ of grasping: grasping stability is estimated in advance before the object drops, which can speed up grasping training. In this paper, our method is instantiated to address the optimization problem for the torsion spring mechanical parameters of an underactuated robotic hand with multi-actuators, and then the optimized results are transferred to the actual physical robotic hand to test the improvement of grasping. This collaborative evolution process leverages the dexterity of the multi-actuators and the adaptivity of the underactuated mechanism.

Phase transition in the majority rule model with the nonconformist agents

Independence and anticonformity are two types of social behaviors known in social psychology literature and the most studied parameters in the opinion dynamics model. These parameters are responsible for continuous (second-order) and discontinuous (first-order) phase transition phenomena. Here, we investigate the majority rule model in which the agents adopt independence and anticonformity behaviors. We define the model on several types of graphs: complete graph, two-dimensional (2D) square lattice, and one-dimensional (1D) chain. By defining p as a probability of independence (or anticonformity), we observe the model on the complete graph undergoes a continuous phase transition where the critical points are pc≈0.334 (pc≈0.667) for the model with independent (anticonformist) agents. On the 2D square lattice, the model also undergoes a continuous phase transition with critical points at pc≈0.0608 (pc≈0.4035) for the model with independent (anticonformist) agents. On the 1D chain, there is no phase transition either with independence or anticonformity. Furthermore, with the aid of finite-size scaling analysis, we obtain the same sets of critical exponents for both models involving independent and anticonformist agents on the complete graph. Therefore they are identical to the mean-field Ising model. However, in the case of the 2D square lattice, the models with independent and anticonformist agents have different sets of critical exponents and are not identical to the 2D Ising model. Our work implies that the existence of independence behavior in a society makes it more challenging to achieve consensus compared to the same society with anticonformists.

Assigning Gender Role in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Sister of My Heart

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni through her novel Sister of My Heart unveils the position of women and their roles assigned in Indian patriarchal society and their effort to overthrow the biased attitude of male. As its theoretical tool it utilizes western version of liberal feminism and gender theory as stated by David Glover and Cora Kaplan. In doing so it aims at examining the reality of patriarchal ideology which considers women as second class citizen and maternal vessels. It reveals the pathetic condition of the protagonist, Anju and Sudha. They have not got the role of independent agents in the society but treated as play things. They are taught to be submissive from the very beginning of their life. The demarcation line has been drawn in the name of Bidhata Purush who also does not come to write their fortune. As a result, directly or indirectly they are engaged in their subservient lives. It is patriarchal ideology which makes them feminine and masculine, which assigns different roles, rights and responsibilities in order to make subservient. This paper concludes that the writer's, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s work exposes the male domination upon women in the Indian society.

A Novel Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Task Offloading in MEC Systems

With the internet developing rapidly, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been proposed to offer computational capabilities to tackle the high latency caused by innumerable data and applications. Due to limited computing resources, the innovation of computation offloading technology for an MEC system remains challenging, and can lead to transmission delays and energy consumption. This paper focuses on a task-offloading scheme for an MEC-based system where each mobile device is an independent agent and responsible for making a schedule based on delay-sensitive tasks. Nevertheless, the time-varying network dynamics and the heterogeneous features of real-time data tasks make it difficult to find an optimal solution for task offloading. Existing centralized-based or distributed-based algorithms require huge computational resources for complex problems. To address the above problem, we design a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach by using a parameterized indexed value function for value estimation. Additionally, the task-offloading problem is simulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) and our aim is to reduce the total delay of data processing. Experimental results have shown that our algorithm significantly promotes the users’ offloading performance over traditional methods.

DeepMAG: Deep reinforcement learning with multi-agent graphs for flexible job shop scheduling

The flexible job shop scheduling (FJSS) is important in real-world factories due to the wide applicability. FJSS schedules the operations of jobs to be executed by specific machines at the appropriate time slots based on two decision steps, namely, the job sequencing (i.e., the sequence of jobs executed on a machine) and the job routing (i.e., the route of a job to a machine). Most current studies utilize either deep reinforcement learning (DRL) or multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for FJSS with a large search space. However, these studies suffer from two major limitations: no integration between DRL and MARL, and independent agents without cooperation. To this end, we propose a new model for FJSS, called DeepMAG based on Deep reinforcement learning with Multi-Agent Graphs. DeepMAG has two key contributions. (1) Integration between DRL and MARL. DeepMAG integrates DRL with MARL by associating a different agent to each machine and job. Each agent exploits DRL to find the best action on the job sequencing and routing. After a job-associated agent chooses the best machine, the job becomes a job candidate for the machine to proceed to its next operation, while a machine-associated agent selects the next job from its job candidate set to be processed. (2) Cooperative agents. A multi-agent graph is built based on the operation relationships among machines and jobs. An agent cooperates with its neighboring agents to take one cooperative action. Finally, we conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of DeepMAG and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques.