Epistemology

Epistemology (ᵻˌpɪstəˈmɒlədʒi; ) is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, and is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:

The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification

Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony

The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coher

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Concepts of Information Content and Likelihood in Parameter Calibration for Hydrological Simulation Models

There remains a great deal of uncertainty about uncertainty estimation in hydrological modeling. Given that hydrology is still a subject limited by the available measurement techniques, it does not appear that the issue of epistemic error in hydrological data will go away for the foreseeable future, and it may be necessary to find a way to allow for robust model conditioning and more subjective treatments of potential epistemic errors in prediction. In this paper an attempt is made to analyze how this is the result of the epistemic uncertainties inherent in the hydrological modeling process and their impact on model conditioning and hypothesis testing. Some ideas are proposed about how to deal with assessing the information in hydrological data and how it might influence model conditioning based on hydrological reasoning, with an application to rainfall-runoff modeling of a catchment in northern England, where inconsistent data for some events can introduce disinformation into the model conditioning process. A methodology is presented to make an assessment of the relative information content of calibration data before running a model that can then inform the evaluation of model runs and resulting prediction uncertainties.

Asce-Amer Soc Civil Engineers2015

Lieu hologrammatique, un concept et une méthodologie complexe de mesure de l'organisation spatiale des réalités sociales

Thibault Pierre Louis Romany

The urban is a complex phenomenon whose exploration remains a important scientific challenge. Choosing complex thought in order to renew our capacities for understanding and action on and with the urban is not trivial. The complex thought developed by Edgar Morin is as elegant as elusive. The social sciences of space developed by Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault have contributed to the renewal of the space's place to understand the inhabited. The objective of this thesis is to articulate these two constructivist approaches, in order to achieve a higher level of synthesis regarding the understanding and measure of the social construction of inhabited space. The thesis consists in three parts :

the epistemological challenge : how to enagage with a complex problem ?
the theoretical challenge : how to appreciate the social construction of space in order to measure an urban substance ?
the methodological challenge : how to measure this substance ? Based on reflections concerning measuring urbanity, I propose a generalization to that of the spatialization of social realities. By translating the notions of metric, scale and place, the author's work leads to the proposal of an indisciplinary concept and methodology for measuring the spatialization of social realities: the hologrammatic place. The thesis defended is that such conceptualization allows us to identify boundaries of places by their emergence. Such an a posteriori identification allows the establishment not of an indicator, but of a measure of the spatialization of social realities. This research contribute to the renewal of urban planning methodologies toward the establishment of a complex methodology that makes conceivable a relative and relational urbanism.

EPFL2020

End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling With Semi-Structured Knowledge Management

Silin Gao

Current task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems mostly manage structured knowledge (e.g. databases and tables) to guide the goal-oriented conversations. However, they fall short of handling dialogs which also involve unstructured knowledge (e.g. reviews and documents). In this article, we formulate a task of modeling TOD grounded on a fusion of structured and unstructured knowledge. To address this task, we propose a TOD system with semi-structured knowledge management, SeKnow, which extends the belief state to manage knowledge with both structured and unstructured contents. Furthermore, we introduce two implementations of SeKnow based on a non-pretrained sequence-to-sequence model and a pretrained language model, respectively. Both implementations use the end-to-end manner to jointly optimize dialog modeling grounded on structured and unstructured knowledge. We conduct experiments on a modified version of MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset, Mod-MultiWOZ 2.1, where dialogs are processed to involve semi-structured knowledge. Experimental results show that SeKnow has strong performances in both end-to-end dialog and intermediate knowledge management, compared to existing TOD systems and their extensions with pipeline knowledge management schemes.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022