Africa
Semantics-Empowered Big Data Processing with Applications
Thirunarayan, Krishnaprasad (Kno.e.sis: Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing) | Sheth, Amit (Kno.e.sis: Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing)
We discuss the nature of big data and address the role of semantics in analyzing and processing big data that arises in the context of physical-cyber-social systems. To handle volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision-making. To handle variety, we resort to semantic models and annotations of data so that intelligent processing can be done independent of heterogeneity of data formats and media. To handle velocity, we seek to use continuous semantics capability to dynamically create event or situation specific models and recognize relevant new concepts, entities and facts. To handle veracity, we explore trust models and approaches to glean trustworthiness. These four v's of big data are harnessed by the semantics-empowered analytics to derive value to support applications transcending physical-cyber-social continuum.
Country-scale Exploratory Analysis of Call Detail Records through the Lens of Data Grid Models
Guigourรจs, Romain, Gay, Dominique, Boullรฉ, Marc, Clรฉrot, Fabrice, Rossi, Fabrice
Call Detail Records (CDRs) are data recorded by telecommunications companies, consisting of basic informations related to several dimensions of the calls made through the network: the source, destination, date and time of calls. CDRs data analysis has received much attention in the recent years since it might reveal valuable information about human behavior. It has shown high added value in many application domains like e.g., communities analysis or network planning. In this paper, we suggest a generic methodology for summarizing information contained in CDRs data. The method is based on a parameter-free estimation of the joint distribution of the variables that describe the calls. We also suggest several well-founded criteria that allows one to browse the summary at various granularities and to explore the summary by means of insightful visualizations. The method handles network graph data, temporal sequence data as well as user mobility data stemming from original CDRs data. We show the relevance of our methodology for various case studies on real-world CDRs data from Ivory Coast.
A Multi-Gene Genetic Programming Application for Predicting Students Failure at School
Orove, J. O., Osegi, N. E., Eke, B. O.
Several efforts to predict student failure rate (SFR) at school accurately still remains a core problem area faced by many in the educational sector. The procedure for forecasting SFR are rigid and most often times require data scaling or conversion into binary form such as is the case of the logistic model which may lead to lose of information and effect size attenuation. Also, the high number of factors, incomplete and unbalanced dataset, and black boxing issues as in Artificial Neural Networks and Fuzzy logic systems exposes the need for more efficient tools. Currently the application of Genetic Programming (GP) holds great promises and has produced tremendous positive results in different sectors. In this regard, this study developed GPSFARPS, a software application to provide a robust solution to the prediction of SFR using an evolutionary algorithm known as multi-gene genetic programming. The approach is validated by feeding a testing data set to the evolved GP models. Result obtained from GPSFARPS simulations show its unique ability to evolve a suitable failure rate expression with a fast convergence at 30 generations from a maximum specified generation of 500. The multi-gene system was also able to minimize the evolved model expression and accurately predict student failure rate using a subset of the original expression
Learning Large-Scale Dynamic Discrete Choice Models of Spatio-Temporal Preferences with Application to Migratory Pastoralism in East Africa
Ermon, Stefano (Stanford University) | Xue, Yexiang (Cornell University) | Toth, Russell (University of Sydney) | Dilkina, Bistra (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Bernstein, Richard (Cornell University) | Damoulas, Theodoros (NYU CUSP) | Clark, Patrick (USDA Research Service) | DeGloria, Steve (Cornell University) | Mude, Andrew (International Livestock Research Institute) | Barrett, Christopher (Cornell University) | Gomes, Carla P. (Cornell University)
Understanding spatio-temporal resource preferences is paramount in the design of policies for sustainable development. Unfortunately, resource preferences are often unknown to policy-makers and have to be inferred from data. In this paper we consider the problem of inferring agents' preferences from observed movement trajectories, and formulate it as an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem . With the goal of informing policy-making, we take a probabilistic approach and consider generative models that can be used to simulate behavior under new circumstances such as changes in resource availability, access policies, or climate. We study the Dynamic Discrete Choice (DDC) models from econometrics and prove that they generalize the Max-Entropy IRL model, a widely used probabilistic approach from the machine learning literature. Furthermore, we develop SPL-GD, a new learning algorithm for DDC models that is considerably faster than the state of the art and scales to very large datasets. We consider an application in the context of pastoralism in the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa, where migratory pastoralists face regular risks due to resource availability, droughts, and resource degradation from climate change and development. We show how our approach based on satellite and survey data can accurately model migratory pastoralism in East Africa and that it considerably outperforms other approaches on a large-scale real-world dataset of pastoralists' movements in Ethiopia collected over 3 years.
Using Riemannian geometry for SSVEP-based Brain Computer Interface
Kalunga, Emmanuel K., Chevallier, Sylvain, Barthelemy, Quentin
Riemannian geometry has been applied to Brain Computer Interface (BCI) for brain signals classification yielding promising results. Studying electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from their associated covariance matrices allows a mitigation of common sources of variability (electronic, electrical, biological) by constructing a representation which is invariant to these perturbations. While working in Euclidean space with covariance matrices is known to be error-prone, one might take advantage of algorithmic advances in information geometry and matrix manifold to implement methods for Symmetric Positive-Definite (SPD) matrices. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of the actual tools of information geometry and how they could be applied on covariance matrices of EEG. In practice, covariance matrices should be estimated, thus a thorough study of all estimators is conducted on real EEG dataset. As a main contribution, this paper proposes an online implementation of a classifier in the Riemannian space and its subsequent assessment in Steady-State Visually Evoked Potential (SSVEP) experimentations.
Use of Modality and Negation in Semantically-Informed Syntactic MT
Baker, Kathryn, Bloodgood, Michael, Dorr, Bonnie J., Callison-Burch, Chris, Filardo, Nathaniel W., Piatko, Christine, Levin, Lori, Miller, Scott
This paper describes the resource- and system-building efforts of an eight-week Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically-Informed Machine Translation (SIMT). We describe a new modality/negation (MN) annotation scheme, the creation of a (publicly available) MN lexicon, and two automated MN taggers that we built using the annotation scheme and lexicon. Our annotation scheme isolates three components of modality and negation: a trigger (a word that conveys modality or negation), a target (an action associated with modality or negation) and a holder (an experiencer of modality). We describe how our MN lexicon was semi-automatically produced and we demonstrate that a structure-based MN tagger results in precision around 86% (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. We apply our MN annotation scheme to statistical machine translation using a syntactic framework that supports the inclusion of semantic annotations. Syntactic tags enriched with semantic annotations are assigned to parse trees in the target-language training texts through a process of tree grafting. While the focus of our work is modality and negation, the tree grafting procedure is general and supports other types of semantic information. We exploit this capability by including named entities, produced by a pre-existing tagger, in addition to the MN elements produced by the taggers described in this paper. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English test set. This finding supports the hypothesis that both syntactic and semantic information can improve translation quality.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 13
OXFORD 1994 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York 0 E. K. Furukawa, D. Michie, and S. Muggleton, 1994 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The founder of modern computational logic, J.A. Robinson, opens this volume with a chapter on the field's great forefathers John von Neumann and Alan Turing.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 12 MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
Machine Intelligence 1 (1967) (eds N. Collins and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh Machine Intelligence 2 (1968) (eds E. Dale and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh (1 and 2 published as one volume in 1971 by Edinburgh University Press) (eds N. Collins, E. Dale, and D. Michie) Machine Intelligence 3 (1968) (ed. CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD 1991 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York C J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and E. Tyugu, 1991 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Machine intelligence. ISBN 0-19-853823-5 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Machine intelligence 12: towards an automated logic of human thought /edited by J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and It is a pleasure to contribute an introduction to this twelfth volume of the international Machine Intelligence series. My own work has, at times, cast me in the scientific roles of experimenter, instrumentation designer, and administrator.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 11
Machine Intelligence 1 (1967) (eds N. Collins and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh Machine Intelligence 2 (1968) (eds E. Dale and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh (1 and 2 published as one volume in 1971 by Edinburgh University Press) (eds N. Collins, E. Dale, and D. Michie). CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD 1988 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and J. Richards 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Machine Intelligence. Richard J. 006.3 ISBN 0-19-853718-2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset and printed in Northern Ireland at The Universities Press (Belfast) Ltd. Held at intervals in Scotland, the first seven International Machine Intelligence Workshops spanning the period of 1965-71 were involved in developing the new subject internationally--in those early days mainly as a mid-Atlantic phenomenon.