Computational techniques have shown much promise in the field of Finance, owing to their ability to extract sense out of dauntingly complex systems. This paper reviews the most promising of these techniques, from traditional computational intelligence methods to their machine learning siblings, with particular view to their application in optimising the management of a portfolio of financial instruments. The current state of the art is assessed, and prospective further work is assessed and recommended.

This paper proposes the application of particle swarm optimization (PSO) to the problem of finite element model (FEM) selection. This problem arises when a choice of the best model for a system has to be made from set of competing models, each developed a priori from engineering judgment. PSO is a population-based stochastic search algorithm inspired by the behaviour of biological entities in nature when they are foraging for resources. Each potentially correct model is represented as a particle that exhibits both individualistic and group behaviour. Each particle moves within the model search space looking for the best solution by updating the parameters values that define it. The most important step in the particle swarm algorithm is the method of representing models which should take into account the number, location and variables of parameters to be updated. One example structural system is used to show the applicability of PSO in finding an optimal FEM. An optimal model is defined as the model that has the least number of updated parameters and has the smallest parameter variable variation from the mean material properties. Two different objective functions are used to compare performance of the PSO algorithm.

Despite the extensive development of first-principles planning in recent years, planning applications are still primarily developed using knowledge-based planners which can exploit domain-specific heuristics and weaker domain models.  Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planners capture domain-specific heuristics for more efficient search, accommodate incomplete causal models, and can be used to enforce standard operating procedures.  Unfortunately, we do not have semantics for the methods or tasks that make up HTN models, that help evaluate the correctness of methods, or to build a reliable executive for HTN plans.  This paper fills the gap by providing a well-defined semantics for the methods and plans of SHOP2, a state-of-the-art HTN planner.  The semantics are defined in terms of concurrent golog (ConGolog) and the situation calculus.  We provide a proof of equivalence between the plans generated by SHOP2 and the action sequences of the ConGolog semantics.  We show how the semantics reflects the distinction between plan-time and execution-time, and provide some simple examples showing how the semantics can support method verification.  The semantics provide an implementation-neutral specification for an executive, showing how an executive must treat the plans SHOP2 generates in order to enforce the expected behaviors.  Future directions include automated verification of method specifications, automatically generating plan monitors, and plan revision and repair.

This paper explores the use of an oft-ignored information source in heuristic search: a search-distance-to-go estimate. Operators frequently have different costs and cost-to-go is not the same as search-distance-to-go.  We evaluate two previous proposals: dynamically weighted A* and A* epsilon.  We present a revision to dynamically weighted A* that improves its performance substantially in domains where the search does not progress uniformly towards solutions, and particularly in certain temporal planning problems.  We show how to incorporate distance estimates into weighted A* and improve its performance in several domains. Both approaches lead to dramatic performance increases in popular benchmark domains.

When modeling real-world decision-theoretic planning problems in the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, it is often impossible to obtain a completely accurate estimate of transition probabilities. For example, natural uncertainty arises in the transition specification due to elicitation of MDP transition models from an expert or data, or non-stationary transition distributions arising from insufficient state knowledge. In the interest of obtaining the most robust policy under transition uncertainty, the Markov Decision Process with Imprecise Transition Probabilities (MDP-IPs) has been introduced to model such scenarios. Unfortunately, while solutions to the MDP-IP are well-known, they require nonlinear optimization and are extremely time-consuming in practice. To address this deficiency, we propose efficient dynamic programming methods to exploit the structure of factored MDPIPs. Noting that the key computational bottleneck in the solution of MDP-IPs is the need to repeatedly solve nonlinear constrained optimization problems, we show how to target approximation techniques to drastically reduce the computational overhead of the nonlinear solver while producing bounded, approximately optimal solutions. Our results show up to two orders of magnitude speedup in comparison to traditional “flat” dynamic programming approaches and up to an order of magnitude speedup over the extension of factored MDP approximate value iteration techniques to MDP-IPs.

As the volume and interconnectedness of corporate data grows, data quality is becoming a business competency essential to success. Existing methods for managing data quality do not scale up to large volumes of data in a way that is directly manageable by the owner of the data. For the past two years a new breed of data quality products, built on applied AI techniques, are empowering non-technical users. Over 150 businesses are benefiting from these products including NASDAQ, Visa, Experian, Oracle, Fidelity, Bank of America, Volvo, Dell, Sabic, and Dassault Systems. The applied AI techniques described include lightweight ontologies to efficiently find inexact textual matches in large data sets.

In this paper we address the problem of generating preferred plans by combining the procedural control knowledge specified by Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) with rich user preferences. To this end, we extend the popular Planning Domain Definition Language, PDDL3, to support specification of simple and temporally extended preferences over HTN constructs. To compute preferred HTN plans, we propose a branch-and-bound algorithm, together with a set of heuristics that, leveraging HTN structure, measure progress towards satisfaction of preferences. Our preference-based planner, HTNPLAN-P, is implemented as an extension of the SHOP2 planner. We compared our planner with SGPLAN5 and HPLAN-P — the top performers in the 2006 International Planning Competition preference tracks. HTNPLAN-P generated plans that in all but a few cases equalled or exceeded the quality of plans returned by HPLAN-P and SGPLAN5. While our implementation builds on SHOP2, the language and techniques proposed here are relevant to a broad range of HTN planners.

While much work on learning in planning focused on learning domain physics (i.e., action models), and search control knowledge, little attention has been paid towards learning user preferences on desirable plans. Hierarchical task networks (HTN) are known to provide an effective way to encode user prescriptions about what constitute good plans. However, manual construction of these methods is complex and error prone. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learning probabilistic hierarchical task networks that capture user preferences by examining user-produced plans given no prior information about the methods (in contrast, most prior work on learning within the HTN framework focused on learning “method preconditions”—i.e., domain physics—assuming that the structure of the methods is given as input). We will show that this problem has close parallels to the problem of probabilistic grammar induction, and describe how grammar induction methods can be adapted to learn task networks. We will empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing that task networks we learn are able to generate plans with a distribution close to the distribution of the userpreferred plans.

We show how to translate HTN domain descriptions (if they satisfy certain restrictions) into PDDL so that they can be used by classical planners.  We provide correctness results for our translation algorithm, and show that it runs in linear time and space. We also show that even small and incomplete amounts of HTN knowledge, when translated into PDDL using our algorithm, can greatly improve a classical planner's performance. In experiments on several thousand randomly generated problems in three different planning domains, such knowledge speeded up the well-known Fast-Forward planner by several orders of magnitude, and enabled it to solve much larger problems than it could otherwise solve.

While the most accurate word sense disambiguation systems are built using supervised learning from sense-tagged data, scaling them up to all words of a language has proved elusive, since preparing a sense-tagged corpus for all words of a language is time-consuming and human labor intensive. In this paper, we propose and implement a completely automatic approach to scale up word sense disambiguation to all words of English.  Our approach relies on English-Chinese parallel corpora, English-Chinese bilingual dictionaries, and automatic methods of finding synonyms of Chinese words. No additional human sense annotations or word translations are needed. We conducted a large-scale empirical evaluation on more than 29,000 noun tokens in English texts annotated in OntoNotes 2.0, based on its coarse-grained sense inventory.  The evaluation results show that our approach is able to achieve high accuracy, outperforming the first-sense baseline and coming close to a prior reported approach that requires manual human efforts to provide Chinese translations of English senses.