The second was the propensity of the computing industry toward more lucrative assignments in the service sector. Both these factors are changing, not least because leading international software companies have set up research and development centers in the country. Computer science education established itself in India in the early 1980s when the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) set up computer science departments and started offering undergraduate programs in the discipline. Research in artificial intelligence took off soon afterward when the government of India launched the Knowledge Based Computing Systems (KBCS) program in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program (Saint-Dizier 1991). A number of nodal centers were set up to focus on different areas of research including expert systems (IIT Madras), speech processing (Tata Institue of Fundamental Research), parallel processing (Indian Institute for Science), image processing (Indian Statistical Institute), and natural language processing (Center for Development of Advanced Computing).

Modern SAT solvers are routinely used as core solving engines in vast numbers of different AI and industrial applications. In this short article, we will provide an overview of the SAT solver competitions. The solvers), and another one based on wall clock time, second SAT competition took place during the second which promotes solvers using all available Dimacs challenge in 1993 (Johnson and Trick resources to answer as quickly as possible (for 1996). Another SAT competition took place in answers incorrectly if it reports satisfiable but Beijing in 1996, organized by James Crawford. Each survey propagation (Braunstein and Zecchina category is defined through the type of instances 2004), a new approach to efficiently solve randomly used as benchmarks.

Soft sets, as a mathematical tool for dealing with uncertainty, have recently gained considerable attention, including some successful applications in information processing, decision, demand analysis, and forecasting. To construct new soft sets from given soft sets, some operations on soft sets have been proposed. Unfortunately, such operations cannot keep all classical set-theoretic laws true for soft sets. In this paper, we redefine the intersection, complement, and difference of soft sets and investigate the algebraic properties of these operations along with a known union operation. We find that the new operation system on soft sets inherits all basic properties of operations on classical sets, which justifies our definitions.

Attribute reduction is viewed as an important preprocessing step for pattern recognition and data mining. Most of researches are focused on attribute reduction by using rough sets. Recently, Tsang et al. discussed attribute reduction with covering rough sets in the paper [E. C.C. Tsang, D. Chen, Daniel S. Yeung, Approximations and reducts with covering generalized rough sets, Computers and Mathematics with Applications 56 (2008) 279-289], where an approach based on discernibility matrix was presented to compute all attribute reducts. In this paper, we provide an improved approach by constructing simpler discernibility matrix with covering rough sets, and then proceed to improve some characterizations of attribute reduction provided by Tsang et al. It is proved that the improved discernible matrix is equivalent to the old one, but the computational complexity of discernible matrix is greatly reduced.

A major benefit of graphical models is that most knowledge is captured in the model structure. Many models, however, produce inference problems with a lot of symmetries not reflected in the graphical structure and hence not exploitable by efficient inference techniques such as belief propagation (BP). In this paper, we present a new and simple BP algorithm, called counting BP, that exploits such additional symmetries. Starting from a given factor graph, counting BP first constructs a compressed factor graph of clusternodes and clusterfactors, corresponding to sets of nodes and factors that are indistinguishable given the evidence. Then it runs a modified BP algorithm on the compressed graph that is equivalent to running BP on the original factor graph. Our experiments show that counting BP is applicable to a variety of important AI tasks such as (dynamic) relational models and boolean model counting, and that significant efficiency gains are obtainable, often by orders of magnitude.

We develop the multilingual topic model for unaligned text (MuTo), a probabilistic model of text that is designed to analyze corpora composed of documents in two languages. From these documents, MuTo uses stochastic EM to simultaneously discover both a matching between the languages and multilingual latent topics. We demonstrate that MuTo is able to find shared topics on real-world multilingual corpora, successfully pairing related documents across languages. MuTo provides a new framework for creating multilingual topic models without needing carefully curated parallel corpora and allows applications built using the topic model formalism to be applied to a much wider class of corpora. Topic models are a powerful formalism for unsupervised analysis of corpora [1, 8].

Incorporating domain knowledge into the modeling process is an effective way to improve learning accuracy. However, as it is provided by humans, domain knowledge can only be specified with some degree of uncertainty. We propose to explicitly model such uncertainty through probabilistic constraints over the parameter space. In contrast to hard parameter constraints, our approach is effective also when the domain knowledge is inaccurate and generally results in superior modeling accuracy. We focus on generative and conditional modeling where the parameters are assigned a Dirichlet or Gaussian prior and demonstrate the framework with experiments on both synthetic and real-world data.

Efficiently finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) configuration of a graphical model is an important problem which is often implemented using message passing algorithms. The optimality of such algorithms is only well established for singly-connected graphs and other limited settings. This article extends the set of graphs where MAP estimation is in P and where message passing recovers the exact solution to so-called perfect graphs. This result leverages recent progress in defining perfect graphs (the strong perfect graph theorem), linear programming relaxations of MAP estimation and recent convergent message passing schemes. The article converts graphical models into nand Markov random fields which are straightforward to relax into linear programs. Therein, integrality can be established in general by testing for graph perfection. This perfection test is performed efficiently using a polynomial time algorithm. Alternatively, known decomposition tools from perfect graph theory may be used to prove perfection for certain families of graphs. Thus, a general graph framework is provided for determining when MAP estimation in any graphical model is in P, has an integral linear programming relaxation and is exactly recoverable by message passing.

Message-passing algorithms have emerged as powerful techniques for approximate inference in graphical models. When these algorithms converge, they can be shown to find local (or sometimes even global) optima of variational formulations to the inference problem. But many of the most popular algorithms are not guaranteed to converge. This has lead to recent interest in convergent message-passing algorithms. In this paper, we present a unified view of convergent message-passing algorithms. We present a simple derivation of an abstract algorithm, tree-consistency bound optimization (TCBO) that is provably convergent in both its sum and max product forms. We then show that many of the existing convergent algorithms are instances of our TCBO algorithm, and obtain novel convergent algorithms "for free" by exchanging maximizations and summations in existing algorithms. In particular, we show that Wainwright's non-convergent sum-product algorithm for tree based variational bounds, is actually convergent with the right update order for the case where trees are monotonic chains.

The introduction of loopy belief propagation (LBP) revitalized the application of graphical models in many domains. Many recent works present improvements on the basic LBP algorithm in an attempt to overcome convergence and local optima problems. Notable among these are convexified free energy approximations that lead to inference procedures with provable convergence and quality properties. However, empirically LBP still outperforms most of its convex variants in a variety of settings, as we also demonstrate here. Motivated by this fact we seek convexified free energies that directly approximate the Bethe free energy. We show that the proposed approximations compare favorably with state-of-the art convex free energy approximations.