A reliable human skin detection method that is adaptable to different human skin colours and illu- mination conditions is essential for better human skin segmentation. Even though different human skin colour detection solutions have been successfully applied, they are prone to false skin detection and are not able to cope with the variety of human skin colours across different ethnic. Moreover, existing methods require high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel human skin de- tection approach that combines a smoothed 2D histogram and Gaussian model, for automatic human skin detection in colour image(s). In our approach an eye detector is used to refine the skin model for a specific person. The proposed approach reduces computational costs as no training is required; and it improves the accuracy of skin detection despite wide variation in ethnicity and illumination. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to employ fusion strategy for this purpose. Qualitative and quantitative results on three standard public datasets and a comparison with state-of-the-art methods have shown the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.

For natural and artificial systems with some symmetry structure, computational understanding and manipulation can be achieved without learning by exploiting the algebraic structure. Here we describe this algebraic coordinatization method and apply it to permutation puzzles. Coordinatization yields a structural understanding, not just solutions for the puzzles.

Artifact systems are a novel paradigm for specifying and implementing business processes described in terms of interacting modules called artifacts. Artifacts consist of data and lifecycles, accounting respectively for the relational structure of the artifacts states and their possible evolutions over time. In this paper we put forward artifact-centric multi-agent systems, a novel formalisation of artifact systems in the context of multi-agent systems operating on them. Differently from the usual process-based models of services, we give a semantics that explicitly accounts for the data structures on which artifact systems are defined. We study the model checking problem for artifact-centric multi-agent systems against specifications expressed in a quantified version of temporal-epistemic logic expressing the knowledge of the agents in the exchange. We begin by noting that the problem is undecidable in general. We identify a noteworthy class of systems that admit bisimilar, finite abstractions. It follows that we can verify these systems by investigating their finite abstractions; we also show that the corresponding model checking problem is EXPSPACE-complete. We then introduce artifact-centric programs, compact and declarative representations of the programs governing both the artifact system and the agents. We show that, while these in principle generate infinite-state systems, under natural conditions their verification problem can be solved on finite abstractions that can be effectively computed from the programs. We exemplify the theoretical results here pursued through a mainstream procurement scenario from the artifact systems literature.

The increasing importance of renewable energy, especially solar and wind power, has led to new forces in the formation of electricity prices. Hence, this paper introduces an econometric model for the hourly time series of electricity prices of the European Power Exchange (EPEX) which incorporates specific features like renewable energy. The model consists of several sophisticated and established approaches and can be regarded as a periodic VAR-TARCH with wind power, solar power, and load as influences on the time series. It is able to map the distinct and well-known features of electricity prices in Germany. An efficient iteratively reweighted lasso approach is used for the estimation. Moreover, it is shown that several existing models are outperformed by the procedure developed in this paper.

Neural population activity often exhibits rich variability and temporal structure. This variability is thought to arise from single-neuron stochasticity, neural dynamics on short time-scales, as well as from modulations of neural firing properties on long time-scales, often referred to as "non-stationarity". To better understand the nature of co-variability in neural circuits and their impact on cortical information processing, we need statistical models that are able to capture multiple sources of variability on different time-scales. Here, we introduce a hierarchical statistical model of neural population activity which models both neural population dynamics as well as inter-trial modulations in firing rates. In addition, we extend the model to allow us to capture non-stationarities in the population dynamics itself (i.e., correlations across neurons). We develop variational inference methods for learning model parameters, and demonstrate that the method can recover non-stationarities in both average firing rates and correlation structure. Applied to neural population recordings from anesthetized macaque primary visual cortex, our models provide a better account of the structure of neural firing than stationary dynamics models.

In this paper, two Q-learning (QL) methods are proposed and their convergence theories are established for addressing the model-free optimal control problem of general nonlinear continuous-time systems. By introducing the Q-function for continuous-time systems, policy iteration based QL (PIQL) and value iteration based QL (VIQL) algorithms are proposed for learning the optimal control policy from real system data rather than using mathematical system model. It is proved that both PIQL and VIQL methods generate a nonincreasing Q-function sequence, which converges to the optimal Q-function. For implementation of the QL algorithms, the method of weighted residuals is applied to derived the parameters update rule. The developed PIQL and VIQL algorithms are essentially off-policy reinforcement learning approachs, where the system data can be collected arbitrary and thus the exploration ability is increased. With the data collected from the real system, the QL methods learn the optimal control policy offline, and then the convergent control policy will be employed to real system. The effectiveness of the developed QL algorithms are verified through computer simulation.

Lifted inference has been proposed for various probabilistic logical frameworks in order to compute the probability of queries in a time that depends on the size of the domains of the random variables rather than the number of instances. Even if various authors have underlined its importance for probabilistic logic programming (PLP), lifted inference has been applied up to now only to relational languages outside of logic programming. In this paper we adapt Generalized Counting First Order Variable Elimination (GC-FOVE) to the problem of computing the probability of queries to probabilistic logic programs under the distribution semantics. In particular, we extend the Prolog Factor Language (PFL) to include two new types of factors that are needed for representing ProbLog programs. These factors take into account the existing causal independence relationships among random variables and are managed by the extension to variable elimination proposed by Zhang and Poole for dealing with convergent variables and heterogeneous factors. Two new operators are added to GC-FOVE for treating heterogeneous factors. The resulting algorithm, called LP$^2$ for Lifted Probabilistic Logic Programming, has been implemented by modifying the PFL implementation of GC-FOVE and tested on three benchmarks for lifted inference. A comparison with PITA and ProbLog2 shows the potential of the approach.

We propose a new Bayesian tracking and parameter learning algorithm for non-linear non-Gaussian multiple target tracking (MTT) models. We design a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution of the target states, birth and death times, and association of observations to targets, which constitutes the solution to the tracking problem, as well as the model parameters. In the numerical section, we present performance comparisons with several competing techniques and demonstrate significant performance improvements in all cases.

Bipartite ranking aims to learn a real-valued ranking function that orders positive instances before negative instances. Recent efforts of bipartite ranking are focused on optimizing ranking accuracy at the top of the ranked list. Most existing approaches are either to optimize task specific metrics or to extend the ranking loss by emphasizing more on the error associated with the top ranked instances, leading to a high computational cost that is super-linear in the number of training instances. We propose a highly efficient approach, titled TopPush, for optimizing accuracy at the top that has computational complexity linear in the number of training instances. We present a novel analysis that bounds the generalization error for the top ranked instances for the proposed approach. Empirical study shows that the proposed approach is highly competitive to the state-of-the-art approaches and is 10-100 times faster.

We propose a new framework for how to use sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms for inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGM). Via a sequential decomposition of the PGM we find a sequence of auxiliary distributions defined on a monotonically increasing sequence of probability spaces. By targeting these auxiliary distributions using SMC we are able to approximate the full joint distribution defined by the PGM. One of the key merits of the SMC sampler is that it provides an unbiased estimate of the partition function of the model. We also show how it can be used within a particle Markov chain Monte Carlo framework in order to construct high-dimensional block-sampling algorithms for general PGMs.