The bioinformatical methods to detect lateral gene transfer events are mainly based on functional coding DNA characteristics. In this paper, we propose the use of DNA traits not depending on protein coding requirements. We introduce several semilocal variables that depend on DNA primary sequence and that reflect thermodynamic as well as physico-chemical magnitudes that are able to tell apart the genome of different organisms. After combining these variables in a neural classificator, we obtain results whose power of resolution go as far as to detect the exchange of genomic material between bacteria that are phylogenetically close.

In general Evolutionary Computation (EC) includes a number of optimization methods inspired by biological mechanisms of evolution. The methods catalogued in this area use the Darwinian principles of life evolution to produce algorithms that returns high quality solutions to hard-to-solve optimization problems. The main strength of EC is precisely that they provide good solutions even if the computational resources (e.g., running time) are limited. Astronomy and Astrophysics are two fields that often require optimizing problems of high complexity or analyzing a huge amount of data and the so-called complete optimization methods are inherently limited by the size of the problem/data. For instance, reliable analysis of large amounts of data is central to modern astrophysics and astronomical sciences in general. EC techniques perform well where other optimization methods are inherently limited (as complete methods applied to NP-hard problems), and in the last ten years, numerous proposals have come up that apply with greater or lesser success methodologies of evolutional computation to common engineering problems. Some of these problems, such as the estimation of non-lineal parameters, the development of automatic learning techniques, the implementation of control systems, or the resolution of multi-objective optimization problems, have had (and have) a special repercussion in the fields. For these reasons EC emerges as a feasible alternative for traditional methods. In this paper, we discuss some promising applications in this direction and a number of recent works in this area; the paper also includes a general description of EC to provide a global perspective to the reader and gives some guidelines of application of EC techniques for future research

The article discusses some applications of fuzzy logic ideas to formalizing of the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) process and to measuring the effectiveness of CBR systems

Through history, the human being tried to relay its daily tasks to other creatures, which was the main reason behind the rise of civilizations. It started with deploying animals to automate tasks in the field of agriculture(bulls), transportation (e.g. horses and donkeys), and even communication (pigeons). Millenniums after, come the Golden age with "Al-jazari" and other Muslim inventors, which were the pioneers of automation, this has given birth to industrial revolution in Europe, centuries after. At the end of the nineteenth century, a new era was to begin, the computational era, the most advanced technological and scientific development that is driving the mankind and the reason behind all the evolutions of science; such as medicine, communication, education, and physics. At this edge of technology engineers and scientists are trying to model a machine that behaves the same as they do, which pushed us to think about designing and implementing "Things that-Thinks", then artificial intelligence was. In this work we will cover each of the major discoveries and studies in the field of machine cognition, which are the "Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer"(EPAM) and "The General Problem Solver"(GPS). The First one focus mainly on implementing the human-verbal learning behavior, while the second one tries to model an architecture that is able to solve problems generally (e.g. theorem proving, chess playing, and arithmetic). We will cover the major goals and the main ideas of each model, as well as comparing their strengths and weaknesses, and finally giving their fields of applications. And Finally, we will suggest a real life implementation of a cognitive machine.

Joint sparsity offers powerful structural cues for feature selection, especially for variables that are expected to demonstrate a "grouped" behavior. Such behavior is commonly modeled via group-lasso, multitask lasso, and related methods where feature selection is effected via mixed-norms. Several mixed-norm based sparse models have received substantial attention, and for some cases efficient algorithms are also available. Surprisingly, several constrained sparse models seem to be lacking scalable algorithms. We address this deficiency by presenting batch and online (stochastic-gradient) optimization methods, both of which rely on efficient projections onto mixed-norm balls. We illustrate our methods by applying them to the multitask lasso. We conclude by mentioning some open problems.

A fundamental operation in many vision tasks, including motion understanding, stereopsis, visual odometry, or invariant recognition, is establishing correspondences between images or between images and data from other modalities. We present an analysis of the role that multiplicative interactions play in learning such correspondences, and we show how learning and inferring relationships between images can be viewed as detecting rotations in the eigenspaces shared among a set of orthogonal matrices. We review a variety of recent multiplicative sparse coding methods in light of this observation. We also review how the squaring operation performed by energy models and by models of complex cells can be thought of as a way to implement multiplicative interactions. This suggests that the main utility of including complex cells in computational models of vision may be that they can encode relations not invariances.

Existing methods for sparse channel estimation typically provide an estimate computed as the solution maximizing an objective function defined as the sum of the log-likelihood function and a penalization term proportional to the l1-norm of the parameter of interest. However, other penalization terms have proven to have strong sparsity-inducing properties. In this work, we design pilot-assisted channel estimators for OFDM wireless receivers within the framework of sparse Bayesian learning by defining hierarchical Bayesian prior models that lead to sparsity-inducing penalization terms. The estimators result as an application of the variational message-passing algorithm on the factor graph representing the signal model extended with the hierarchical prior models. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of our channel estimators as compared to traditional and state-of-the-art sparse methods.

The paper presents an ant colony optimization metaheuristic for collaborative planning. Collaborative planning is used to coordinate individual plans of self-interested decision makers with private information in order to increase the overall benefit of the coalition. The method consists of a new search graph based on encoded solutions. Distributed and private information is integrated via voting mechanisms and via a simple but effective collaborative local search procedure. The approach is applied to a distributed variant of the multi-level lot-sizing problem and evaluated by means of 352 benchmark instances from the literature. The proposed approach clearly outperforms existing approaches on the sets of medium and large sized instances. While the best method in the literature so far achieves an average deviation from the best known non-distributed solutions of 46 percent for the set of the largest instances, for example, the presented approach reduces the average deviation to only 5 percent.

Informledge System (ILS) is a knowledge network with autonomous nodes and intelligent links that integrate and structure the pieces of knowledge. In this paper, we aim to put forward the link dynamics involved in intelligent processing of information in ILS. There has been advancement in knowledge management field which involve managing information in databases from a single domain. ILS works with information from multiple domains stored in distributed way in the autonomous nodes termed as Knowledge Network Node (KNN). Along with the concept under consideration, KNNs store the processed information linking concepts and processors leading to the appropriate processing of information.

Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological, information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this article, we examine a range of representation issues for graph-based relational data. Since the choice of relational data representation for the nodes, links, and features can dramatically affect the capabilities of SRL algorithms, we survey approaches and opportunities for relational representation transformation designed to improve the performance of these algorithms. This leads us to introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. In particular, the transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey and compare competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight challenges that remain to be addressed.