This paper discusses a new measure that is adaptable to certain intervalic probability frameworks, possibility theory, and belief theory. As such, it has the potential for wide use in knowledge engineering, expert systems, and related problems in the human sciences. This measure (denoted here by F) has been introduced in Smithson (1988) and is more formally discussed in Smithson (1989a)o Here, I propose to outline the conceptual basis for F and compare its properties with other measures of second-order uncertainty. I will argue that F is an indicator of nonspecificity or alternatively, of freedom, as distinguished from either ambiguity or vagueness.

We present an approach to propagation-based SAT encoding of combinatorial problems, Boolean equi-propagation, where constraints are modeled as Boolean functions which propagate information about equalities between Boolean literals. This information is then applied to simplify the CNF encoding of the constraints. A key factor is that considering only a small fragment of a constraint model at one time enables us to apply stronger, and even complete, reasoning to detect equivalent literals in that fragment. Once detected, equivalences apply to simplify the entire constraint model and facilitate further reasoning on other fragments. Equi-propagation in combination with partial evaluation and constraint simplification provide the foundation for a powerful approach to SAT-based finite domain constraint solving. We introduce a tool called BEE (Ben-Gurion Equi-propagation Encoder) based on these ideas and demonstrate for a variety of benchmarks that our approach leads to a considerable reduction in the size of CNF encodings and subsequent speed-ups in SAT solving times.

Researchers and scientists increasingly find themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of technical material. Our goal is to effectively serve this need by using bibliometric text mining and summarization techniques to generate summaries of scientific literature. We show how we can use citations to produce automatically generated, readily consumable, technical extractive summaries. We first propose C-LexRank, a model for summarizing single scientific articles based on citations, which employs community detection and extracts salient information-rich sentences. Next, we further extend our experiments to summarize a set of papers, which cover the same scientific topic. We generate extractive summaries of a set of Question Answering (QA) and Dependency Parsing (DP) papers, their abstracts, and their citation sentences and show that citations have unique information amenable to creating a summary.

The application of machine learning to bioinformatics problems is well established. Less well understood is the application of bioinformatics techniques to machine learning and, in particular, the representation of non-biological data as biosequences. The aim of this paper is to explore the effects of giving amino acid representation to problematic machine learning data and to evaluate the benefits of supplementing traditional machine learning with bioinformatics tools and techniques. The signatures of 60 computer viruses and 60 computer worms were converted into amino acid representations and first multiply aligned separately to identify conserved regions across different families within each class (virus and worm). This was followed by a second alignment of all 120 aligned signatures together so that non-conserved regions were identified prior to input to a number of machine learning techniques. Differences in length between virus and worm signatures after the first alignment were resolved by the second alignment. Our first set of experiments indicates that representing computer malware signatures as amino acid sequences followed by alignment leads to greater classification and prediction accuracy. Our second set of experiments indicates that checking the results of data mining from artificial virus and worm data against known proteins can lead to generalizations being made from the domain of naturally occurring proteins to malware signatures. However, further work is needed to determine the advantages and disadvantages of different representations and sequence alignment methods for handling problematic machine learning data.

This paper addresses the issue of integrating agents with a variety of external resources and services, as found in enterprise computing environments. We propose an approach for interfacing agents and existing message routing and mediation engines based on the endpoint concept from the enterprise integration patterns of Hohpe and Woolf. A design for agent endpoints is presented, and an architecture for connecting the Jason agent platform to the Apache Camel enterprise integration framework using this type of endpoint is described. The approach is illustrated by means of a business process use case, and a number of Camel routes are presented. These demonstrate the benefits of interfacing agents to external services via a specialised message routing tool that supports enterprise integration patterns.

Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose that an agent's vote is influenced by the votes of their friends who have already voted. Despite its simplicity, this model provides useful insights into a number of areas including social polling, sequential voting, and manipulation. We prove that the number of candidates and the network structure affect the computational complexity of computing which candidate necessarily or possibly can win in such a social poll. For social networks with bounded treewidth and a bounded number of candidates, we provide polynomial algorithms for both problems. In other cases, we prove that computing which candidates necessarily or possibly win are computationally intractable.

This paper introduces a new algorithm for the induction if complex finite state automata from samples of behavior. The algorithm is based on information theoretic principles. The algorithm reduces the search space by many orders of magnitude over what was previously thought possible. We compare the algorithm with some existing induction techniques for finite state automata and show that the algorithm is much superior in both run time and quality of inductions.

A submarine's sonar team is responsible for detecting, localising and classifying targets using information provided by the platform's sensor suite. The information used to make these assessments is typically uncertain and/or incomplete and is likely to require a measure of confidence in its reliability. Moreover, improvements in sensor and communication technology are resulting in increased amounts of on-platform and off-platform information available for evaluation. This proliferation of imprecise information increases the risk of overwhelming the operator. To assist the task of localisation and classification a concept demonstration decision aid (Horizon), based on evidential reasoning, has been developed. Horizon is an information fusion software package for representing and fusing imprecise information about the state of the world, expressed across suitable frames of reference. The Horizon software is currently at prototype stage.

A novel method for estimating Bayesian network (BN) parameters from data is presented which provides improved performance on test data. Previous research has shown the value of representing conditional probability distributions (CPDs) via neural networks(Neal 1992), noisy-OR gates (Neal 1992, Diez 1993)and decision trees (Friedman and Goldszmidt 1996).The Bernoulli mixture network (BMN) explicitly represents the CPDs of discrete BN nodes as mixtures of local distributions,each having a different set of parents.This increases the space of possible structures which can be considered,enabling the CPDs to have finer-grained dependencies.The resulting estimation procedure induces a modelthat is better able to emulate the underlying interactions occurring in the data than conventional conditional Bernoulli network models.The results for artificially generated data indicate that overfitting is best reduced by restricting the complexity of candidate mixture substructures local to each node. Furthermore, mixtures of very simple substructures can perform almost as well as more complex ones.The BMN is also applied to data collected from an online adventure game with an application to keyhole plan recognition. The results show that the BMN-based model brings a dramatic improvement in performance over a conventional BN model.

A key problem in statistics and machine learning is the determination of network structure from data. We consider the case where the structure of the graph to be reconstructed is known to be scale-free. We show that in such cases it is natural to formulate structured sparsity inducing priors using submodular functions, and we use their Lovász extension to obtain a convex relaxation. For tractable classes such as Gaussian graphical models, this leads to a convex optimization problem that can be efficiently solved. We show that our method results in an improvement in the accuracy of reconstructed networks for synthetic data. We also show how our prior encourages scale-free reconstructions on a bioinfomatics dataset.