This paper describes and motivates a new decision theory known as functional decision theory (FDT), as distinct from causal decision theory and evidential decision theory. Functional decision theorists hold that the normative principle for action is to treat one's decision as the output of a fixed mathematical function that answers the question, "Which output of this very function would yield the best outcome?" Adhering to this principle delivers a number of benefits, including the ability to maximize wealth in an array of traditional decision-theoretic and game-theoretic problems where CDT and EDT perform poorly. Using one simple and coherent decision rule, functional decision theorists (for example) achieve more utility than CDT on Newcomb's problem, more utility than EDT on the smoking lesion problem, and more utility than both in Parfit's hitchhiker problem. In this paper, we define FDT, explore its prescriptions in a number of different decision problems, compare it to CDT and EDT, and give philosophical justifications for FDT as a normative theory of decision-making.

A team of Waterloo researchers found that applying artificial intelligence to the right combination of data retrieved from wearable technology may detect whether your health is failing. The study, which involved researchers from Waterloo's Faculties of Applied Health Sciences and Engineering, found that the data from wearable sensors and artificial intelligence that assesses changes in aerobic responses could one day predict whether a person is experiencing the onset of a respiratory or cardiovascular disease. "The onset of a lot of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has a direct impact on our aerobic fitness," said Thomas Beltrame, who led the research while at the University of Waterloo, and is now at the Institute of Computing in University of Campinas in Brazil. "In the near future, we believe it will be possible to continuously check your health, even before you realize that you need medical help." The study monitored active, healthy men in their twenties who wore a shirt for four days that incorporated sensors for heart rate, breathing and acceleration.

The ubiquitous complex networks are often composed of regular and irregular components, which makes uncovering the complexity of network structure into a fundamental challenge in network science. Exploring the regular information and identifying the roles of microscopic elements in network organization can help practitioners to recognize the universal principles of network formation and facilitate network data mining.Despite many algorithms having been proposed for link prediction and network reconstruction, estimating and regulating the reconstructability of complex networks remains an inadequately explored problem. With the practical assumption that there has consistence between local structures of networks and the corresponding adjacency matrices are approximately low rank, we obtain a self-representation network model in which the organization principles of networks are captured by representation matrix. According to the model, original networks can be reconstructed based on observed structure. What's more, the model enables us to estimate to what extent networks are regulable, in other words, measure the reconstructability of complex networks. In addition, the model enables us to measure the importance of network links for network regularity thereby allowing us to regulate the reconstructability of networks. The extensive experiments on disparate networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and measure. Specifically, the structural regularity reflects the reconstructability of networks, and the reconstruction accuracy can be promoted via the deleting of irregular network links independent of specific algorithms.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, have developed artificial intelligence (AI) capable of using wearable-collected data to predict the onset of health problems. Findings were published Feb. 23 in the Journal of Applied Physiology. The study aimed to outline a possible foundation for wearable technology and AI could partner to predict illness. Researchers hope the technology pairing could assess changes in aerobic responses to identify the onset of respiratory or cardiovascular disease. "The onset of a lot of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has a direct impact on our aerobic fitness," said first author Thomas Beltrame, of the Institute of Computing in University of Campinas in Brazil, and colleagues.

This paper describes the deployment and implementation of a blockchain to improve the security, knowledge and intelligence during the inter-agent communication and collaboration processes in restrict domains of the Internet Infrastructure. It is a work that proposes the application of a blockchain, platform independent, on a particular model of agents, but that can be used in similar proposals, once the results on the specific model were satisfactory.

Dealing with memory and time constraints are current challenges when learning from data streams with a massive amount of data. Many algorithms have been proposed to handle these difficulties, among them, the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) algorithm. Although the VFDT has been widely used in data stream mining, in the last years, several authors have suggested modifications to increase its performance, putting aside memory concerns by proposing memory-costly solutions. Besides, most data stream mining solutions have been centred around ensembles, which combine the memory costs of their weak learners, usually VFDTs. To reduce the memory cost, keeping the predictive performance, this study proposes the Strict VFDT (SVFDT), a novel algorithm based on the VFDT. The SVFDT algorithm minimises unnecessary tree growth, substantially reducing memory usage and keeping competitive predictive performance. Moreover, since it creates much more shallow trees than VFDT, SVFDT can achieve a shorter processing time. Experiments were carried out comparing the SVFDT with the VFDT in 11 benchmark data stream datasets. This comparison assessed the trade-off between accuracy, memory, and processing time. Statistical analysis showed that the proposed algorithm obtained similar predictive performance and significantly reduced processing time and memory use. Thus, SVFDT is a suitable option for data stream mining with memory and time limitations, recommended as a weak learner in ensemble-based solutions.

Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive, rule systems and statistical learning. The aim of most of these studies is to reveal the underlying language structuring these representations and providing a general substrate for thought. Here, we ask about the plasticity of symbolic descriptive languages. We perform two concept learning experiments, that consistently demonstrate that humans can change very rapidly the repertoire of symbols they use to identify concepts, by compiling expressions which are frequently used into new symbols of the language. The pattern of concept learning times is accurately described by a Bayesian agent that rationally updates the probability of compiling a new expression according to how useful it has been to compress concepts so far. By portraying the Language of Thought as a flexible system of rules, we also highlight the intrinsic difficulties to pin it down empirically. Keywords: Language of Thought, Concept Learning, Probabilistic Inference 1. Introduction How can children acquire a vast universe of concepts with seemingly very little exposure? Preprint submitted to Cognitive Psychology. Combinatorial languages can describe a vast set of concepts from a small set of primitives. This can be understood in a relatively simple example in the domain of shapes. A combinatorial and symbolic language similar to Logo [5] can combine operations such as "move", "pen up", "pen down" or "rotate" to generate an infinite set of expressions (or programs) which, when evaluated, can convey all sort of shapes.

We use an algebraic viewpoint, namely a matrix framework to deal with the problem of resource allocation under uncertainty in the context of a qualitative approach. Our basic qualitative data are a plausibility relation over the resources, a hierarchical relation over the agents and of course the preference that the agents have over the resources. With this data we propose a qualitative binary relation $\unrhd$ between allocations such that $\mathcal{F}\unrhd \mathcal{G}$ has the following intended meaning: the allocation $\mathcal{F}$ produces more or equal social welfare than the allocation $\mathcal{G}$. We prove that there is a family of allocations which are maximal with respect to $\unrhd$. We prove also that there is a notion of simple deal such that optimal allocations can be reached by sequences of simple deals. Finally, we introduce some mechanism for discriminating {optimal} allocations.

The supervisory control of probabilistic discrete event systems (PDESs) is investigated under the assumptions that the supervisory controller (supervisor) is probabilistic and has a partial observation. The probabilistic P-supervisor is defined, which specifies a probability distribution on the control patterns for each observation. The notions of the probabilistic controllability and observability are proposed and demonstrated to be a necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the probabilistic P-supervisors. Moreover, the polynomial verification algorithms for the probabilistic controllability and observability are put forward. In addition, the infimal probabilistic controllable and observable superlanguage is introduced and computed as the solution of the optimal control problem of PDESs. Several examples are presented to illustrate the results obtained.

Day 2 of Insight Exchange Network's "Healthcare on the Blockchain" event began with sessions on using blockchain technology for secure verification and changing the architecture of consumer decision making (see our coverage of Day 1). Morning speakers included David Houlding, Director of Healthcare Privacy & Security at Intel, returning to moderate a session on blockchain security with Jeremy Grant, Managing Director of Technology Business Strategy at Venable LLP and Debbie Bucci from the Office of Standards and Interoperability at Health and Human Services. Doug Emery, Director of Benefits Innovation Solutions and the the Center for Value in Healthcare at Altarum, and James Maldonado, CEO of Trestleworks, presented a session which encouraged some new points of view. For example, the speakers discussed evolving from fee-for-service to risk-adjusted systems as the unit of account and transitioning from revenue cycle management to value cycle management through computable, composable payment and benefits contracts. After a morning networking break, Jennifer Georgino, Contributor to Blockchain Healthcare Review, returned to moderate a session on managing data on the blockchain for cost-savings and error reduction.