In this paper we apply Conformal Prediction (CP) to the k-Nearest Neighbours Regression (k-NNR) algorithm and propose ways of extending the typical nonconformity measure used for regression so far. Unlike traditional regression methods which produce point predictions, Conformal Predictors output predictive regions that satisfy a given confidence level. The regions produced by any Conformal Predictor are automatically valid, however their tightness and therefore usefulness depends on the nonconformity measure used by each CP. In effect a nonconformity measure evaluates how strange a given example is compared to a set of other examples based on some traditional machine learning algorithm. We define six novel nonconformity measures based on the k-Nearest Neighbours Regression algorithm and develop the corresponding CPs following both the original (transductive) and the inductive CP approaches. A comparison of the predictive regions produced by our measures with those of the typical regression measure suggests that a major improvement in terms of predictive region tightness is achieved by the new measures.

This project describes the electricity demand and energy consumption management system and its application to Southern Peru smelter. It is composed of an hourly demand-forecasting module and of a simulation component for a plant electrical system. The first module was done using dynamic neural networks with backpropagation training algorithm; it is used to predict the electric power demanded every hour, with an error percentage below of 1%. This information allows efficient management of energy peak demands before this happen, distributing the raise of electric load to other hours or improving those equipments that increase the demand. The simulation module is based in advanced estimation techniques, such as: parametric estimation, neural network modeling, statistic regression and previously developed models, which simulates the electric behavior of the smelter plant. These modules facilitate electricity demand and consumption proper planning, because they allow knowing the behavior of the hourly demand and the consumption patterns of the plant, including the bill components, but also energy deficiencies and opportunities for improvement, based on analysis of information about equipments, processes and production plans, as well as maintenance programs. Finally the results of its application in Southern Peru smelter are presented.

We describe a new variational lower-bound on the minimum energy configuration of a planar binary Markov Random Field (MRF). Our method is based on adding auxiliary nodes to every face of a planar embedding of the graph in order to capture the effect of unary potentials. A ground state of the resulting approximation can be computed efficiently by reduction to minimum-weight perfect matching. We show that optimization of variational parameters achieves the same lower-bound as dual-decomposition into the set of all cycles of the original graph. We demonstrate that our variational optimization converges quickly and provides high-quality solutions to hard combinatorial problems 10-100x faster than competing algorithms that optimize the same bound.

In this paper, we present a novel approach of translating natural languages specification to SBVR business rules. The business rules constraint business structure or control behaviour of a business process. In modern business modelling, one of the important phases is writing business rules. Typically, a business rule analyst has to manually write hundreds of business rules in a natural language (NL) and then manually translate NL specification of all the rules in a particular rule language such as SBVR, or OCL, as required. However, the manual translation of NL rule specification to formal representation as SBVR rule is not only difficult, complex and time consuming but also can result in erroneous business rules. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that automatically translates the NL (such as English) specification of business rules to SBVR (Semantic Business Vocabulary and Rules) rules. The major challenge in NL to SBVR translation was complex semantic analysis of English language. We have used a rule based algorithm for robust semantic analysis of English and generate SBVR rules. Automated generation of SBVR based Business rules can help in improved and efficient constrained business aspects in a typical business modelling.

We describe Cobot, a mixed initiative socio-semantic conversational search and recommendation system for finding health information. With Cobot, users can start a real time conversation about their health concerns. Cobot then connects relevant users together in the conversation also providing contextual recommendations relevant to the conversation. Conventional search engines and content portals provide a solitary search experience inundating the health information seeker with a hoard of information often confusing and frustrating them. Cobot brings relevant healthcare information directly or through other users without any search through natural language conversation.

Recent approaches to multi-view learning have shown that factorizing the information into parts that are shared across all views and parts that are private to each view could effectively account for the dependencies and independencies between the different input modalities. Unfortunately, these approaches involve minimizing non-convex objective functions. In this paper, we propose an approach to learning such factorized representations inspired by sparse coding techniques. In particular, we show that structured sparsity allows us to address the multi-view learning problem by alternately solving two convex optimization problems. Furthermore, the resulting factorized latent spaces generalize over existing approaches in that they allow :having latent dimensions shared between any subset of the views instead of between all the views only. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the task of human pose estimation.

While traditional research on text clustering has largely focused on grouping documents by topic, it is conceivable that a user may want to cluster documents along other dimensions, such as the author's mood, gender, age, or sentiment. Without knowing the user's intention, a clustering algorithm will only group documents along the most prominent dimension, which may not be the one the user desires. To address the problem of clustering documents along the user-desired dimension, previous work has focused on learning a similarity metric from data manually annotated with the user's intention or having a human construct a feature space in an interactive manner during the clustering process. With the goal of reducing reliance on human knowledge for fine-tuning the similarity function or selecting the relevant features required by these approaches, we propose a novel active clustering algorithm, which allows a user to easily select the dimension along which she wants to cluster the documents by inspecting only a small number of words. We demonstrate the viability of our algorithm on a variety of commonly-used sentiment datasets.

The paper uses the SCOP theory of concepts to model the role of environmental context on three levels of entrepreneurial opportunity: idea generation, idea development, and entrepreneurial decision. The role of contextual-fit in the generation and development of ideas is modeled as the collapse of their superposition state into one of the potential states that composes this superposition. The projection of this collapsed state on the socio-economic basis results in interference between the developed idea and the perceptions of the supporting community, undergoing an eventual collapse for an entrepreneurial decision that reflects the shared vision of its stakeholders. The developed idea may continue to evolve due to continuous or discontinuous changes in the environment. The model offers unique insights into the effects of external influences on entrepreneurial decisions.

In multimedia information retrieval, where a document may contain both textual and visual content features, the ranking of documents is often computed by heuristically combining the feature spaces of different media types or combining the ranking scores computed independently from different feature spaces. In this paper, we propose a principled approach inspired by quantum theory. Specifically, we propose a tensor product based model aiming to represent textual and visual content features of an image as a non-separable composite system. The ranking scores of the images are then computed in the form of a quantum measurement. In addition, the correlations between features of different media types are incorporated in the framework. Experiments on ImageClef2007 show a promising performance of the tensor based approach.

The physical actions performed by any robot can be used to convey meaning to a user in human-robot interaction. While the analysis of physical actions as communicative acts is not new, it is less clear how dialogue planning policies for human-robot interaction should be influenced by the co-occurrence of physical tasks actions. In this short paper we report on a study which analyses the relative importance of omitting verbal feedback in situated human-robot dialogue. Results indicate that while a lack of explicit feedback can and does lead to more errors in dialogue, overall task performance times are improved, while users perceive the resultant system as better performing on a number of subjective measures.