We develop a conceptually clear, intuitive, and feasible decision procedure for testing satisfiability in the full multi-agent epistemic logic CMAEL(CD) with operators for common and distributed knowledge for all coalitions of agents mentioned in the language. To that end, we introduce Hintikka structures for CMAEL(CD) and prove that satisfiability in such structures is equivalent to satisfiability in standard models. Using that result, we design an incremental tableau-building procedure that eventually constructs a satisfying Hintikka structure for every satisfiable input set of formulae of CMAEL(CD) and closes for every unsatisfiable input set of formulae.

Scheduling problems in manufacturing, logistics and project management have frequently been modeled using the framework of Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems with minimum and maximum time lags (RCPSP/max). Due to the importance of these problems, providing scalable solution schedules for RCPSP/max problems is a topic of extensive research. However, all existing methods for solving RCPSP/max assume that durations of activities are known with certainty, an assumption that does not hold in real world scheduling problems where unexpected external events such as manpower availability, weather changes, etc. lead to delays or advances in completion of activities. Thus, in this paper, our focus is on providing a scalable method for solving RCPSP/max problems with durational uncertainty. To that end, we introduce the robust local search method consisting of three key ideas: (a) Introducing and studying the properties of two decision rule approximations used to compute start times of activities with respect to dynamic realizations of the durational uncertainty; (b) Deriving the expression for robust makespan of an execution strategy based on decision rule approximations; and (c) A robust local search mechanism to efficiently compute activity execution strategies that are robust against durational uncertainty. Furthermore, we also provide enhancements to local search that exploit temporal dependencies between activities. Our experimental results illustrate that robust local search is able to provide robust execution strategies efficiently.

Support Vector Machines, SVMs, and the Large Margin Nearest Neighbor algorithm, LMNN, are two very popular learning algorithms with quite different learning biases. In this paper we bring them into a unified view and show that they have a much stronger relation than what is commonly thought. We analyze SVMs from a metric learning perspective and cast them as a metric learning problem, a view which helps us uncover the relations of the two algorithms. We show that LMNN can be seen as learning a set of local SVM-like models in a quadratic space. Along the way and inspired by the metric-based interpretation of SVM s we derive a novel variant of SVMs, epsilon-SVM, to which LMNN is even more similar. We give a unified view of LMNN and the different SVM variants. Finally we provide some preliminary experiments on a number of benchmark datasets in which show that epsilon-SVM compares favorably both with respect to LMNN and SVM.

We consider the problem of online linear regression on individual sequences. The goal in this paper is for the forecaster to output sequential predictions which are, after T time rounds, almost as good as the ones output by the best linear predictor in a given L1-ball in R^d. We consider both the cases where the dimension d is small and large relative to the time horizon T. We first present regret bounds with optimal dependencies on the sizes U, X and Y of the L1-ball, the input data and the observations. The minimax regret is shown to exhibit a regime transition around the point d = sqrt(T) U X / (2 Y). Furthermore, we present efficient algorithms that are adaptive, i.e., they do not require the knowledge of U, X, and Y, but still achieve nearly optimal regret bounds.

On the internet, web surfers, in the search of information, always strive for recommendations. The solutions for generating recommendations become more difficult because of exponential increase in information domain day by day. In this paper, we have calculated entropy based similarity between users to achieve solution for scalability problem. Using this concept, we have implemented an online user based collaborative web recommender system. In this model based collaborative system, the user session is divided into two levels. Entropy is calculated at both the levels. It is shown that from the set of valuable recommenders obtained at level I; only those recommenders having lower entropy at level II than entropy at level I, served as trustworthy recommenders. Finally, top N recommendations are generated from such trustworthy recommenders for an online user.

We propose the concept of Action-Related Place (ARPlace) as a powerful and flexible representation of task-related place in the context of mobile manipulation. ARPlace represents robot base locations not as a single position, but rather as a collection of positions, each with an associated probability that the manipulation action will succeed when located there. ARPlaces are generated using a predictive model that is acquired through experience-based learning, and take into account the uncertainty the robot has about its own location and the location of the object to be manipulated. When executing the task, rather than choosing one specific goal position based only on the initial knowledge about the task context, the robot instantiates an ARPlace, and bases its decisions on this ARPlace, which is updated as new information about the task becomes available. To show the advantages of this least-commitment approach, we present a transformational planner that reasons about ARPlaces in order to optimize symbolic plans. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that using ARPlaces leads to more robust and efficient mobile manipulation in the face of state estimation uncertainty on our simulated robot.

We present a technique for the animation of a 3D kinematic tongue model, one component of the talking head of an acoustic-visual (AV) speech synthesizer. The skeletal animation approach is adapted to make use of a deformable rig controlled by tongue motion capture data obtained with electromagnetic articulography (EMA), while the tongue surface is extracted from volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Initial results are shown and future work outlined.

In this paper, we propose a dynamic shared context processing method based on DSC (Dynamic Shared Context) model, applied in an e-collaborative learning environment. Firstly, we present the model. This is a way to measure the relevance between events and roles in collaborative environments. With this method, we can share the most appropriate event information for each role instead of sharing all information to all roles in a collaborative work environment. Then, we apply and verify this method in our project with Google App supported e-learning collaborative environment. During this experiment, we compared DSC method measured relevance of events and roles to manual measured relevance. And we describe the favorable points from this comparison and our finding. Finally, we discuss our future research of a hybrid DSC method to make dynamical information shared more effective in a collaborative work environment.

A complex system is made up of many components with many interactions. So the design of systems such as simulation systems, cooperative systems or assistance systems includes a very accurate modelling of interactional and communicational levels. The agent-based approach provides an adapted abstraction level for this problem. After having studied the organizational context and communicative capacities of agentbased systems, to simulate the reorganization of a flexible manufacturing, to regulate an urban transport system, and to simulate an epidemic detection system, our thoughts on the interactional level were inspired by human-machine interface models, especially those in "cognitive engineering". To provide a general framework for agent-based complex systems modelling, we then proposed a scale of four behaviours that agents may adopt in their complex systems (reactive, routine, cognitive, and collective). To complete the description of multi-level agent models, which is the focus of this paper, we illustrate our modelling and discuss our ongoing work on each level.

Recent results in Compressive Sensing have shown that, under certain conditions, the solution to an underdetermined system of linear equations with sparsity-based regularization can be accurately recovered by solving convex relaxations of the original problem. In this work, we present a novel primal-dual analysis on a class of sparsity minimization problems. We show that the Lagrangian bidual (i.e., the Lagrangian dual of the Lagrangian dual) of the sparsity minimization problems can be used to derive interesting convex relaxations: the bidual of the $\ell_0$-minimization problem is the $\ell_1$-minimization problem; and the bidual of the $\ell_{0,1}$-minimization problem for enforcing group sparsity on structured data is the $\ell_{1,\infty}$-minimization problem. The analysis provides a means to compute per-instance non-trivial lower bounds on the (group) sparsity of the desired solutions. In a real-world application, the bidual relaxation improves the performance of a sparsity-based classification framework applied to robust face recognition.