In the physical world, an object is a moving object if its position changes over time. In a symbolic dynamic system such as a computer program or a blocks world, what are the moving objects? In this paper, we propose a definition, consider ways to generate moving objects and their "positions." We also introduce the flow graph of a moving object. It depicts the "trajectory" of the object, thus should be useful when planning to achieve a goal that involves moving some objects around.

Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search, for instance, the relevance of documents to a query on breaking news often changes significantly over time, requiring effective adaptation to user intention. In this paper, we focus on recency search and study a number of algorithms to improve ranking results by leveraging user click feedback. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we use real search sessions collected in a random exploration bucket for \emph{reliable} offline evaluation of these algorithms, which provides an unbiased comparison across algorithms without online bucket tests. Second, we propose a re-ranking approach to improve search results for recency queries using user clicks. Third, our empirical comparison of a dozen algorithms on real-life search data suggests importance of a few algorithmic choices in these applications, including generalization across different query-document pairs, specialization to popular queries, and real-time adaptation of user clicks.

Recently, several researchers have found that cost-based satisficing search with A* often runs into problems. Although some "work arounds" have been proposed to ameliorate the problem, there has not been any concerted effort to pinpoint its origin. In this paper, we argue that the origins can be traced back to the wide variance in action costs that is observed in most planning domains. We show that such cost variance misleads A* search, and that this is no trifling detail or accidental phenomenon, but a systemic weakness of the very concept of "cost-based evaluation functions + systematic search + combinatorial graphs". We show that satisficing search with sized-based evaluation functions is largely immune to this problem.

We present the extention and application of a new unsupervised statistical learning technique--the Partition Decoupling Method--to gene expression data. Because it has the ability to reveal non-linear and non-convex geometries present in the data, the PDM is an improvement over typical gene expression analysis algorithms, permitting a multi-gene analysis that can reveal phenotypic differences even when the individual genes do not exhibit differential expression. Here, we apply the PDM to publicly-available gene expression data sets, and demonstrate that we are able to identify cell types and treatments with higher accuracy than is obtained through other approaches. By applying it in a pathway-by-pathway fashion, we demonstrate how the PDM may be used to find sets of mechanistically-related genes that discriminate phenotypes.

this paper presents an enhancement of the medial axis algorithm to be used for finding the optimal shortest path for developed cognitive map. The cognitive map has been developed, based on the architectural blueprint maps. The idea for using the medial-axis is to find main path central pixels; each center pixel represents the center distance between two side boarder pixels. The need for these pixels in the algorithm comes from the need of building a network of nodes for the path, where each node represents a turning in the real world (left, right, critical left, critical right...). The algorithm also ignores from finding the center pixels paths that are too small for intelligent robot navigation. The Idea of this algorithm is to find the possible shortest path between start and end points. The goal of this research is to extract a simple, robust representation of the shape of the cognitive map together with the optimal shortest path between start and end points. The intelligent robot will use this algorithm in order to decrease the time that is needed for sweeping the targeted building.

The identification of the language of the script is an important stage in the process of recognition of the writing. There are several works in this research area, which treat various languages. Most of the used methods are global or statistical. In this present paper, we study the possibility of using the features of scripts to identify the language. The identification of the language of the script by characteristics returns the identification in the case of multilingual documents less difficult. We present by this work, a study on the possibility of using the structural features to identify the Arabic language from an Arabic / Latin text.

Sequential prediction problems such as imitation learning, where future observations depend on previous predictions (actions), violate the common i.i.d. assumptions made in statistical learning. This leads to poor performance in theory and often in practice. Some recent approaches provide stronger guarantees in this setting, but remain somewhat unsatisfactory as they train either non-stationary or stochastic policies and require a large number of iterations. In this paper, we propose a new iterative algorithm, which trains a stationary deterministic policy, that can be seen as a no regret algorithm in an online learning setting. We show that any such no regret algorithm, combined with additional reduction assumptions, must find a policy with good performance under the distribution of observations it induces in such sequential settings. We demonstrate that this new approach outperforms previous approaches on two challenging imitation learning problems and a benchmark sequence labeling problem.

CHRONIOUS is an Open, Ubiquitous and Adaptive Chronic Disease Management Platform for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease(COPD) Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and Renal Insufficiency. It consists of several modules: an ontology based literature search engine, a rule based decision support system, remote sensors interacting with lifestyle interfaces (PDA, monitor touchscreen) and a machine learning module. All these modules interact each other to allow the monitoring of two types of chronic diseases and to help clinician in taking decision for cure purpose. This paper illustrates how some machine learning algorithms and a rule based decision support system can be used in smart devices, to monitor chronic patient. We will analyse how a set of machine learning algorithms can be used in smart devices to alert the clinician in case of a patient health condition worsening trend.

The estimation of asset return distributions is crucial for determining optimal trading strategies. In this paper we describe the constrained mixture model, based on a mixture of Gamma and Gaussian distributions, to provide an accurate description of price trends as being clearly positive, negative or ranging while accounting for heavy tails and high kurtosis. The model is estimated in the Expectation Maximisation framework and model order estimation also respects the model's constraints.

An emotional version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that differences in language emotionalities influence differences among cultures no less than conceptual differences. Conceptual contents of languages and cultures to significant extent are determined by words and their semantic differences; these could be borrowed among languages and exchanged among cultures. Emotional differences, as suggested in the paper, are related to grammar and mostly cannot be borrowed. Conceptual and emotional mechanisms of languages are considered here along with their functions in the mind and cultural evolution. A fundamental contradiction in human mind is considered: language evolution requires reduced emotionality, but "too low" emotionality makes language "irrelevant to life," disconnected from sensory-motor experience. Neural mechanisms of these processes are suggested as well as their mathematical models: the knowledge instinct, the language instinct, the dual model connecting language and cognition, dynamic logic, neural modeling fields. Mathematical results are related to cognitive science, linguistics, and psychology. Experimental evidence and theoretical arguments are discussed. Approximate equations for evolution of human minds and cultures are obtained. Their solutions identify three types of cultures: "conceptual"-pragmatic cultures, in which emotionality of language is reduced and differentiation overtakes synthesis resulting in fast evolution at the price of uncertainty of values, self doubts, and internal crises; "traditional-emotional" cultures where differentiation lags behind synthesis, resulting in cultural stability at the price of stagnation; and "multi-cultural" societies combining fast cultural evolution and stability. Unsolved problems and future theoretical and experimental directions are discussed.