A new distance function dist(A,B) for fuzzy sets A and B is introduced. It is based on the descriptive complexity, i.e., the number of bits (on average) that are needed to describe an element in the symmetric difference of the two sets. The distance gives the amount of additional information needed to describe any one of the two sets given the other. We prove its mathematical properties and perform pattern clustering on data based on this distance.

Knowledge is attributed to human whose problem-solving behavior is subjective and complex. In today's knowledge economy, the need to manage knowledge produced by a community of actors cannot be overemphasized. This is due to the fact that actors possess some level of tacit knowledge which is generally difficult to articulate. Problem-solving requires searching and sharing of knowledge among a group of actors in a particular context. Knowledge expressed within the context of a problem resolution must be capitalized for future reuse. In this paper, an approach that permits dynamic capitalization of relevant and reliable actors' knowledge in solving decision problem following Economic Intelligence process is proposed. Knowledge annotation method and temporal attributes are used for handling the complexity in the communication among actors and in contextualizing expressed knowledge. A prototype is built to demonstrate the functionalities of a collaborative Knowledge Management system based on this approach. It is tested with sample cases and the result showed that dynamic capitalization leads to knowledge validation hence increasing reliability of captured knowledge for reuse. The system can be adapted to various domains

The shift from industrial economy to knowledge economy in today's world has revolutionalized strategic planning in organizations as well as their problem solving approaches. The point of focus today is knowledge and service production with more emphasis been laid on knowledge capital. Many organizations are investing on tools that facilitate knowledge sharing among their employees and they are as well promoting and encouraging collaboration among their staff in order to build the organization's knowledge capital with the ultimate goal of creating a lasting competitive advantage for their organizations. One of the current leading approaches used for solving organization's decision problem is the Economic Intelligence (EI) approach which involves interactions among various actors called EI actors. These actors collaborate to ensure the overall success of the decision problem solving process. In the course of the collaboration, the actors express knowledge which could be capitalized for future reuse. In this paper, we propose in the first place, an annotation model for knowledge elicitation among EI actors. Because of the need to build a knowledge capital, we also propose a dynamic knowledge capitalisation approach for managing knowledge produced by the actors. Finally, the need to manage the interactions and the interdependencies among collaborating EI actors, led to our third proposition which constitute an awareness mechanism for group work management.

To harness modern multicore processors, it is imperative to develop parallel versions of fundamental algorithms. In this paper, we compare different approaches to parallel best-first search in a shared-memory setting. We present a new method, PBNF, that uses abstraction to partition the state space and to detect duplicate states without requiring frequent locking. PBNF allows speculative expansions when necessary to keep threads busy. We identify and fix potential livelock conditions in our approach, proving its correctness using temporal logic. Our approach is general, allowing it to extend easily to suboptimal and anytime heuristic search. In an empirical comparison on STRIPS planning, grid pathfinding, and sliding tile puzzle problems using 8-core machines, we show that A*, weighted A* and Anytime weighted A* implemented using PBNF yield faster search than improved versions of previous parallel search proposals.

"Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensor motor knowledge. We are all prodigious Olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it."- Hans Moravec Moravec's paradox is involved with the fact that it is the seemingly easier day to day problems that are harder to implement in a machine, than the seemingly complicated logic based problems of today. The results prove that most artificially intelligent machines are as adept if not more than us at under-taking long calculations or even play chess, but their logic brings them nowhere when it comes to carrying out everyday tasks like walking, facial gesture recognition or speech recognition.

Temporal Logic Model Checking is a verification method in which we describe a system, the model, and then we verify whether some properties, expressed in a temporal logic formula, hold in the system. It has many industrial applications. In order to improve performance, some tools allow preprocessing of the model, verifying on-line a set of properties reusing the same compiled model; we prove that the complexity of the Model Checking problem, without any preprocessing or preprocessing the model or the formula in a polynomial data structure, is the same. As a result preprocessing does not always exponentially improve performance. Symbolic Model Checking algorithms work by manipulating sets of states, and these sets are often represented by BDDs. It has been observed that the size of BDDs may grow exponentially as the model and formula increase in size. As a side result, we formally prove that a superpolynomial increase of the size of these BDDs is unavoidable in the worst case. While this exponential growth has been empirically observed, to the best of our knowledge it has never been proved so far in general terms. This result not only holds for all types of BDDs regardless of the variable ordering, but also for more powerful data structures, such as BEDs, RBCs, MTBDDs, and ADDs.

We explore phase transitions of plan modification, which mainly focus on the conformant planning problems. By analyzing features of plan modification in conformant planning problems, quantitative results are obtained. If the number of operators is less than, almost all conformant planning problems can't be solved with plan modification. If the number of operators is more than, almost all conformant planning problems can be solved with plan modification. The results of the experiments also show that there exists an experimental threshold of density (ratio of number of operators to number of propositions), which separates the region where almost all conformant planning problems can't be solved with plan modification from the region where almost all conformant planning problems can be solved with plan modification.

A learning algorithm based on primary school teaching and learning is presented. The methodology is to continuously evaluate a student and to give them training on the examples for which they repeatedly fail, until, they can correctly answer all types of questions. This incremental learning procedure produces better learning curves by demanding the student to optimally dedicate their learning time on the failed examples. When used in machine learning, the algorithm is found to train a machine on a data with maximum variance in the feature space so that the generalization ability of the network improves. The algorithm has interesting applications in data mining, model evaluations and rare objects discovery.

Rough set theory, a mathematical tool to deal with inexact or uncertain knowledge in information systems, has originally described the indiscernibility of elements by equivalence relations. Covering rough sets are a natural extension of classical rough sets by relaxing the partitions arising from equivalence relations to coverings. Recently, some topological concepts such as neighborhood have been applied to covering rough sets. In this paper, we further investigate the covering rough sets based on neighborhoods by approximation operations. We show that the upper approximation based on neighborhoods can be defined equivalently without using neighborhoods. To analyze the coverings themselves, we introduce unary and composition operations on coverings. A notion of homomorphismis provided to relate two covering approximation spaces. We also examine the properties of approximations preserved by the operations and homomorphisms, respectively.

Sets of desirable gambles constitute a quite general type of uncertainty model with an interesting geometrical interpretation. We give a general discussion of such models and their rationality criteria. We study exchangeability assessments for them, and prove counterparts of de Finetti's finite and infinite representation theorems. We show that the finite representation in terms of count vectors has a very nice geometrical interpretation, and that the representation in terms of frequency vectors is tied up with multivariate Bernstein (basis) polynomials. We also lay bare the relationships between the representations of updated exchangeable models, and discuss conservative inference (natural extension) under exchangeability and the extension of exchangeable sequences.