Auctions play an important role in electronic commerce, and have been used to solve problems in distributed computing. Automated approaches to designing effective auction mechanisms are helpful in reducing the burden of traditional game theoretic, analytic approaches and in searching through the large space of possible auction mechanisms. This paper presents an approach to automated mechanism design (AMD) in the domain of double auctions. We describe a novel parametrized space of double auctions, and then introduce an evolutionary search method that searches this space of parameters. The approach evaluates auction mechanisms using the framework of the TAC Market Design Game and relates the performance of the markets in that game to their constituent parts using reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the strongest mechanisms we found using this approach not only win the Market Design Game against known, strong opponents, but also exhibit desirable economic properties when they run in isolation.

Adaptive control problems are notoriously difficult to solve even in the presence of plant-specific controllers. One way to by-pass the intractable computation of the optimal policy is to restate the adaptive control as the minimization of the relative entropy of a controller that ignores the true plant dynamics from an informed controller. The solution is given by the Bayesian control rule-a set of equations characterizing a stochastic adaptive controller for the class of possible plant dynamics. Here, the Bayesian control rule is applied to derive BCR-MDP, a controller to solve undiscounted Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces and unknown dynamics. In particular, we derive a non-parametric conjugate prior distribution over the policy space that encapsulates the agent's whole relevant history and we present a Gibbs sampler to draw random policies from this distribution. Preliminary results show that BCR-MDP successfully avoids sub-optimal limit cycles due to its built-in mechanism to balance exploration versus exploitation.

In this paper, research on AI based modeling technique to optimize development of new alloys with necessitated improvements in properties and chemical mixture over existing alloys as per functional requirements of product is done. The current research work novels AI in lieu of predictions to establish association between material and product customary. Advanced computational simulation techniques like CFD, FEA interrogations are made viable to authenticate product dynamics in context to experimental investigations. Accordingly, the current research is focused towards binding relationships between material design and product design domains. The input to feed forward back propagation prediction network model constitutes of material design features. Parameters relevant to product design strategies are furnished as target outputs. The outcomes of ANN shows good sign of correlation between material and product design domains. The study enriches a new path to illustrate material factors at the time of new product development.

A field known as Compressive Sensing (CS) has recently emerged to help address the growing challenges of capturing and processing high-dimensional signals and data sets. CS exploits the surprising fact that the information contained in a sparse signal can be preserved in a small number of compressive (or random) linear measurements of that signal. Strong theoretical guarantees have been established on the accuracy to which sparse or near-sparse signals can be recovered from noisy compressive measurements. In this paper, we address similar questions in the context of a different modeling framework. Instead of sparse models, we focus on the broad class of manifold models, which can arise in both parametric and non-parametric signal families. Building upon recent results concerning the stable embeddings of manifolds within the measurement space, we establish both deterministic and probabilistic instance-optimal bounds in $\ell_2$ for manifold-based signal recovery and parameter estimation from noisy compressive measurements. In line with analogous results for sparsity-based CS, we conclude that much stronger bounds are possible in the probabilistic setting. Our work supports the growing empirical evidence that manifold-based models can be used with high accuracy in compressive signal processing.

A bot is a piece of software that is usually installed on an infected machine without the user's knowledge. A bot is controlled remotely by the attacker under a Command and Control structure. Recent statistics show that bots represent one of the fastest growing threats to our network by performing malicious activities such as email spamming or keylogging. However, few bot detection techniques have been developed to date. In this paper, we investigate a behavioural algorithm to detect a single bot that uses keylogging activity. Our approach involves the use of function calls analysis for the detection of the bot with a keylogging component. Correlation of the frequency of a specified time-window is performed to enhance he detection scheme. We perform a range of experiments with the spybot. Our results show that there is a high correlation between some function calls executed by this bot which indicates abnormal activity in our system.

Recently, Wang et al. discussed the properties of fuzzy information systems under homomorphisms in the paper [C. Wang, D. Chen, L. Zhu, Homomorphisms between fuzzy information systems, Applied Mathematics Letters 22 (2009) 1045-1050], where homomorphisms are based upon the concepts of consistent functions and fuzzy relation mappings. In this paper, we classify consistent functions as predecessor-consistent and successor-consistent, and then proceed to present more properties of consistent functions. In addition, we improve some characterizations of fuzzy relation mappings provided by Wang et al.

CODEQ is a new, population-based meta-heuristic algorithm that is a hybrid of concepts from chaotic search, opposition-based learning, differential evolution and quantum mechanics. CODEQ has successfully been used to solve different types of problems (e.g. constrained, integer-programming, engineering) with excellent results. In this paper, CODEQ is used to train feed-forward neural networks. The proposed method is compared with particle swarm optimization and differential evolution algorithms on three data sets with encouraging results.

A fertile area of recent research has demonstrated concrete polynomial time lower bounds for solving natural hard problems on restricted computational models. Among these problems are Satisfiability, Vertex Cover, Hamilton Path, Mod6-SAT, Majority-of-Majority-SAT, and Tautologies, to name a few. The proofs of these lower bounds follow a certain proof-by-contradiction strategy that we call alternation-trading. An important open problem is to determine how powerful such proofs can possibly be. We propose a methodology for studying these proofs that makes them amenable to both formal analysis and automated theorem proving. We prove that the search for better lower bounds can often be turned into a problem of solving a large series of linear programming instances. Implementing a small-scale theorem prover based on this result, we extract new human-readable time lower bounds for several problems. This framework can also be used to prove concrete limitations on the current techniques.

Modal logics have traditionally played a central role in Computer Science, appearing, e.g., in the guise of temporal logics, program logics such as PDL, epistemic logics, and later as description logics. The development of modal logics has seen extensions along (at least) two axes: the enhancement of the expressive power of basic (relational) modal logic on the one hand, and the continual extension, beyond the purely relational realm, of the class of structures described using modal logics on the other hand. Hybrid logic falls into the first category, extending modal logic with the ability to reason about individual states in models. This feature, originally suggested by Prior and first studied in the context of tense logics and PDL (see [5] for references), is of particular relevance in knowledge representation languages and as such has found its way into modern description logics, where it is denoted by the letter O in the standard naming scheme [2]. Extensions along the second axis - semantics beyond Kripke structures and neighbourhood models - include various probabilistic modal logics, interpreted over probabilistic transition systems, graded modal logic over multigraphs [8], conditional logics over selection function frames [6], and coalition logic [17], interpreted over so-called game frames. As a unifying semantic bracket covering all these logics and many further ones, coalgebraic modal logic has emerged ([7] gives a survey). The scope of coalgebraic modal logic has recently been expanded to encompass nominals; we refer to the arising class of logics as coalgebraic hybrid logics.

Text of abstract We present a family of pairwise tournaments reducing k-class classification to binary classification. These reductions are provably robust against a constant fraction of binary errors, simultaneously matching the best possible computation O(log k) and regret O(1). The construction also works for robustly selecting the best of k-choices by tournament. We strengthen previous results by defeating a more powerful adversary than previously addressed while providing a new form of analysis. In this setting, the error correcting tournament has depth O(log k) while using O(klogk) comparators, both optimal up to a small constant. Keywords: reductions, multiclass classification, cost-sensitive learning, tournaments, robust search 1. Introduction We consider the classical problem of multiclass classification, where given an instance x X, the goal is to predict the most likely label y {1,...,k}, according to some unknown probability distribution. A common general approach to multiclass learning is to reduce a multiclass problem to a set of binary classification problems [2, 7, 11, 12, 15].