Doctoral Symposium of MATES'06 Abstract: Automated management and monitoring of service contracts like Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or higher-level policies is vital for efficient and reliable distributed se rvice-oriented architectures (SOA) with high quality of service (QoS) levels. IT service provider need to manage, exec ute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. I propose a novel rule-based knowledge representation (KR) for SLA rules and a respective rule-based service level management (RBSLM) framework. My rule-based approach based on logic programming pr ovides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation and high levels of automation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. Therewith, I address an urgent need service-oriented businesses do have nowadays which is to dynamically change their business and contractual logic in order to adapt to rapidly changing business environments and to overcome the restricting nature of slow change cycles.

Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been stu died in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representat ion languages rules are being used as a declarative programming language to form alize real-world decision logic and create IS production systems upon. This paper adopts an SE methodology from extreme programming, namely t est driven development, and discusses how it can be adapted to verificat ion, validation and integrity testing (V&V&I) of policy and contract sp ecifications. Since, the test-driven approach focuses on the behavioral a spects and the drawn conclusions instead of the structure of the rule base a nd the causes of faults, it is independent of the complexity of the rule lan guage and the system under test and thus much easier to use and understand f or the rule engineer and the user.

We provide an overview of some recent progress on the complexity of election systems. The issues studied include the complexity of the winner, manipulation, bribery, and control problems.

In this paper we propose some novel path planning strategies for a double integrator with bounded velocity and bounded control inputs. First, we study the following version of the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP): given a set of points in $\real^d$, find the fastest tour over the point set for a double integrator. We first give asymptotic bounds on the time taken to complete such a tour in the worst-case. Then, we study a stochastic version of the TSP for double integrator where the points are randomly sampled from a uniform distribution in a compact environment in $\real^2$ and $\real^3$. We propose novel algorithms that perform within a constant factor of the optimal strategy with high probability. Lastly, we study a dynamic TSP: given a stochastic process that generates targets, is there a policy which guarantees that the number of unvisited targets does not diverge over time? If such stable policies exist, what is the minimum wait for a target? We propose novel stabilizing receding-horizon algorithms whose performances are within a constant factor from the optimum with high probability, in $\real^2$ as well as $\real^3$. We also argue that these algorithms give identical performances for a particular nonholonomic vehicle, Dubins vehicle.

We are presenting a set of multilingual text analysis tools that can help analysts in any field to explore large document collections quickly in order to determine whether the documents contain information of interest, and to find the relevant text passages. The automatic tool, which currently exists as a fully functional prototype, is expected to be particularly useful when users repeatedly have to sieve through large collections of documents such as those downloaded automatically from the internet. The proposed system takes a whole document collection as input. It first carries out some automatic analysis tasks (named entity recognition, geo-coding, clustering, term extraction), annotates the texts with the generated meta-information and stores the meta-information in a database. The system then generates a zoomable and hyperlinked geographic map enhanced with information on entities and terms found. When the system is used on a regular basis, it builds up a historical database that contains information on which names have been mentioned together with which other names or places, and users can query this database to retrieve information extracted in the past.

We present a tool that, from automatically recognised names, tries to infer inter-person relations in order to present associated people on maps. Based on an in-house Named Entity Recognition tool, applied on clusters of an average of 15,000 news articles per day, in 15 different languages, we build a knowledge base that allows extracting statistical co-occurrences of persons and visualising them on a per-person page or in various graphs.

We are presenting a method to recognise geographical references in free text. Our tool must work on various languages with a mi ni-mum of language-dependent resources, except a gazetteer. The main difficulty is to disa mbiguate these place names by distinguis hing places from persons and by selecting the mo st likely place out of a list of homographi c place names world-wide. The system uses a number of language-independent clues and he uristics to disambiguate place name homogra phs. The final aim is to index texts with the countries and cities they mention and to automatically visualise this information on geographical maps using various tools.

We are proposing a simple, but efficient basic approach for a number of multilingual and cross-lingual language technology applications that are not limited to the usual two or three languages, but that can be applied with relatively little effort to larger sets of languages. The approach consists of using existing multilingual linguistic resources such as thesauri, nomenclatures and gazetteers, as well as exploiting the existence of additional more or less language-independent text items such as dates, currency expressions, numbers, names and cognates. Mapping texts onto the multilingual resources and identifying word token links between texts in different languages are basic ingredients for applications such as cross-lingual document similarity calculation, multilingual clustering and categorisation, cross-lingual document retrieval, and tools to provide cross-lingual information access.

In a highly multilingual and multicultural environment such as in the European Commission with soon over twenty official languages, there is an urgent need for text analysis tools that use minimal linguistic knowledge so that they can be adapted to many languages without much human effort. We are presenting two such Information Extraction tools that have already been adapted to various Western and Eastern European languages: one for the recognition of date expressions in text, and one for the detection of geographical place names and the visualisation of the results in geographical maps. An evaluation of the performance has produced very satisfying results.

Definitions First we recall relevent definitions. This objective function is piece-wise linear and convex. This objective function is piece-wise linear and convex. A matrix game is given by a (payoff) matrix A. To solve a matrix game is to find a row p (an optimal strategy for the row player), a column q (an optimal strategy for the column player), and a number v such that p = ( p The number v is known as the value of game. The pair ( p, q) is known as an equilibrium for the matrix game.