Agents and agent systems are becoming more and more important in the development of a variety of fields such as ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, autonomous computing, intelligent systems and intelligent robotics. The need for improvement of our basic knowledge on agents is very essential. We take a systematic approach and present extended classification of artificial agents which can be useful for understanding of what artificial agents are and what they can be in the future. The aim of this classification is to give us insights in what kind of agents can be created and what type of problems demand a specific kind of agents for their solution.

The runtime for Kernel Partial Least Squares (KPLS) to compute the fit is quadratic in the number of examples. However, the necessity of obtaining sensitivity measures as degrees of freedom for model selection or confidence intervals for more detailed analysis requires cubic runtime, and thus constitutes a computational bottleneck in real-world data analysis. We propose a novel algorithm for KPLS which not only computes (a) the fit, but also (b) its approximate degrees of freedom and (c) error bars in quadratic runtime. The algorithm exploits a close connection between Kernel PLS and the Lanczos algorithm for approximating the eigenvalues of symmetric matrices, and uses this approximation to compute the trace of powers of the kernel matrix in quadratic runtime.

In our understanding, a mind-map is an adaptive engine that basically works incrementally on the fundament of existing transactional streams. Generally, mind-maps consist of symbolic cells that are connected with each other and that become either stronger or weaker depending on the transactional stream. Based on the underlying biologic principle, these symbolic cells and their connections as well may adaptively survive or die, forming different cell agglomerates of arbitrary size. In this work, we intend to prove mind-maps' eligibility following diverse application scenarios, for example being an underlying management system to represent normal and abnormal traffic behaviour in computer networks, supporting the detection of the user behaviour within search engines, or being a hidden communication layer for natural language interaction.

Recent development of network structure analysis shows that it plays an important role in characterizing complex system of many branches of sciences. Different from previous network centrality measures, this paper proposes the notion of topological centrality (TC) reflecting the topological positions of nodes and edges in general networks, and proposes an approach to calculating the topological centrality. The proposed topological centrality is then used to discover communities and build the backbone network. Experiments and applications on research network show the significance of the proposed approach.

A new search algorithm for solving distributed constraint optimization problems (DisCOPs) is presented. Agents assign variables sequentially and compute bounds on partial assignments asynchronously. The asynchronous bounds computation is based on the propagation of partial assignments. The asynchronous forward-bounding algorithm (AFB) is a distributed optimization search algorithm that keeps one consistent partial assignment at all times. The algorithm is described in detail and its correctness proven. Experimental evaluation shows that AFB outperforms synchronous branch and bound by many orders of magnitude, and produces a phase transition as the tightness of the problem increases. This is an analogous effect to the phase transition that has been observed when local consistency maintenance is applied to MaxCSPs. The AFB algorithm is further enhanced by the addition of a backjumping mechanism, resulting in the AFB-BJ algorithm. Distributed backjumping is based on accumulated information on bounds of all values and on processing concurrently a queue of candidate goals for the next move back. The AFB-BJ algorithm is compared experimentally to other DisCOP algorithms (ADOPT, DPOP, OptAPO) and is shown to be a very efficient algorithm for DisCOPs.

Concrete is one of the most frequently used materials in Civil Engineering. Nevertheless, as a highly heterogeneous material, it shows very complex nonlinear behavior, which is extremely difficult to describe by a sound constitutive law. As a consequence, numerical simulation of response of complex concrete structures still remains a very challenging and demanding topic in engineering computational modeling. One of the most promising approaches to modeling of concrete behavior is based on the microplane concept, see, e.g., [7, Chapter 25] for general exposition and [1] for the most recent version of this family of models. It leads a fully three-dimensional material law that incorporates tensional and compressive softening, damage of the material, supports different combinations of loading, unloading and cyclic loading along with the development of damage-induced anisotropy of the material.

This paper presents comparison of several stochastic optimization algorithms developed by authors in their previous works for the solution of some problems arising in Civil Engineering. The introduced optimization methods are: the integer augmented simulated annealing (IASA), the real-coded augmented simulated annealing (RASA) [10], the differential evolution (DE) in its original fashion developed by R. Storn and K. Price[15] and simplified real-coded differential genetic algorithm (SADE) [6]. Each of these methods was developed for some specific optimization problem; namely the Chebychev trial polynomial problem, the so called type 0 function and two engineering problems - the reinforced concrete beam layout and the periodic unit cell problem respectively. Detailed and extensive numerical tests were performed to examine the stability and efficiency of proposed algorithms. The results of our experiments suggest that the performance and robustness of RASA, IASA and SADE methods are comparable, while the DE algorithm performs slightly worse. This fact together with a small number of internal parameters promotes the SADE method as the most robust for practical use.

This paper presents several types of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) used for global optimization on real domains. The interest has been focused on multimodal problems, where the difficulties of a premature convergence usually occurs. First the standard genetic algorithm (SGA) using binary encoding of real values and its unsatisfactory behavior with multimodal problems is briefly reviewed together with some improvements of fighting premature convergence. Two types of real encoded methods based on differential operators are examined in detail: the differential evolution (DE), a very modern and effective method firstly published by R. Storn and K. Price, and the simplified real-coded differential genetic algorithm SADE proposed by the authors. In addition, an improvement of the SADE method, called CERAF technology, enabling the population of solutions to escape from local extremes, is examined. All methods are tested on an identical set of objective functions and a systematic comparison based on a reliable methodology is presented. It is confirmed that real coded methods generally exhibit better behavior on real domains than the binary algorithms, even when extended by several improvements. Furthermore, the positive influence of the differential operators due to their possibility of self-adaptation is demonstrated. From the reliability point of view, it seems that the real encoded differential algorithm, improved by the technology described in this paper, is a universal and reliable method capable of solving all proposed test problems.

In this paper we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for on-line variable selection in multivariate regression problems involving high dimensional data streams. The algorithm recursively extracts all the latent factors of a partial least squares solution and selects the most important variables for each factor. This is achieved by means of only one sparse singular value decomposition which can be efficiently updated on-line and in an adaptive fashion. Simulation results based on artificial data streams demonstrate that the algorithm is able to select important variables in dynamic settings where the correlation structure among the observed streams is governed by a few hidden components and the importance of each variable changes over time. We also report on an application of our algorithm to a multivariate version of the "enhanced index tracking" problem using financial data streams. The application consists of performing on-line asset allocation with the objective of overperforming two benchmark indices simultaneously.

Since the early days of digital communication, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have now been routinely used in speech recognition, processing of natural languages, images, and in bioinformatics. An HMM $(X_i,Y_i)_{i\ge 1}$ assumes observations $X_1,X_2,...$ to be conditionally independent given an "explanotary" Markov process $Y_1,Y_2,...$, which itself is not observed; moreover, the conditional distribution of $X_i$ depends solely on $Y_i$. Central to the theory and applications of HMM is the Viterbi algorithm to find {\em a maximum a posteriori} estimate $q_{1:n}=(q_1,q_2,...,q_n)$ of $Y_{1:n}$ given the observed data $x_{1:n}$. Maximum {\em a posteriori} paths are also called Viterbi paths or alignments. Recently, attempts have been made to study the behavior of Viterbi alignments of HMMs with two hidden states when $n$ tends to infinity. It has indeed been shown that in some special cases a well-defined limiting Viterbi alignment exists. While innovative, these attempts have relied on rather strong assumptions. This work proves the existence of infinite Viterbi alignments for virtually any HMM with two hidden states.