In this paper we show how taking advantage of autonomous agents' capability to maintain parallel interactions with others, and incorporating it into the cooperative economic search model results in a new search strategy which outperforms current strategies in use. As a framework for our analysis we use the electronic marketplace, where buyer agents have the incentive to search cooperatively. The new search technique is quite intuitive, however its analysis and the process of extracting the optimal search strategy are associated with several significant complexities. These difficulties are derived mainly from the unbounded search space and simultaneous dual affects of decisions taken along the search. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the model, highlighting, demonstrating and proving important characteristics of the optimal search strategy. Consequently, we manage to come up with an efficient modular algorithm for extracting the optimal cooperative search strategy for any given environment. A computational based comparative illustration of the system performance using the new search technique versus the traditional methods is given, emphasizing the main differences in the optimal strategy's structure and the advantage of using the proposed model.

Affinity propagation clustering (AP) has two limitations: it is hard to know what value of parameter 'preference' can yield an optimal clustering solution, and oscillations cannot be eliminated automatically if occur. The adaptive AP method is proposed to overcome these limitations, including adaptive scanning of preferences to search space of the number of clusters for finding the optimal clustering solution, adaptive adjustment of damping factors to eliminate oscillations, and adaptive escaping from oscillations when the damping adjustment technique fails. Experimental results on simulated and real data sets show that the adaptive AP is effective and can outperform AP in quality of clustering results.

In this manner, on a simple system, the evolution of contact states, by parallelization of DDA, h as been investigated. So, a comparison between NFIS and SOM results has been presented. The results show appli cability of the proposed methods, by different accuracy, on detection of contact's distribution.

In this study, under general frame of MAny Connected Intelligent Particles Systems (MACIPS), we reproduce two new simple subsets of such intelligent complex network, namely hybrid intelligent systems, involved a few prominent intelligent computing and approximate reasoning methods: self organizing feature map (SOM), Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System and Rough Set Theory (RST). Over this, we show how our algorithms can be construed as a linkage of government-society interaction, where government catches various fashions of behavior: "solid (absolute) or flexible". So, transition of such society, by changing of connectivity parameters (noise) from order to disorder is inferred. Add to this, one may find an indirect mapping among finical systems and eventual market fluctuations with MACIPS.

In this study, we introduce general frame of MAny Connected Intelligent Particles Systems (MACIPS). Connections and interconnections between particles get a complex behavior of such merely simple system (system in system).Contribution of natural computing, under information granulation theory, are the main topics of this spacious skeleton. Upon this clue, we organize two algorithms involved a few prominent intelligent computing and approximate reasoning methods: self organizing feature map (SOM), Neuro- Fuzzy Inference System and Rough Set Theory (RST). Over this, we show how our algorithms can be taken as a linkage of government-society interaction, where government catches various fashions of behavior: solid (absolute) or flexible. So, transition of such society, by changing of connectivity parameters (noise) from order to disorder is inferred. Add to this, one may find an indirect mapping among financial systems and eventual market fluctuations with MACIPS. Keywords: phase transition, SONFIS, SORST, many connected intelligent particles system, society-government interaction

Determining the evolutionary history of a given biological data is an important task in biological sciences. Given a set of quartet topologies over a set of taxa, the Maximum Quartet Consistency (MQC) problem consists of computing a global phylogeny that satisfies the maximum number of quartets. A number of solutions have been proposed for the MQC problem, including Dynamic Programming, Constraint Programming, and more recently Answer Set Programming (ASP). ASP is currently the most efficient approach for optimally solving the MQC problem. This paper proposes encoding the MQC problem with pseudo-Boolean (PB) constraints. The use of PB allows solving the MQC problem with efficient PB solvers, and also allows considering different modeling approaches for the MQC problem. Initial results are promising, and suggest that PB can be an effective alternative for solving the MQC problem.

SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor 1 Running head: SIMDIALOG SIMDIALOG: A VISUAL GAME DIALOG EDITOR Charles B. Owen, Frank Biocca, Corey Bohil, Jason Conley Michigan State University East Lansing MI SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor 2 Abstract SimDialog is a visual editor for dialog in computer games. This paper presents the design of SimDialog, illustrating how script writers and non-programmers can easily create dialog for video games with complex branching structures and dynamic response characteristics. The system creates dialog as a directed graph. This allows for play using the dialog with a statebased cause and effect system that controls selection of non-player character responses and can provide a basic scoring mechanism for games. SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor 3 Introduction A challenge in the design of computer games is writing, organizing, and testing nonlinear dialog involving multiple user options and branches to many different possible character responses. One form of these are dialog trees (Bateman 2007) -- scripts that allow for multiple user inputs and character responses. We have developed SimDialog, a visual editor for complex nonlinear game dialog. The SimDialog system consists of an editor program that allows authors to design complex conversations with multiple options and a runtime component that manages the progression through the conversation during game play. SimDialog makes it easy for game writers and non-programmers to create dialog for computer games directly without having to edit complex file formats or pass their work to programmers who must then embed the dialog in the game program.

The notion of optimality naturally arises in many areas of applied mathematics and computer science concerned with decision making. Here we consider this notion in the context of three formalisms used for different purposes in reasoning about multi-agent systems: strategic games, CP-nets, and soft constraints. To relate the notions of optimality in these formalisms we introduce a natural qualitative modification of the notion of a strategic game. We show then that the optimal outcomes of a CP-net are exactly the Nash equilibria of such games. This allows us to use the techniques of game theory to search for optimal outcomes of CP-nets and vice-versa, to use techniques developed for CP-nets to search for Nash equilibria of the considered games. Then, we relate the notion of optimality used in the area of soft constraints to that used in a generalization of strategic games, called graphical games. In particular we prove that for a natural class of soft constraints that includes weighted constraints every optimal solution is both a Nash equilibrium and Pareto efficient joint strategy. For a natural mapping in the other direction we show that Pareto efficient joint strategies coincide with the optimal solutions of soft constraints.

We present a formal model to represent and solve the unicast/multicast routing problem in networks with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. To attain this, first we translate the network adapting it to a weighted graph (unicast) or and-or graph (multicast), where the weight on a connector corresponds to the multidimensional cost of sending a packet on the related network link: each component of the weights vector represents a different QoS metric value (e.g. bandwidth, cost, delay, packet loss). The second step consists in writing this graph as a program in Soft Constraint Logic Programming (SCLP): the engine of this framework is then able to find the best paths/trees by optimizing their costs and solving the constraints imposed on them (e.g. delay < 40msec), thus finding a solution to QoS routing problems. Moreover, c-semiring structures are a convenient tool to model QoS metrics. At last, we provide an implementation of the framework over scale-free networks and we suggest how the performance can be improved.

This paper explores the links between Knowledge Management and new community-based models of the organization from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. From a theoretical standpoint, we look at Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Knowledge Management (KM) and explore the links between the two as they relate to the use of information systems to manage knowledge. We begin by reviewing technologically supported approaches to KM and introduce the idea of "Systemes d'Aide a la Gestion des Connaissances" SAGC (Systems to aid the Management of Knowledge). Following this we examine the contribution that communal structures such as CoPs can make to intraorganizational KM and highlight some of 'success factors' for this approach to KM that are found in the literature. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results of a survey involving the Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) of twelve large French businesses; the objective of this study was to identify the factors that might influence the success of such approaches. The survey was analysed using thematic content analysis and the results are presented here with some short illustrative quotes from the CKOs. Finally, the paper concludes with some brief reflections on what can be learnt from looking at this problem from these two perspectives.