-- In order to improve children speech therapy, we develop a Fuzzy Expert System based on a speech therapy guide. This guide, write in natural language, was formalized using fuzzy logic paradigm. In this manner we obtain a knowledge base with over 150 rules and 19 linguistic variables. All these researches, including expert system validation, are part of TERAPERS project (financed by the National Agency for Scientific Research, Romania). I. INTRODUCTION The main objectives of speech therapy expert system develop by our team are [1]: - personalized therapy (the therapy must be in according with child's problems level, context and possibilities); - speech therapist assistant (the expert system offer some suggestion regarding what exercises are better for a specific moment and from a specific child); - (self) teaching (when system's conclusion is different that speech therapist's conclusion the last one must have the knowledge base change possibility).

In this paper we present architecture of a fuzzy expert system used for therapy of dyslalic children. With fuzzy approach we can create a better model for speech therapist decisions. A software interface was developed for validation of the system. The main objectives of this task are: personalized therapy (the therapy must be in according with child's problems level, context and possibilities), speech therapist assistant (the expert system offer some suggestion regarding what exercises are better for a specific moment and from a specific child), (self) teaching (when system's conclusion is different that speech therapist's conclusion the last one must have the knowledge base change possibility). Keywords: fuzzy expert systems, speech therapy 1. Introduction In this article we refer to LOGOMON system developed in TERAPERS project by the authors.

When solving instances of problem domains that feature a large branching factor, A* may generate a large number of nodes whose cost is greater than the cost of the optimal solution. We designate such nodes as surplus. Generating surplus nodes and adding them to the OPEN list may dominate both time and memory of the search. A recently introduced variant of A* called Partial Expansion A* (PEA*) deals with the memory aspect of this problem. When expanding a node n, PEA* generates all of its children and puts into OPEN only the children with f = f (n). n is re-inserted in the OPEN list with the f -cost of the best discarded child. This guarantees that surplus nodes are not inserted into OPEN. In this paper, we present a novel variant of A* called Enhanced Partial Expansion A* (EPEA*) that advances the idea of PEA* to address the time aspect. Given a priori domain- and heuristic- specific knowledge, EPEA* generates only the nodes with f = f(n). Although EPEA* is not always applicable or practical, we study several variants of EPEA*, which make it applicable to a large number of domains and heuristics. In particular, the ideas of EPEA* are applicable to IDA* and to the domains where pattern databases are traditionally used. Experimental studies show significant improvements in run-time and memory performance for several standard benchmark applications. We provide several theoretical studies to facilitate an understanding of the new algorithm.

Many problems in machine learning and other fields can be (re)for-mulated as linearly constrained separable convex programs. In most of the cases, there are multiple blocks of variables. However, the traditional alternating direction method (ADM) and its linearized version (LADM, obtained by linearizing the quadratic penalty term) are for the two-block case and cannot be naively generalized to solve the multi-block case. So there is great demand on extending the ADM based methods for the multi-block case. In this paper, we propose LADM with parallel splitting and adaptive penalty (LADMPSAP) to solve multi-block separable convex programs efficiently. When all the component objective functions have bounded subgradients, we obtain convergence results that are stronger than those of ADM and LADM, e.g., allowing the penalty parameter to be unbounded and proving the sufficient and necessary conditions} for global convergence. We further propose a simple optimality measure and reveal the convergence rate of LADMPSAP in an ergodic sense. For programs with extra convex set constraints, with refined parameter estimation we devise a practical version of LADMPSAP for faster convergence. Finally, we generalize LADMPSAP to handle programs with more difficult objective functions by linearizing part of the objective function as well. LADMPSAP is particularly suitable for sparse representation and low-rank recovery problems because its subproblems have closed form solutions and the sparsity and low-rankness of the iterates can be preserved during the iteration. It is also highly parallelizable and hence fits for parallel or distributed computing. Numerical experiments testify to the advantages of LADMPSAP in speed and numerical accuracy.

We present a system that demonstrates how the compositional structure of events, in concert with the compositional structure of language, can interplay with the underlying focusing mechanisms in video action recognition, thereby providing a medium, not only for top-down and bottom-up integration, but also for multi-modal integration between vision and language. We show how the roles played by participants (nouns), their characteristics (adjectives), the actions performed (verbs), the manner of such actions (adverbs), and changing spatial relations between participants (prepositions) in the form of whole sentential descriptions mediated by a grammar, guides the activity-recognition process. Further, the utility and expressiveness of our framework is demonstrated by performing three separate tasks in the domain of multi-activity videos: sentence-guided focus of attention, generation of sentential descriptions of video, and query-based video search, simply by leveraging the framework in different manners.

BliStr is a system that automatically develops strategies for E prover on a large set of problems. The main idea is to interleave (i) iterated low-timelimit local search for new strategies on small sets of similar easy problems with (ii) higher-timelimit evaluation of the new strategies on all problems. The accummulated results of the global higher-timelimit runs are used to define and evolve the notion of "similar easy problems", and to control the selection of the next strategy to be improved. The technique was used to significantly strengthen the set of E strategies used by the MaLARea, PS-E, E-MaLeS, and E systems in the CASC@Turing 2012 competition, particularly in the Mizar division. Similar improvement was obtained on the problems created from the Flyspeck corpus.

In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count), elimination style rules (like single transferable vote) and rules based on the tournament graph (like Copeland) respectively. We argue that with an elimination style voting rule like single transferable vote, partial voting does not change the situations where strategic voting is possible. However, with scoring rules and rules based on the tournament graph, partial voting can increase the situations where strategic voting is possible. As a consequence, the computational complexity of computing a strategic vote can change. For example, with Borda count, the complexity of computing a strategic vote can decrease or stay the same depending on how we score partial votes.

Many machine learning models have important structural tuning parameters that cannot be directly estimated from the data. The common tactic for setting these parameters is to use resampling methods, such as cross--validation or the bootstrap, to evaluate a candidate set of values and choose the best based on some pre--defined criterion. Unfortunately, this process can be time consuming. However, the model tuning process can be streamlined by adaptively resampling candidate values so that settings that are clearly sub-optimal can be discarded. The notion of futility analysis is introduced in this context. An example is shown that illustrates how adaptive resampling can be used to reduce training time. Simulation studies are used to understand how the potential speed--up is affected by parallel processing techniques.

Despite the success of the popular kernelized support vector machines, they have two major limitations: they are restricted to Positive Semi-Definite (PSD) kernels, and their training complexity scales at least quadratically with the size of the data. Many natural measures of similarity between pairs of samples are not PSD e.g. invariant kernels, and those that are implicitly or explicitly defined by latent variable models. In this paper, we investigate scalable approaches for using indefinite similarity measures in large margin frameworks. In particular we show that a normalization of similarity to a subset of the data points constitutes a representation suitable for linear classifiers. The result is a classifier which is competitive to kernelized SVM in terms of accuracy, despite having better training and test time complexities. Experimental results demonstrate that on CIFAR-10 dataset, the model equipped with similarity measures invariant to rigid and non-rigid deformations, can be made more than 5 times sparser while being more accurate than kernelized SVM using RBF kernels.

INCE the appearance of the seminal paper [1], NMF has become a popular data decomposition technique due to succesful applications in a still growing number of fields where data are nonnegative, such as pixel intensities in computer vision, amplitude spectra in audio signal analysis and EEG signal analysis, term counts in document clustering problems, and item ratings in collaborative filtering. NMF aims at decompositions, where, and are all nonnegative matrices. Throughout this paper will be regarded as a collection of data samples organized columnwise, as a dictionary of features organized columnwise, and as matrix of coefficients when is projected onto the dictionary. Under assumptions of linearity and nonnegativity, when underlying dimensionality is lower than dimensionality of the original space of the data, dimensionality reduction of the data can effectively be achieved this way. Although the decomposition is nonunique in general, NMF is able to produce strictly additive decompositions perceived as part-based by adding additional bias in the model [1], [2]. To this end, different sparsity promoting regularizers have been proposed for divergence-based NMF [3]. Also, to include higher order data descriptions, many other variants have been developed, e.g.