Given a current news event, we tackle the problem of generating plausible predictions of future events it might cause. We present a new methodology for modeling and predicting such future news events using machine learning and data mining techniques. Our Pundit algorithm generalizes examples of causality pairs to infer a causality predictor. To obtain precisely labeled causality examples, we mine 150 years of news articles and apply semantic natural language modeling techniques to headlines containing certain predefined causality patterns. For generalization, the model uses a vast number of world knowledge ontologies. Empirical evaluation on real news articles shows that our Pundit algorithm performs as well as non-expert humans.

A market of potato commodity for industry scale usage is engaging several types of actors. They are farmers, middlemen, and industries. A multi-agent system has been built to simulate these actors into agent entities, based on manually given parameters within a simulation scenario file. Each type of agents has its own fuzzy logic representing actual actors' knowledge, to be used to interpreting values and take appropriated decision of it while on simulation. The system will simulate market activities with programmed behaviors then produce the results as spreadsheet and chart graph files. These results consist of each agent's yearly finance and commodity data. The system will also predict each of next value from these outputs.

For robots to be accommodated in human spaces and in humans' daily activities, robots should be able to understand messages from the human conversation partner. In the same light, humans must also understand the messages that are being communicated by robots, including the nonverbal ones. We conducted a web-based video study wherein participants gave interpretations on the iconic gestures and emblems that were produced by an anthropomorphic robot. Out of the 15 gestures presented, we found 6 robotic gestures that can be accurately recognized by the human observer. These were nodding, clapping, hugging, expressing anger, walking, and flying. We reviewed these gestures for their meaning from literatures in human and animal behavior. We conclude by discussing the possible implications of these gestures for the design of social robots that are aimed to have engaging interactions with humans.

Classifying streaming data requires the development of methods which are computationally efficient and able to cope with changes in the underlying distribution of the stream, a phenomenon known in the literature as concept drift. We propose a new method for detecting concept drift which uses an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) chart to monitor the misclassification rate of an streaming classifier. Our approach is modular and can hence be run in parallel with any underlying classifier to provide an additional layer of concept drift detection. Moreover our method is computationally efficient with overhead O(1) and works in a fully online manner with no need to store data points in memory. Unlike many existing approaches to concept drift detection, our method allows the rate of false positive detections to be controlled and kept constant over time.

Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) are popular unsupervised artificial neural network used to reduce dimensions and visualize data. Visual interpretation from Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) has been limited due to grid approach of data representation, which makes inter-scenario analysis impossible. The paper proposes a new way to structure SOM. This model reconstructs SOM to show strength between variables as the threads of a cobweb and illuminate inter-scenario analysis. While Radar Graphs are very crude representation of spider web, this model uses more lively and realistic cobweb representation to take into account the difference in strength and length of threads. This model allows for visualization of highly unstructured dataset with large number of dimensions, common in Bigdata sources.

A fundamental question in systems biology is the construction and training to data of mathematical models. Logic formalisms have become very popular to model signaling networks because their simplicity allows us to model large systems encompassing hundreds of proteins. An approach to train (Boolean) logic models to high-throughput phospho-proteomics data was recently introduced and solved using optimization heuristics based on stochastic methods. Here we demonstrate how this problem can be solved using Answer Set Programming (ASP), a declarative problem solving paradigm, in which a problem is encoded as a logical program such that its answer sets represent solutions to the problem. ASP has significant improvements over heuristic methods in terms of efficiency and scalability, it guarantees global optimality of solutions as well as provides a complete set of solutions. We illustrate the application of ASP with in silico cases based on realistic networks and data.

In this tutorial, I will discuss the details about how Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is formalized and how different learning algorithms are proposed to learn the model.

We investigate the problem of sequentially predicting the binary labels on the nodes of an arbitrary weighted graph. We show that, under a suitable parametrization of the problem, the optimal number of prediction mistakes can be characterized (up to logarithmic factors) by the cutsize of a random spanning tree of the graph. The cutsize is induced by the unknown adversarial labeling of the graph nodes. In deriving our characterization, we obtain a simple randomized algorithm achieving in expectation the optimal mistake bound on any polynomially connected weighted graph. Our algorithm draws a random spanning tree of the original graph and then predicts the nodes of this tree in constant expected amortized time and linear space. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method compares well to both global (Perceptron) and local (label propagation) methods, while being generally faster in practice.

A mixture of shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions is introduced and used for clustering and classification. A variant of the EM algorithm is developed for parameter estimation by exploiting the relationship with the general inverse Gaussian distribution. This approach is mathematically elegant and relatively computationally straightforward. Our novel mixture modelling approach is demonstrated on both simulated and real data to illustrate clustering and classification applications. In these analyses, our mixture of shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions performs favourably when compared to the popular Gaussian approach. This work, which marks an important step in the non-Gaussian model-based clustering and classification direction, concludes with discussion as well as suggestions for future work.

Renewable and sustainable energy is one of the most important challenges currently facing mankind. Wind has made an increasing contribution to the world's energy supply mix, but still remains a long way from reaching its full potential. In this paper, we investigate the use of artificial evolution to design vertical-axis wind turbine prototypes that are physically instantiated and evaluated under approximated wind tunnel conditions. An artificial neural network is used as a surrogate model to assist learning and found to reduce the number of fabrications required to reach a higher aerodynamic efficiency, resulting in an important cost reduction. Unlike in other approaches, such as computational fluid dynamics simulations, no mathematical formulations are used and no model assumptions are made. Index Terms Evolutionary algorithms, surrogate assisted evolution, three-dimensional printers, wind turbines. In recent years, wind has made an increasing contribution to the world's energy supply mix.