In this article we give our contribution to the problem of segmentation with plug-in procedures. We give general sufficient conditions under which plug in procedure are efficient. We also give an algorithm that satisfy these conditions. We give an application of the used algorithm to hyperspectral images segmentation. Hyperspectral images are images that have both spatial and spectral coherence with thousands of spectral bands on each pixel. In the proposed procedure we combine a reduction dimension technique and a spatial regularisation technique. This regularisation is based on the mixlet modelisation of Kolaczyck and Al.

Korf, Reid, and Edelkamp introduced a formula to predict the number of nodes IDA* will expand on a single iteration for a given consistent heuristic, and experimentally demonstrated that it could make very accurate predictions. In this paper we show that, in addition to requiring the heuristic to be consistent, their formula's predictions are accurate only at levels of the brute-force search tree where the heuristic values obey the unconditional distribution that they defined and then used in their formula. We then propose a new formula that works well without these requirements, i.e., it can make accurate predictions of IDA*'s performance for inconsistent heuristics and if the heuristic values in any level do not obey the unconditional distribution. In order to achieve this we introduce the conditional distribution of heuristic values which is a generalization of their unconditional heuristic distribution. We also provide extensions of our formula that handle individual start states and the augmentation of IDA* with bidirectional pathmax (BPMX), a technique for propagating heuristic values when inconsistent heuristics are used. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of our new method and all its variations.

Similarity networks are important abstractions in many information management applications such as recommender systems, corpora analysis, and medical informatics. For instance, by inducing similarity networks between movies rated similarly by users, or between documents containing common terms, and or between clinical trials involving the same themes, we can aim to find the global structure of connectivities underlying the data, and use the network as a basis to make connections between seemingly disparate entities. In the above applications, composing similarities between objects of interest finds uses in serendipitous recommendation, in storytelling, and in clinical diagnosis, respectively. We present an algorithmic framework for traversing similarity paths using the notion of `hammock' paths which are generalization of traditional paths. Our framework is exploratory in nature so that, given starting and ending objects of interest, it explores candidate objects for path following, and heuristics to admissibly estimate the potential for paths to lead to a desired destination. We present three diverse applications: exploring movie similarities in the Netflix dataset, exploring abstract similarities across the PubMed corpus, and exploring description similarities in a database of clinical trials. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of our approach for unstructured knowledge discovery in similarity networks.

This paper proposes a multimodal biometric system through Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) for face and ear biometrics with belief fusion of the estimated scores characterized by Gabor responses and the proposed fusion is accomplished by Dempster-Shafer (DS) decision theory. Face and ear images are convolved with Gabor wavelet filters to extracts spatially enhanced Gabor facial features and Gabor ear features. Further, GMM is applied to the high-dimensional Gabor face and Gabor ear responses separately for quantitive measurements. Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate density parameters in GMM. This produces two sets of feature vectors which are then fused using Dempster-Shafer theory. Experiments are conducted on multimodal database containing face and ear images of 400 individuals. It is found that use of Gabor wavelet filters along with GMM and DS theory can provide robust and efficient multimodal fusion strategy.

Currently, criminal's profile (CP) is obtained from investigator's or forensic psychologist's interpretation, linking crime scene characteristics and an offender's behavior to his or her characteristics and psychological profile. This paper seeks an efficient and systematic discovery of non-obvious and valuable patterns between variables from a large database of solved cases via a probabilistic network (PN) modeling approach. The PN structure can be used to extract behavioral patterns and to gain insight into what factors influence these behaviors. Thus, when a new case is being investigated and the profile variables are unknown because the offender has yet to be identified, the observed crime scene variables are used to infer the unknown variables based on their connections in the structure and the corresponding numerical (probabilistic) weights. The objective is to produce a more systematic and empirical approach to profiling, and to use the resulting PN model as a decision tool.

Auctions play an important role in electronic commerce, and have been used to solve problems in distributed computing. Automated approaches to designing effective auction mechanisms are helpful in reducing the burden of traditional game theoretic, analytic approaches and in searching through the large space of possible auction mechanisms. This paper presents an approach to automated mechanism design (AMD) in the domain of double auctions. We describe a novel parametrized space of double auctions, and then introduce an evolutionary search method that searches this space of parameters. The approach evaluates auction mechanisms using the framework of the TAC Market Design Game and relates the performance of the markets in that game to their constituent parts using reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the strongest mechanisms we found using this approach not only win the Market Design Game against known, strong opponents, but also exhibit desirable economic properties when they run in isolation.

Adaptive control problems are notoriously difficult to solve even in the presence of plant-specific controllers. One way to by-pass the intractable computation of the optimal policy is to restate the adaptive control as the minimization of the relative entropy of a controller that ignores the true plant dynamics from an informed controller. The solution is given by the Bayesian control rule-a set of equations characterizing a stochastic adaptive controller for the class of possible plant dynamics. Here, the Bayesian control rule is applied to derive BCR-MDP, a controller to solve undiscounted Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces and unknown dynamics. In particular, we derive a non-parametric conjugate prior distribution over the policy space that encapsulates the agent's whole relevant history and we present a Gibbs sampler to draw random policies from this distribution. Preliminary results show that BCR-MDP successfully avoids sub-optimal limit cycles due to its built-in mechanism to balance exploration versus exploitation.

In this paper, research on AI based modeling technique to optimize development of new alloys with necessitated improvements in properties and chemical mixture over existing alloys as per functional requirements of product is done. The current research work novels AI in lieu of predictions to establish association between material and product customary. Advanced computational simulation techniques like CFD, FEA interrogations are made viable to authenticate product dynamics in context to experimental investigations. Accordingly, the current research is focused towards binding relationships between material design and product design domains. The input to feed forward back propagation prediction network model constitutes of material design features. Parameters relevant to product design strategies are furnished as target outputs. The outcomes of ANN shows good sign of correlation between material and product design domains. The study enriches a new path to illustrate material factors at the time of new product development.

A bot is a piece of software that is usually installed on an infected machine without the user's knowledge. A bot is controlled remotely by the attacker under a Command and Control structure. Recent statistics show that bots represent one of the fastest growing threats to our network by performing malicious activities such as email spamming or keylogging. However, few bot detection techniques have been developed to date. In this paper, we investigate a behavioural algorithm to detect a single bot that uses keylogging activity. Our approach involves the use of function calls analysis for the detection of the bot with a keylogging component. Correlation of the frequency of a specified time-window is performed to enhance he detection scheme. We perform a range of experiments with the spybot. Our results show that there is a high correlation between some function calls executed by this bot which indicates abnormal activity in our system.

CODEQ is a new, population-based meta-heuristic algorithm that is a hybrid of concepts from chaotic search, opposition-based learning, differential evolution and quantum mechanics. CODEQ has successfully been used to solve different types of problems (e.g. constrained, integer-programming, engineering) with excellent results. In this paper, CODEQ is used to train feed-forward neural networks. The proposed method is compared with particle swarm optimization and differential evolution algorithms on three data sets with encouraging results.