Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, while often powerful, can suffer from slow learning speeds, particularly in high dimensional spaces. Decomposition of tasks into a hierarchical structure holds the potential to significantly speed up learning, generalization, and transfer learning. However, the current task decomposition techniques often rely on high-level knowledge provided by an expert (e.g. using dynamic Bayesian networks) to extract a hierarchical task structure; which is not necessarily available in autonomous systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Sequential Association Rule Mining that can extract Hierarchical Structure of Tasks in Reinforcement Learning (SARM-HSTRL) in an autonomous manner for both Markov decision processes (MDPs) and factored MDPs. The proposed method leverages association rule mining to discover the causal and temporal relationships among states in different trajectories, and extracts a task hierarchy that captures these relationships among sub-goals as termination conditions of different sub-tasks. We prove that the extracted hierarchical policy offers a hierarchically optimal policy in MDPs and factored MDPs. It should be noted that SARM-HSTRL extracts this hierarchical optimal policy without having dynamic Bayesian networks in scenarios with a single task trajectory and also with multiple tasks' trajectories. Furthermore, it has been theoretically and empirically shown that the extracted hierarchical task structure is consistent with trajectories and provides the most efficient, reliable, and compact structure under appropriate assumptions. The numerical results compare the performance of the proposed SARM-HSTRL method with conventional HRL algorithms in terms of the accuracy in detecting the sub-goals, the validity of the extracted hierarchies, and the speed of learning in several testbeds.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in extending traditional stream processing engines with logical, rule-based, reasoning capabilities. This poses significant theoretical and practical challenges since rules can derive new information and propagate it both towards past and future time points; as a result, streamed query answers can depend on data that has not yet been received, as well as on data that arrived far in the past. Stream reasoning algorithms, however, must be able to stream out query answers as soon as possible, and can only keep a limited number of previous input facts in memory. In this paper, we propose novel reasoning problems to deal with these challenges, and study their computational properties on Datalog extended with a temporal sort and the successor function (a core rule-based language for stream reasoning applications).

Artificial Intelligence is dominating both headlines and the agendas of business leaders. Our 2018 Views from the C-Suite survey of global executives finds widespread agreement that there are tremendous opportunities in digitization and new technologies such as AI. Fully 71 percent of executives expect AI to have "transformative effects for economic growth and competitiveness" over the next 12 months. However, executives may need to temper their expectations for the short-term implications of AI. Much of executives' enthusiasm is justified.

What's more, even AIs based on mechanisms inspired by human biology, such as neural networks, have only a distant relationship with biological neurons in the brain. NN are examples more of the importance of reinforcement and self-organisation of controller networks than any similarity with biology. The first, naive, approach to AI is to think that it is necessary to create a synthetic human, or a synthetic brain to produce cognition: in fact, cognition does not need to be anthropomorphic at all. Second attempt at a definition: "The ability of a machine to achieve performance equal to or better than certain human cognitive processes." This definition is based on the final outcome, without presupposing imitation of biological mechanisms.

AI is a large topic, and there is no single agreed definition of what it involves. But there seems to be more agreement than disagreement. Broadly speaking, AI is an umbrella term for the field in computer science dedicated to making machines simulate different aspects of human intelligence, including learning, decision-making and pattern recognition. Some of the most striking applications, in fields like speech recognition and computer vision, are things people take for granted when assessing human intelligence but have been beyond the limits of computers until relatively recently. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 by mathematics professor John McCarthy, who wrote, The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning and any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

Abstract--Design rule check is a critical step in the physical design of integrated circuits to ensure manufacturability. However, it can be done only after a time-consuming detailed routing procedure, which adds drastically to the time of design iterations. With advanced technology nodes, the outcomes of global routing and detailed routing become less correlated, which adds to the difficulty of predicting design rule violations from earlier stages. In this paper, a framework based on neural network ensembles is proposed to predict design rule violation hotspots using information from placement and global routing. A soft voting structure and a PCA-based subset selection scheme are developed on top of a baseline neural network from a recent work. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture achieves significant improvement in model performance compared to the baseline case. For half of test cases, the performance is even better than random forest, a commonly-used ensemble learning model. Today's IC fabrication technologies require satisfying many complex design rules to ensure manufacturability.

In this paper, we confront the problem of deep learning's big labeled data requirements, offer a rule based strategy for extreme augmentation of small data sets and apply that strategy with the image to image translation model by Isola et al. (2016) to automate cel style cartoon coloring with very limited training data. While our experimental results using geometric rules and transformations demonstrate the performance of our methods on an image translation task with industry applications in art, design and animation, we also propose the use of rules on partial data sets as a generalizable small data strategy, potentially applicable across data types and domains.

In this work we first remember the characteristics of Quantum Rule-Based Systems (QRBS), a concept defined in a previous article by one of the authors of this paper, and we introduce the problem of quantum uncertainty. We assume that the subjective uncertainty that affects the facts of classical RBSs can be treated as a direct consequence of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics (QM), and we also assume that the uncertainty associated with a given hypothesis is a consequence of the propagation of the imprecision through the inferential circuits of RBSs. This article does not intend to contribute anything new to the QM field: it is a work of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses QC techniques to solve the problem of uncertainty in RBSs. Bearing the above arguments in mind a quantum model is proposed. This model has been applied to a problem already defined by one of the authors of this work in a previous publication and which is briefly described in this article. Then the model is generalized, and it is thoroughly evaluated. The results obtained show that QC is a valid, effective and efficient method to deal with the inherent uncertainty of RBSs.

These devices, particularly the smart mobile phones have transformed over a period of time from merely communication tools to smart and highly personal devices enabling to assist the users in their variety of day-to-day situations in their daily life. In the real word, users' interest on "Mobile Phones" is more and more than other platforms like "Desktop Computer" or "Tablet Computer" over time [36]. People use mobile phones not only for voice communication between individuals but also for various activities such as applications (mobile apps) using, Internet browsing, emailing, using online social network, instant messaging etc [28]. Recent advances in the sensing capabilities of smart mobile phones make them enable to collect the rich contextual information and users' various activity records with mobile phones through the device logs. These historical mobile phone data are simply as the collection of the past contexts and user's activities with the mobile phones for these past contexts. These are phone call logs [39] having phone call activities, app usages logs [45] having various mobile application usages, mobile phone notification logs [22] having the responses with various notifications from different applications, web logs [13] having Internet browsing activities of the mobile phone users. The main characteristic of such kind of phone log data is that it contains the actual diverse activities of the users in different contexts in their real world life. Modeling smartphone user behaviors by developing various computational machine learning methods (rule-based learning) in order to analyze different behavioral patterns in different contexts, and eventually predict the next behaviors or detect strange behaviors utilizing such mobile phone data, can be used for build- 2 Iqbal H. Sarker*

Up to the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules. Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing. This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's law) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyantheories of linguistics (e.g. Some of the earliest-used machine learning algorithms, such as decision trees, produced systems of hard if-then rules similar to existing hand-written rules. However, part-of-speech tagging introduced the use of hidden Markov models to natural language processing, and increasingly, research has focused on statistical models, which make soft, probabilistic decisions based on attaching real-valued weights to the features making up the input data.