This paper deals with the arrow of complexification of engineering. We claim that the complexification of engineering consists in (a) that shift throughout which engineering becomes a science; thus it ceases to be a (mere) praxis or profession; (b) becoming a science, engineering can be considered as one of the sciences of complexity. In reality, the complexification of engineering is the process by which engineering can be studied, achieved and understood in terms of knowledge, and not of goods and services any longer. Complex engineered systems and bio-inspired engineering are so far the two expressions of a complex engineering.

Clustering with fast algorithms large samples of high dimensional data is an important challenge in computational statistics. Borrowing ideas from MacQueen (1967) who introduced a sequential version of the $k$-means algorithm, a new class of recursive stochastic gradient algorithms designed for the $k$-medians loss criterion is proposed. By their recursive nature, these algorithms are very fast and are well adapted to deal with large samples of data that are allowed to arrive sequentially. It is proved that the stochastic gradient algorithm converges almost surely to the set of stationary points of the underlying loss criterion. A particular attention is paid to the averaged versions, which are known to have better performances, and a data-driven procedure that allows automatic selection of the value of the descent step is proposed. The performance of the averaged sequential estimator is compared on a simulation study, both in terms of computation speed and accuracy of the estimations, with more classical partitioning techniques such as $k$-means, trimmed $k$-means and PAM (partitioning around medoids). Finally, this new online clustering technique is illustrated on determining television audience profiles with a sample of more than 5000 individual television audiences measured every minute over a period of 24 hours.

The success of an agent mediated e-market system lies in the underlying reputation management system to improve the quality of services in an information asymmetric e-market. Reputation provides an operatable metric for establishing trustworthiness between mutually unknown online entities. Reputation systems encourage honest behaviour and discourage malicious behaviour of participating agents in the e-market. A dynamic reputation model would provide virtually instantaneous knowledge about the changing e-market environment and would utilise Internets' capacity for continuous interactivity for reputation computation. This paper proposes a dynamic reputation framework using reinforcement learning and fuzzy set theory that ensures judicious use of information sharing for inter-agent cooperation. This framework is sensitive to the changing parameters of e-market like the value of transaction and the varying experience of agents with the purpose of improving inbuilt defense mechanism of the reputation system against various attacks so that e-market reaches an equilibrium state and dishonest agents are weeded out of the market.

We introduce matrix and its block to the Dung's theory of argumentation frameworks. It is showed that each argumentation framework has a matrix representation, and the common extension-based semantics of argumentation framework can be characterized by blocks of matrix and their relations. In contrast with traditional method of directed graph, the matrix way has the advantage of computability. Therefore, it has an extensive perspective to bring the theory of matrix into the research of argumentation frameworks and related areas.

Standard compressive sensing results state that to exactly recover an s sparse signal in R^p, one requires O(s. log(p)) measurements. While this bound is extremely useful in practice, often real world signals are not only sparse, but also exhibit structure in the sparsity pattern. We focus on group-structured patterns in this paper. Under this model, groups of signal coefficients are active (or inactive) together. The groups are predefined, but the particular set of groups that are active (i.e., in the signal support) must be learned from measurements. We show that exploiting knowledge of groups can further reduce the number of measurements required for exact signal recovery, and derive universal bounds for the number of measurements needed. The bound is universal in the sense that it only depends on the number of groups under consideration, and not the particulars of the groups (e.g., compositions, sizes, extents, overlaps, etc.). Experiments show that our result holds for a variety of overlapping group configurations.

In this paper we combine Answer Set Programming (ASP) with Dynamic Linear Time Temporal Logic (DLTL) to define a temporal logic programming language for reasoning about complex actions and infinite computations. DLTL extends propositional temporal logic of linear time with regular programs of propositional dynamic logic, which are used for indexing temporal modalities. The action language allows general DLTL formulas to be included in domain descriptions to constrain the space of possible extensions. We introduce a notion of Temporal Answer Set for domain descriptions, based on the usual notion of Answer Set. Also, we provide a translation of domain descriptions into standard ASP and we use Bounded Model Checking techniques for the verification of DLTL constraints.

Satisfied customers establishes loyalty, provides opportunities of selling additional products and services. Satisfied customers also reduce the probability of losing business to competitors. However, customer dissatisfaction results in direct revenue losses due to customer churn as well as damage to business reputation. Therefore, the improvement of customer experience is a vital priority for contact centres across all industries. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are used by businesses to provide customers with a convenient, consistent and reliable contact channel to access information fast.

The exploration-exploitation trade-off is among the central challenges of reinforcement learning. The optimal Bayesian solution is intractable in general. This paper studies to what extent analytic statements about optimal learning are possible if all beliefs are Gaussian processes. A first order approximation of learning of both loss and dynamics, for nonlinear, time-varying systems in continuous time and space, subject to a relatively weak restriction on the dynamics, is described by an infinite-dimensional partial differential equation. An approximate finite-dimensional projection gives an impression for how this result may be helpful.

We introduce a factor analysis model that summarizes the dependencies between observed variable groups, instead of dependencies between individual variables as standard factor analysis does. A group may correspond to one view of the same set of objects, one of many data sets tied by co-occurrence, or a set of alternative variables collected from statistics tables to measure one property of interest. We show that by assuming group-wise sparse factors, active in a subset of the sets, the variation can be decomposed into factors explaining relationships between the sets and factors explaining away set-specific variation. We formulate the assumptions in a Bayesian model which provides the factors, and apply the model to two data analysis tasks, in neuroimaging and chemical systems biology.

Abstract: We consider the problem of covariance matrix estimation in the presence of latent variables. Under suitable conditions, it is possible to learn the marginal covariance matrix of the observed variables via a tractable convex program, where the concentration matrix of the observed variables is decomposed into a sparse matrix (representing the graphical structure of the observed variables) and a low rank matrix (representing the marginalization effect of latent variables). We present an efficient first-order method based on split Bregman to solve the convex problem. The algorithm is guaranteed to converge under mild conditions. We show that our algorithm is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm on both artificial and real-world data. Applying the algorithm to a gene expression data involving thousands of genes, we show that most of the correlation between observed variables can be explained by only a few dozen latent factors.