Different notions of equivalence, such as the prominent notions of strong and uniform equivalence, have been studied in Answer-Set Programming, mainly for the purpose of identifying programs that can serve as substitutes without altering the semantics, for instance in program optimization. Such semantic comparisons are usually characterized by various selections of models in the logic of Here-and-There (HT). For uniform equivalence however, correct characterizations in terms of HT-models can only be obtained for finite theories, respectively programs. In this article, we show that a selection of countermodels in HT captures uniform equivalence also for infinite theories. This result is turned into coherent characterizations of the different notions of equivalence by countermodels, as well as by a mixture of HT-models and countermodels (so-called equivalence interpretations). Moreover, we generalize the so-called notion of relativized hyperequivalence for programs to propositional theories, and apply the same methodology in order to obtain a semantic characterization which is amenable to infinite settings. This allows for a lifting of the results to first-order theories under a very general semantics given in terms of a quantified version of HT. We thus obtain a general framework for the study of various notions of equivalence for theories under answer-set semantics. Moreover, we prove an expedient property that allows for a simplified treatment of extended signatures, and provide further results for non-ground logic programs. In particular, uniform equivalence coincides under open and ordinary answer-set semantics, and for finite non-ground programs under these semantics, also the usual characterization of uniform equivalence in terms of maximal and total HT-models of the grounding is correct, even for infinite domains, when corresponding ground programs are infinite.

A combined Short-Term Learning (STL) and Long-Term Learning (LTL) approach to solving mobile-robot navigation problems is presented and tested in both the real and virtual domains. The LTL phase consists of rapid simulations that use a Genetic Algorithm to derive diverse sets of behaviours, encoded as variable sets of attributes, and the STL phase is an idiotypic Artificial Immune System. Results from the LTL phase show that sets of behaviours develop very rapidly, and significantly greater diversity is obtained when multiple autonomous populations are used, rather than a single one. The architecture is assessed under various scenarios, including removal of the LTL phase and switching off the idiotypic mechanism in the STL phase. The comparisons provide substantial evidence that the best option is the inclusion of both the LTL phase and the idiotypic system. In addition, this paper shows that structurally different environments can be used for the two phases without compromising transferability.

Weighted logic programming, a generalization of bottom-up logic programming, is a well-suited framework for specifying dynamic programming algorithms. In this setting, proofs correspond to the algorithm's output space, such as a path through a graph or a grammatical derivation, and are given a real-valued score (often interpreted as a probability) that depends on the real weights of the base axioms used in the proof. The desired output is a function over all possible proofs, such as a sum of scores or an optimal score. We describe the PRODUCT transformation, which can merge two weighted logic programs into a new one. The resulting program optimizes a product of proof scores from the original programs, constituting a scoring function known in machine learning as a ``product of experts.'' Through the addition of intuitive constraining side conditions, we show that several important dynamic programming algorithms can be derived by applying PRODUCT to weighted logic programs corresponding to simpler weighted logic programs. In addition, we show how the computation of Kullback-Leibler divergence, an information-theoretic measure, can be interpreted using PRODUCT.

Stochasticity and spatial heterogeneity are of great interest recently in studying the spread of an infectious disease. The presented method solves an inverse problem to discover the effectively decisive topology of a heterogeneous network and reveal the transmission parameters which govern the stochastic spreads over the network from a dataset on an infectious disease outbreak in the early growth phase. Populations in a combination of epidemiological compartment models and a meta-population network model are described by stochastic differential equations. Probability density functions are derived from the equations and used for the maximal likelihood estimation of the topology and parameters. The method is tested with computationally synthesized datasets and the WHO dataset on SARS outbreak.

We present an application of Artificial Intelligence techniques to the field of Information Security. The problem of remote Operating System (OS) Detection, also called OS Fingerprinting, is a crucial step of the penetration testing process, since the attacker (hacker or security professional) needs to know the OS of the target host in order to choose the exploits that he will use. OS Detection is accomplished by passively sniffing network packets and actively sending test packets to the target host, to study specific variations in the host responses revealing information about its operating system. The first fingerprinting implementations were based on the analysis of differences between TCP/IP stack implementations. The next generation focused the analysis on application layer data such as the DCE RPC endpoint information. Even though more information was analyzed, some variation of the "best fit" algorithm was still used to interpret this new information. Our new approach involves an analysis of the composition of the information collected during the OS identification process to identify key elements and their relations. To implement this approach, we have developed tools using Neural Networks and techniques from the field of Statistics. These tools have been successfully integrated in a commercial software (Core Impact).

Existing value function approximation methods have been successfully used in many applications, but they often lack useful a priori error bounds. We propose a new approximate bilinear programming formulation of value function approximation, which employs global optimization. The formulation provides strong a priori guarantees on both robust and expected policy loss by minimizing specific norms of the Bellman residual. Solving a bilinear program optimally is NP-hard, but this is unavoidable because the Bellman-residual minimization itself is NP-hard. We describe and analyze both optimal and approximate algorithms for solving bilinear programs. The analysis shows that this algorithm offers a convergent generalization of approximate policy iteration. We also briefly analyze the behavior of bilinear programming algorithms under incomplete samples. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can consistently minimize the Bellman residual on simple benchmark problems.

We provide a sound and consistent foundation for the use of \emph{nonrandom} exploration data in "contextual bandit" or "partially labeled" settings where only the value of a chosen action is learned. The primary challenge in a variety of settings is that the exploration policy, in which "offline" data is logged, is not explicitly known. Prior solutions here require either control of the actions during the learning process, recorded random exploration, or actions chosen obliviously in a repeated manner. The techniques reported here lift these restrictions, allowing the learning of a policy for choosing actions given features from historical data where no randomization occurred or was logged. We empirically verify our solution on two reasonably sized sets of real-world data obtained from Yahoo!.

As A Computable Model Of The Oracle Turing Machine Han Xiao Wen Weimingbosi Corporation PKU Biocity No. 39 Shang Di Xi Lu, Haidian Beijing, 100085 China We wish to present a mirrored language structure (MLS) and four logic rules determined by this structure for the model of a computable Oracle Turing machine. MLS has novel features that are of considerable biological and computational significance. It suggests an algorithm of relation learning and recognition (RLR) that enables the deterministic computers to simulate the mechanism of the Oracle Turing machine, or P NP in a mathematical term. A concept of mirrored language structure for the human brain has already been proposed by Chomsky [4] as Universal Grammar (UG). His model consists of a hierarchical (deep and surface) dual language structure and a possible set of innate rules.

RESTful services on the Web expose information through retrievable resource representations that represent self-describing descriptions of resources, and through the way how these resources are interlinked through the hyperlinks that can be found in those representations. This basic design of RESTful services means that for extracting the most useful information from a service, it is necessary to understand a service's representations, which means both the semantics in terms of describing a resource, and also its semantics in terms of describing its linkage with other resources. Based on the Resource Linking Language (ReLL), this paper describes a framework for how RESTful services can be described, and how these descriptions can then be used to harvest information from these services. Building on this framework, a layered model of RESTful service semantics allows to represent a service's information in RDF/OWL. Because REST is based on the linkage between resources, the same model can be used for aggregating and interlinking multiple services for extracting RDF data from sets of RESTful services.

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used for modeling decision-making problems in robotics, automated control, and economics. Traditional MDPs assume that the decision maker (DM) knows all states and actions. However, this may not be true in many situations of interest. We define a new framework, MDPs with unawareness (MDPUs) to deal with the possibilities that a DM may not be aware of all possible actions. We provide a complete characterization of when a DM can learn to play near-optimally in an MDPU, and give an algorithm that learns to play near-optimally when it is possible to do so, as efficiently as possible. In particular, we characterize when a near-optimal solution can be found in polynomial time.