We address the problem of efficiently estimating the influence function of initially activated nodes in a social network under the susceptible / infected / susceptible (SIS) model, a diffusion model where nodes are allowed to be activated multiple times. The computational complexity drastically increases because of this multiple activation property. We solve this problem by constructing a layered graph from the original social network with each layer added on top as the time proceeds, and applying the bond percolation with a pruning strategy. We show that the computational complexity of the proposed method is much smaller than the conventional naive probabilistic simulation method by a theoretical analysis and confirm this by applying the proposed method to two real world networks.

We present a novel reasoning procedure for Horn SHIQ ontologies—SHIQ ontologies that can be translated to the Horn fragment of first-order logic. In contrast to traditional reasoning procedures for ontologies, our procedure does not build models or model representations, but works by deriving new consequent axioms. The procedure is closely related to the so-called completion-based procedure for EL++ ontologies, and can be regarded as an extension thereof. In fact, our procedure is theoretically optimal for Horn SHIQ ontologies as well as for the common fragment of EL++ and SHIQ. A preliminary empirical evaluation of our procedure on large medical ontologies demonstrates a dramatic improvement over existing ontology reasoners. Specifically, our implementation allows the classification of the largest available OWL version of Galen. To the best of our knowledge no other reasoner is able to classify this ontology.

Users share and access large volumes of information on social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. Whereas a few of these sites have generic, impersonal searching mechanisms, we have developed an agent-based framework that mines the social network of a user to improve search results. Our Social Network-based Item Search (SNIS) system uses agents that utilize the connections of a user in the social network to facilitate the search for items of interest. Our approach generates targeted search results that can improve the precision of the result returned from a user's query. We have implemented the SNIS agent-based framework in Flickr, a photo-sharing social network, for searching for photos by using tag lists as search queries. We discuss the architecture of SNIS, motivate the searching scheme used, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the SNIS approach by presenting results. We also show how SNIS can be utilized for expertise location.

Effective communication in open environments relies on the ability of agents to reach a mutual understanding of the exchanged message by reconciling the vocabulary (ontology) used. Various approaches have considered how mutually acceptable mappings between corresponding concepts in the agents' own ontologies may be determined dynamically through argumentation-based negotiation (such as Meaning-based Argumentation). However, the complexity of this process is high, approaching π 2 (p) -complete in some cases. As reducing this complexity is non-trivial, we propose the use of ontology modularization as a means of reducing the space over which possible concepts are negotiated. The suitability of different modularization approaches as filtering mechanisms for reducing the negotiation search space is investigated, and a framework that integrates modularization with Meaning-based Argumentation is proposed. We empirically demonstrate that some modularization approaches not only reduce the number of alignments required to reach consensus, but also predict those cases where a service provider is unable to satisfy a request, without the need for negotiation.

Recommender systems attempt to highlight items that a target user is likely to find interesting. A common technique is to use collaborative filtering (CF), where multiple users share information so as to provide each with effective recommendations. A key aspect of CF systems is finding users whose tastes accurately reflect the tastes of some target user. Typically, the system looks for other agents who have had experience with many of the items the target user has examined, and whose classification of these items has a strong correlation with the classifications of the target user. Since the universe of items may be enormous and huge data sets are involved, sophisticated methods must be used to quickly locate appropriate other agents. We present a method for quickly determining the proportional intersection between the items that each of two users has examined, by sending and maintaining extremely concise “sketches” of the list of items. These sketches enable the approximation of the proportional intersection within a distance of \epsilon, with a high probability of 1-\delta. Our sketching techniques are based on random minwise independent hash functions, and use very little space and time, so they are well-suited for use in large-scale collaborative filtering systems.

This paper provides a decentralized data model and associated algorithms for peer data management systems (PDMS) based on the DL-liteR description logic. Our approach relies on reducing query reformulation and consistency checking for DL-liteR into reasoning in propositional logic. This enables a straightforward deployment of DL-liteR PDMSs on top of SomeWhere, a scalable propositional peer-to-peer inference system. We also show how to use the state-of-the-art Minicon algorithm for rewriting queries using views in DL-liteR in the centralized and decentralized cases.

The problem of environment design considers a setting in which an interested party aims to influence an agent's decisions by making limited changes to the agent's environment.  Zhang and Parkes [2008] first introduced the environment design concept for a specific problem in the Markov Decision Process setting. In this paper, we present a general framework for the formulation and solution of environment design problems. We consider both the case in which the agent's local decision model is known and partially unknown to the interested party, and illustrate the framework and results on a linear programming setting.  For the latter problem, we formulate an active, indirect elicitation method and provide conditions for convergence and logarithmic convergence. We relate to the problem of inverse optimization and also offer a game-theoretic interpretation of our methods.

Statistical-relational reasoning has received much attention due to its ability to robustly model complex relationships. A key challenge is tractable inference, especially in domains involving many objects, due to the combinatorics involved. One can accelerate inference by using approximation techniques, lazy algorithms, etc. We consider Markov Logic Networks (MLNs), which involve counting how often logical formulae are satisfied. We propose a preprocessing algorithm that can substantially reduce the effective size of MLNs by rapidly counting how often the evidence satisfies each formula, regardless of the truth values of the query literals. This is a general preprocessing method that loses no information and can be used for any MLN inference algorithm. We evaluate our algorithm empirically in three real-world domains, greatly reducing the work needed during subsequent inference. Such reduction might even allow exact inference to be performed when sampling methods would be otherwise necessary.

In this paper, we address the problem of merging multiple imprecise probabilistic beliefs represented as Probabilistic Logic Programs (PLPs) obtained from multiple sources. Beliefs in each PLP are modeled as conditional events attached with probability bounds. The major task of syntax-based merging is to obtain the most rational probability bound for each conditional event from the original PLPs to form a new PLP. We require the minimal change principle to be followed so that each source gives up its beliefs as little as possible. Some instantiated merging operators are derived from our merging framework. Furthermore, we propose a set of postulates for merging PLPs, some of which extend the postulates for merging classical knowledge bases, whilst others are specific to the merging of probabilistic beliefs.

The MAP (maximum a posteriori assignment) problem in Bayesian networks is the problem of finding the most probable instantiation of a set of variables given partial evidence for the remaining variables. The state-of-the-art exact solution method is depth-first branch-and-bound search using dynamic variable ordering and a jointree upper bound proposed by Park and Darwiche [2003]. Since almost all search time is spent computing the jointree bounds, we introduce an efficient method for computing these bounds incrementally. We point out that, using a static variable ordering, it is only necessary to compute relevant upper bounds at each search step, and it is also possible to cache potentials of the jointree for efficient backtracking. Since the jointree computation typically produces bounds for joint configurations of groups of variables, our method also instantiates multiple variables at each search step, instead of a single variable, in order to reduce the number of times that upper bounds need to be computed. Experiments show that this approach leads to orders of magnitude reduction in search time.