Crisis events, like the 9.11 attack, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami devastation, have dramatic impact on human society, economy and environment. The crisis response term is defined as the immediate protection of property and life during the crises events to reduce deaths and injuries. Crisis response requires urgent action and the coordinated application of resources, facilities, and efforts. It includes actions taken before the actual crisis event (e.g., hurricane warning is received), in response to the immediate impact of a crisis, and as sustained effort during the course of the crisis. Depending upon the magnitude and complexity of the crisis, response may be a large-scale and multiorganizational operation involving many layers of authorities, commercial entities, volunteer organizations, media organizations, and the public.

We describe a novel approach to statistical learning from particles tracked while moving in a random environment. The problem consists in inferring properties of the environment from recorded snapshots. We consider here the case of a fluid seeded with identical passive particles that diffuse and are advected by a flow. Our approach rests on efficient algorithms to estimate the weighted number of possible matchings among particles in two consecutive snapshots, the partition function of the underlying graphical model. The partition function is then maximized over the model parameters, namely diffusivity and velocity gradient. A Belief Propagation (BP) scheme is the backbone of our algorithm, providing accurate results for the flow parameters we want to learn. The BP estimate is additionally improved by incorporating Loop Series (LS) contributions. For the weighted matching problem, LS is compactly expressed as a Cauchy integral, accurately estimated by a saddle point approximation. Numerical experiments show that the quality of our improved BP algorithm is comparable to the one of a fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme, based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, while the BP-based scheme is substantially faster than the MCMC scheme.

This is a concise and accessible introduction to the field of game theory. The audience for game theory has drastically expanded and now is used in diverse disciplines such as political science, biology, psychology, economics, linguistics, sociology, and computer science. The book covers the main classes of games, their representations, and the main concepts used to analyze them. ISBN 9781598295931, 88 pages.

Making a decision is often a matter of listing and comparing positive and negative arguments. In such cases, the evaluation scale for decisions should be considered bipolar, that is, negative and positive values should be explicitly distinguished. That is what is done, for example, in Cumulative Prospect Theory. However, contraryto the latter framework that presupposes genuine numerical assessments, human agents often decide on the basis of an ordinal ranking of the pros and the cons, and by focusing on the most salient arguments. In other terms, the decision process is qualitative as well as bipolar. In this article, based on a bipolar extension of possibility theory, we define and axiomatically characterize several decision rules tailored for the joint handling of positive and negative arguments in an ordinal setting. The simplest rules can be viewed as extensions of the maximin and maximax criteria to the bipolar case, and consequently suffer from poor decisive power. More decisive rules that refine the former are also proposed. These refinements agree both with principles of efficiency and with the spirit of order-of-magnitude reasoning, that prevails in qualitative decision theory. The most refined decision rule uses leximin rankings of the pros and the cons, and the ideas of counting arguments of equal strength and cancelling pros by cons. It is shown to come down to a special case of Cumulative Prospect Theory, and to subsume the ``Take the Best'' heuristic studied by cognitive psychologists.

In this paper, we show that a continuous spectrum of randomisation exists, in which most existing tree randomisations are only operating around the two ends of the spectrum. That leaves a huge part of the spectrum largely unexplored. We propose a base learner VR-Tree which generates trees with variable-randomness. VR-Trees are able to span from the conventional deterministic trees to the complete-random trees using a probabilistic parameter. Using VR-Trees as the base models, we explore the entire spectrum of randomised ensembles, together with Bagging and Random Subspace. We discover that the two halves of the spectrum have their distinct characteristics; and the understanding of which allows us to propose a new approach in building better decision tree ensembles. We name this approach Coalescence, which coalesces a number of points in the random-half of the spectrum. Coalescence acts as a committee of ``experts'' to cater for unforeseeable conditions presented in training data. Coalescence is found to perform better than any single operating point in the spectrum, without the need to tune to a specific level of randomness. In our empirical study, Coalescence ranks top among the benchmarking ensemble methods including Random Forests, Random Subspace and C5 Boosting; and only Coalescence is significantly better than Bagging and Max-Diverse Ensemble among all the methods in the comparison. Although Coalescence is not significantly better than Random Forests, we have identified conditions under which one will perform better than the other.

In this paper, we present an approach to learning latent semantic analysis models from loosely annotated images for automatic image annotation and indexing. The given annotation in training images is loose due to: (1) ambiguous correspondences between visual features and annotated keywords; (2) incomplete lists of annotated keywords. The second reason motivates us to enrich the incomplete annotation in a simple way before learning topic models. In particular, some "imagined" keywords are poured into the incomplete annotation through measuring similarity between keywords. Then, both given and imagined annotations are used to learning probabilistic topic models for automatically annotating new images. We conduct experiments on a typical Corel dataset of images and loose annotations, and compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art discrete annotation methods (using a set of discrete blobs to represent an image). The proposed method improves word-driven probability Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA-words) up to a comparable performance with the best discrete annotation method, while a merit of PLSA-words is still kept, i.e., a wider semantic range.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes application of information granulation theory, on the design of rock engineering flowcharts. Firstly, an overall flowchart, based on information granulation theory has been highlighted. Information granulation theory, in crisp (non-fuzzy) or fuzzy format, can take into account engineering experiences (especially in fuzzy shape-incomplete information or superfluous), or engineering judgments, in each step of designing procedure, while the suitable instruments modeling are employed. In this manner and to extension of soft modeling instruments, using three combinations of Self Organizing Map (SOM), Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (NFIS), and Rough Set Theory (RST) crisp and fuzzy granules, from monitored data sets are obtained. The main underlined core of our algorithms are balancing of crisp(rough or non-fuzzy) granules and sub fuzzy granules, within non fuzzy information (initial granulation) upon the "open-close iterations". Using different criteria on balancing best granules (information pockets), are obtained. Validations of our proposed methods, on the data set of in-situ permeability in rock masses in Shivashan dam, Iran have been highlighted.

Decision-theoretic planning is a popular approach to sequential decision making problems, because it treats uncertainty in sensing and acting in a principled way. In single-agent frameworks like MDPs and POMDPs, planning can be carried out by resorting to Q-value functions: an optimal Q-value function Q* is computed in a recursive manner by dynamic programming, and then an optimal policy is extracted from Q*. In this paper we study whether similar Q-value functions can be defined for decentralized POMDP models (Dec-POMDPs), and how policies can be extracted from such value functions. We define two forms of the optimal Q-value function for Dec-POMDPs: one that gives a normative description as the Q-value function of an optimal pure joint policy and another one that is sequentially rational and thus gives a recipe for computation. This computation, however, is infeasible for all but the smallest problems. Therefore, we analyze various approximate Q-value functions that allow for efficient computation. We describe how they relate, and we prove that they all provide an upper bound to the optimal Q-value function Q*. Finally, unifying some previous approaches for solving Dec-POMDPs, we describe a family of algorithms for extracting policies from such Q-value functions, and perform an experimental evaluation on existing test problems, including a new firefighting benchmark problem.

The investigation of the terrorist attack is a time-critical task. The investigators have a limited time window to diagnose the organizational background of the terrorists, to run down and arrest the wire-pullers, and to take an action to prevent or eradicate the terrorist attack. The intuitive interface to visualize the intelligence data set stimulates the investigators' experience and knowledge, and aids them in decision-making for an immediately effective action. This paper presents a computational method to analyze the intelligence data set on the collective actions of the perpetrators of the attack, and to visualize it into the form of a social network diagram which predicts the positions where the wire-pullers conceals themselves.

We study the complexity of cost-optimal classical planning over propositional state variables and unary-effect actions. We discover novel problem fragments for which such optimization is tractable, and identify certain conditions that differentiate between tractable and intractable problems. These results are based on exploiting both structural and syntactic characteristics of planning problems. Specifically, following Brafman and Domshlak (2003), we relate the complexity of planning and the topology of the causal graph. The main results correspond to tractability of cost-optimal planning for propositional problems with polytree causal graphs that either have O(1)-bounded in-degree, or are induced by actions having at most one prevail condition each. Almost all our tractability results are based on a constructive proof technique that connects between certain tools from planning and tractable constraint optimization, and we believe this technique is of interest on its own due to a clear evidence for its robustness.