We analyze the style and structure of story narrative using the case of film scripts. The practical importance of this is noted, especially the need to have support tools for television movie writing. We use the Casablanca film script, and scripts from six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). For analysis of style and structure, we quantify various central perspectives discussed in McKee's book, "Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting". Film scripts offer a useful point of departure for exploration of the analysis of more general narratives. Our methodology, using Correspondence Analysis, and hierarchical clustering, is innovative in a range of areas that we discuss. In particular this work is groundbreaking in taking the qualitative analysis of McKee and grounding this analysis in a quantitative and algorithmic framework.

In the last year more than 70,000 people have been brought to the UK hospitals with serious injuries. Each time a clinician has to urgently take a patient through a screening procedure to make a reliable decision on the trauma treatment. Typically, such procedure comprises around 20 tests; however the condition of a trauma patient remains very difficult to be tested properly. What happens if these tests are ambiguously interpreted, and information about the severity of the injury will come misleading? The mistake in a decision can be fatal: using a mild treatment can put a patient at risk of dying from posttraumatic shock, while using an overtreatment can also cause death. How can we reduce the risk of the death caused by unreliable decisions? It has been shown that probabilistic reasoning, based on the Bayesian methodology of averaging over decision models, allows clinicians to evaluate the uncertainty in decision making. Based on this methodology, in this paper we aim at selecting the most important screening tests, keeping a high performance. We assume that the probabilistic reasoning within the Bayesian methodology allows us to discover new relationships between the screening tests and uncertainty in decisions. In practice, selection of the most informative tests can also reduce the cost of a screening procedure in trauma care centers. In our experiments we use the UK Trauma data to compare the efficiency of the proposed technique in terms of the performance. We also compare the uncertainty in decisions in terms of entropy.

The use of multiple Decision Models (DMs) enables to enhance the accuracy in decisions and at the same time allows users to evaluate the confidence in decision making. In this paper we explore the ability of multiple DMs to learn from a small amount of verified data. This becomes important when data samples are difficult to collect and verify. We propose an evolutionary-based approach to solving this problem. The proposed technique is examined on a few clinical problems presented by a small amount of data.

Multi-agent planning in stochastic environments can be framed formally as a decentralized Markov decision problem. Many real-life distributed problems that arise in manufacturing, multi-robot coordination and information gathering scenarios can be formalized using this framework. However, finding the optimal solution in the general case is hard, limiting the applicability of recently developed algorithms. This paper provides a practical approach for solving decentralized control problems when communication among the decision makers is possible, but costly. We develop the notion of communication-based mechanism that allows us to decompose a decentralized MDP into multiple single-agent problems. In this framework, referred to as decentralized semi-Markov decision process with direct communication (Dec-SMDP-Com), agents operate separately between communications. We show that finding an optimal mechanism is equivalent to solving optimally a Dec-SMDP-Com. We also provide a heuristic search algorithm that converges on the optimal decomposition. Restricting the decomposition to some specific types of local behaviors reduces significantly the complexity of planning. In particular, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for the case in which individual agents perform goal-oriented behaviors between communications. The paper concludes with an additional tractable algorithm that enables the introduction of human knowledge, thereby reducing the overall problem to finding the best time to communicate. Empirical results show that these approaches provide good approximate solutions.

We consider the problem of estimating the support of a vector $\beta^* \in \mathbb{R}^{p}$ based on observations contaminated by noise. A significant body of work has studied behavior of $\ell_1$-relaxations when applied to measurement matrices drawn from standard dense ensembles (e.g., Gaussian, Bernoulli). In this paper, we analyze \emph{sparsified} measurement ensembles, and consider the trade-off between measurement sparsity, as measured by the fraction $\gamma$ of non-zero entries, and the statistical efficiency, as measured by the minimal number of observations $n$ required for exact support recovery with probability converging to one. Our main result is to prove that it is possible to let $\gamma \to 0$ at some rate, yielding measurement matrices with a vanishing fraction of non-zeros per row while retaining the same statistical efficiency as dense ensembles. A variety of simulation results confirm the sharpness of our theoretical predictions.

By way of explaining how a brain works logically, human associative memory is modeled with logical and memory neurons, corresponding to standard digital circuits. The resulting cognitive architecture incorporates basic psychological elements such as short term and long term memory. Novel to the architecture are memory searches using cues chosen pseudorandomly from short term memory. Recalls alternated with sensory images, many tens per second, are analyzed subliminally as an ongoing process, to determine a direction of attention in short term memory.

In a facility with front room and back room operations, it is useful to switch workers between the rooms in order to cope with changing customer demand. Assuming stochastic customer arrival and service times, we seek a policy for switching workers such that the expected customer waiting time is minimized while the expected back room staffing is sufficient to perform all work. Three novel constraint programming models and several shaving procedures for these models are presented. Experimental results show that a model based on closed-form expressions together with a combination of shaving procedures is the most efficient. This model is able to find and prove optimal solutions for many problem instances within a reasonable run-time. Previously, the only available approach was a heuristic algorithm. Furthermore, a hybrid method combining the heuristic and the best constraint programming method is shown to perform as well as the heuristic in terms of solution quality over time, while achieving the same performance in terms of proving optimality as the pure constraint programming model. This is the first work of which we are aware that solves such queueing-based problems with constraint programming.

This paper describes application of information granulation theory, on the analysis of hydrocyclone perforamance. In this manner, using a combining of Self Organizing Map (SOM) and Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (NFIS), crisp and fuzzy granules are obtained(briefly called SONFIS). Balancing of crisp granules and sub fuzzy granules, within non fuzzy information (initial granulation), is rendered in an open-close iteration. Using two criteria, "simplicity of rules "and "adaptive threoshold error level", stability of algorithm is guaranteed. Validation of the proposed method, on the data set of the hydrocyclone is rendered.

In this article we consider the issue of optimal control in collaborative multi-agent systems with stochastic dynamics. The agents have a joint task in which they have to reach a number of target states. The dynamics of the agents contains additive control and additive noise, and the autonomous part factorizes over the agents. Full observation of the global state is assumed. The goal is to minimize the accumulated joint cost, which consists of integrated instantaneous costs and a joint end cost. The joint end cost expresses the joint task of the agents. The instantaneous costs are quadratic in the control and factorize over the agents. The optimal control is given as a weighted linear combination of single-agent to single-target controls. The single-agent to single-target controls are expressed in terms of diffusion processes. These controls, when not closed form expressions, are formulated in terms of path integrals, which are calculated approximately by Metropolis-Hastings sampling. The weights in the control are interpreted as marginals of a joint distribution over agent to target assignments. The structure of the latter is represented by a graphical model, and the marginals are obtained by graphical model inference. Exact inference of the graphical model will break down in large systems, and so approximate inference methods are needed. We use naive mean field approximation and belief propagation to approximate the optimal control in systems with linear dynamics. We compare the approximate inference methods with the exact solution, and we show that they can accurately compute the optimal control. Finally, we demonstrate the control method in multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics consisting of up to 80 agents that have to reach an equal number of target states.

We combine Artificial Immune Systems 'AIS', technology with Collaborative Filtering 'CF' and use it to build a movie recommendation system. We already know that Artificial Immune Systems work well as movie recommenders from previous work by Cayzer and Aickelin 3, 4, 5. Here our aim is to investigate the effect of different affinity measure algorithms for the AIS. Two different affinity measures, Kendalls Tau and Weighted Kappa, are used to calculate the correlation coefficients for the movie recommender. We compare the results with those published previously and show that Weighted Kappa is more suitable than others for movie problems. We also show that AIS are generally robust movie recommenders and that, as long as a suitable affinity measure is chosen, results are good.