This paper pursues some applications of Rough Set Theory (RST) and neural-fuzzy model to analysis of "lugeon data". In the manner, using Self Organizing Map (SOM) as a pre-processing the data are scaled and then the dominant rules by RST, are elicited. Based on these rules variations of permeability in the different levels of Shivashan dam, Iran has been highlighted. Then, via using a combining of SOM and an adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (NFIS) another analysis on the data was carried out. Finally, a brief comparison between the obtained results of RST and SOM-NFIS (briefly SONFIS) has been rendered.

Su-Doku, a popular combinatorial puzzle, provides an excellent testbench for heuristic explorations. Several interesting questions arise from its deceptively simple set of rules. How many distinct Su-Doku grids are there? How to find a solution to a Su-Doku puzzle? Is there a unique solution to a given Su-Doku puzzle? What is a good estimation of a puzzle's difficulty? What is the minimum puzzle size (the number of "givens")? This paper explores how these questions are related to the well-known alldifferent constraint which emerges in a wide variety of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) and compares various algorithmic approaches based on different formulations of Su-Doku.

We introduce a useful tool for analyzing boosting algorithms called the ``smooth margin function,'' a differentiable approximation of the usual margin for boosting algorithms. We present two boosting algorithms based on this smooth margin, ``coordinate ascent boosting'' and ``approximate coordinate ascent boosting,'' which are similar to Freund and Schapire's AdaBoost algorithm and Breiman's arc-gv algorithm. We give convergence rates to the maximum margin solution for both of our algorithms and for arc-gv. We then study AdaBoost's convergence properties using the smooth margin function. We precisely bound the margin attained by AdaBoost when the edges of the weak classifiers fall within a specified range. This shows that a previous bound proved by R\"{a}tsch and Warmuth is exactly tight. Furthermore, we use the smooth margin to capture explicit properties of AdaBoost in cases where cyclic behavior occurs.

The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self-cells or non-self cells. It does this with the help of a distributed task force that has the intelligence to take action from a local and also a global perspective using its network of chemical messengers for communication. There are two major branches of the immune system. The innate immune system is an unchanging mechanism that detects and destroys certain invading organisms, whilst the adaptive immune system responds to previously unknown foreign cells and builds a response to them that can remain in the body over a long period of time. This remarkable information processing biological system has caught the attention of computer science in recent years. A novel computational intelligence technique, inspired by immunology, has emerged, called Artificial Immune Systems. Several concepts from the immune have been extracted and applied for solution to real world science and engineering problems. In this tutorial, we briefly describe the immune system metaphors that are relevant to existing Artificial Immune Systems methods. We will then show illustrative real-world problems suitable for Artificial Immune Systems and give a step-by-step algorithm walkthrough for one such problem. A comparison of the Artificial Immune Systems to other well-known algorithms, areas for future work, tips & tricks and a list of resources will round this tutorial off. It should be noted that as Artificial Immune Systems is still a young and evolving field, there is not yet a fixed algorithm template and hence actual implementations might differ somewhat from time to time and from those examples given here.

Given an argumentation framework AF, we introduce a mapping function that constructs a disjunctive logic program P, such that the preferred extensions of AF correspond to the stable models of P, after intersecting each stable model with the relevant atoms. The given mapping function is of polynomial size w.r.t. AF. In particular, we identify that there is a direct relationship between the minimal models of a propositional formula and the preferred extensions of an argumentation framework by working on representing the defeated arguments. Then we show how to infer the preferred extensions of an argumentation framework by using UNSAT algorithms and disjunctive stable model solvers. The relevance of this result is that we define a direct relationship between one of the most satisfactory argumentation semantics and one of the most successful approach of non-monotonic reasoning i.e., logic programming with the stable model semantics.

In an emergency situation, the actors need an assistance allowing them to react swiftly and efficiently. In this prospect, we present in this paper a decision support system that aims to prepare actors in a crisis situation thanks to a decision-making support. The global architecture of this system is presented in the first part. Then we focus on a part of this system which is designed to represent the information of the current situation. This part is composed of a multiagent system that is made of factual agents. Each agent carries a semantic feature and aims to represent a partial part of a situation. The agents develop thanks to their interactions by comparing their semantic features using proximity measures and according to specific ontologies.

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal trajectories. This is the main motivation for using value-gradients, and it is argued that learning value-gradients is the actual objective of any value-function learning algorithm for control problems. It is also argued that learning value-gradients is significantly more efficient than learning just the values, and this argument is supported in experiments by efficiency gains of several orders of magnitude, in several problem domains. Once value-gradients are introduced into learning, several analyses become possible. For example, a surprising equivalence between a value-gradient learning algorithm and a policy-gradient learning algorithm is proven, and this provides a robust convergence proof for control problems using a value function with a general function approximator.

In this paper, we describe a new algorithm that consists in combining an eye-tracker for minimizing the fatigue of a user during the evaluation process of Interactive Evolutionary Computation. The approach is then applied to the Interactive One-Max optimization problem.

This paper presents a new type of genetic algorithm for the set covering problem. It differs from previous evolutionary approaches first because it is an indirect algorithm, i.e. the actual solutions are found by an external decoder function. The genetic algorithm itself provides this decoder with permutations of the solution variables and other parameters. Second, it will be shown that results can be further improved by adding another indirect optimisation layer. The decoder will not directly seek out low cost solutions but instead aims for good exploitable solutions. These are then post optimised by another hill-climbing algorithm. Although seemingly more complicated, we will show that this three-stage approach has advantages in terms of solution quality, speed and adaptability to new types of problems over more direct approaches. Extensive computational results are presented and compared to the latest evolutionary and other heuristic approaches to the same data instances.

Jerne's idiotypic network theory postulates that the immune response involves inter-antibody stimulation and suppression as well as matching to antigens. The theory has proved the most popular Artificial Immune System (ais) model for incorporation into behavior-based robotics but guidelines for implementing idiotypic selection are scarce. Furthermore, the direct effects of employing the technique have not been demonstrated in the form of a comparison with non-idiotypic systems. This paper aims to address these issues. A method for integrating an idiotypic ais network with a Reinforcement Learning based control system (rl) is described and the mechanisms underlying antibody stimulation and suppression are explained in detail. Some hypotheses that account for the network advantage are put forward and tested using three systems with increasing idiotypic complexity. The basic rl, a simplified hybrid ais-rl that implements idiotypic selection independently of derived concentration levels and a full hybrid ais-rl scheme are examined. The test bed takes the form of a simulated Pioneer robot that is required to navigate through maze worlds detecting and tracking door markers.