We present a uniform non-monotonic solution to the problems of reasoning about action on the basis of an argumentation-theoretic approach. Our theory is provably correct relative to a sensible minimisation policy introduced on top of a temporal propositional logic. Sophisticated problem domains can be formalised in our framework. As much attention of researchers in the field has been paid to the traditional and basic problems in reasoning about actions such as the frame, the qualification and the ramification problems, approaches to these problems within our formalisation lie at heart of the expositions presented in this paper.

Concept Analysis provides a principled approach to effective management of wide area information systems, such as the Nebula File System and Interface. This not only offers evidence to support the assertion that a digital library is a bounded collection of incommensurate information sources in a logical space, but also sheds light on techniques for collaboration through coordinated access to the shared organization of knowledge.

Data sets are often modeled as point clouds in $R^D$, for $D$ large. It is often assumed that the data has some interesting low-dimensional structure, for example that of a $d$-dimensional manifold $M$, with $d$ much smaller than $D$. When $M$ is simply a linear subspace, one may exploit this assumption for encoding efficiently the data by projecting onto a dictionary of $d$ vectors in $R^D$ (for example found by SVD), at a cost $(n+D)d$ for $n$ data points. When $M$ is nonlinear, there are no "explicit" constructions of dictionaries that achieve a similar efficiency: typically one uses either random dictionaries, or dictionaries obtained by black-box optimization. In this paper we construct data-dependent multi-scale dictionaries that aim at efficient encoding and manipulating of the data. Their construction is fast, and so are the algorithms that map data points to dictionary coefficients and vice versa. In addition, data points are guaranteed to have a sparse representation in terms of the dictionary. We think of dictionaries as the analogue of wavelets, but for approximating point clouds rather than functions.

Texture classification became one of the problems which has been paid much attention on by image processing scientists since late 80s. Consequently, since now many different methods have been proposed to solve this problem. In most of these methods the researchers attempted to describe and discriminate textures based on linear and non-linear patterns. The linear and non-linear patterns on any window are based on formation of Grain Components in a particular order. Grain component is a primitive unit of morphology that most meaningful information often appears in the form of occurrence of that. The approach which is proposed in this paper could analyze the texture based on its grain components and then by making grain components histogram and extracting statistical features from that would classify the textures. Finally, to increase the accuracy of classification, proposed approach is expanded to color images to utilize the ability of approach in analyzing each RGB channels, individually. Although, this approach is a general one and it could be used in different applications, the method has been tested on the stone texture and the results can prove the quality of approach.

Volterra and polynomial regression models play a major role in nonlinear system identification and inference tasks. Exciting applications ranging from neuroscience to genome-wide association analysis build on these models with the additional requirement of parsimony. This requirement has high interpretative value, but unfortunately cannot be met by least-squares based or kernel regression methods. To this end, compressed sampling (CS) approaches, already successful in linear regression settings, can offer a viable alternative. The viability of CS for sparse Volterra and polynomial models is the core theme of this work. A common sparse regression task is initially posed for the two models. Building on (weighted) Lasso-based schemes, an adaptive RLS-type algorithm is developed for sparse polynomial regressions. The identifiability of polynomial models is critically challenged by dimensionality. However, following the CS principle, when these models are sparse, they could be recovered by far fewer measurements. To quantify the sufficient number of measurements for a given level of sparsity, restricted isometry properties (RIP) are investigated in commonly met polynomial regression settings, generalizing known results for their linear counterparts. The merits of the novel (weighted) adaptive CS algorithms to sparse polynomial modeling are verified through synthetic as well as real data tests for genotype-phenotype analysis.

We present an application focused on the design of resilient long-reach passive optical networks. We specifically consider dual-parented networks whereby each customer must be connected to two metro sites via local exchange sites. An important property of such a placement is resilience to single metro node failure. The objective of the application is to determine the optimal position of a set of metro nodes such that the total optical fibre length is minimized. We prove that this problem is NP-Complete. We present two alternative combinatorial optimisation approaches to finding an optimal metro node placement using: a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) formulation of the problem; and, a hybrid approach that uses clustering as a preprocessing step. We consider a detailed case-study based on a network for Ireland. The hybrid approach scales well and finds solutions that are close to optimal, with a runtime that is two orders-of-magnitude better than the MIP model.

A grounding of a formula $\phi$ over a given finite domain is a ground formula which is equivalent to $\phi$ on that domain. Very effective propositional solvers have made grounding-based methods for problem solving increasingly important, however for realistic problem domains and instances, the size of groundings is often problematic. A key technique in ground (e.g., SAT) solvers is unit propagation, which often significantly reduces ground formula size even before search begins. We define a "lifted" version of unit propagation which may be carried out prior to grounding, and describe integration of the resulting technique into grounding algorithms. We describe an implementation of the method in a bottom-up grounder, and an experimental study of its performance.

Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization is becoming a hot research area and quite a few papers regarding these algorithms have been published. However the role of local search techniques has not been expanded adequately. This paper studies the role of a local search technique called 2-opt for the Multi-Objective Travelling Salesman Problem (MOTSP). A new mutation operator called Jumping Gene (JG) is also used. Since 2-opt operator was intended for the single objective TSP, its domain has been expanded to MOTSP in this paper. This new technique is applied to the list of KroAB100 cities.

In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm performance-loss bounds for DPP in the presence of approximation/estimation error. The bounds are expressed in terms of the l\infty-norm of the average accumulated error as opposed to the l\infty-norm of the error in the case of the standard approximate value iteration (AVI) and the approximate policy iteration (API). This suggests that DPP can achieve a better performance than AVI and API since it averages out the simulation noise caused by Monte-Carlo sampling throughout the learning process. We examine this theoretical results numerically by com- paring the performance of the approximate variants of DPP with existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods on different problem domains. Our results show that, in all cases, DPP-based algorithms outperform other RL methods by a wide margin.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to research aimed at tackling the full problem of artificial intelligence, that is, create truly intelligent agents. This sets it apart from most AI research which aims at solving relatively narrow domains, such as character recognition, motion planning, or increasing player satisfaction in games. But how do we know when an agent is truly intelligent? A common point of reference in the AGI community is Legg and Hutter's formal definition of universal intelligence, which has the appeal of simplicity and generality but is unfortunately incomputable. Games of various kinds are commonly used as benchmarks for "narrow" AI research, as they are considered to have many important properties. We argue that many of these properties carry over to the testing of general intelligence as well. We then sketch how such testing could practically be carried out. The central part of this sketch is an extension of universal intelligence to deal with finite time, and the use of sampling of the space of games expressed in a suitably biased game description language.