A neural network based approach is presented for controlling two distinct types of nonlinear systems. The first corresponds to nonlinear systems with parametric uncertainties where the parameters occur nonlinearly. The second corresponds to systems for which stabilizing control structures cannotbe determined. The proposed neural controllers are shown to result in closed-loop system stability under certain conditions.

A significant limitation of neural networks is that the representations theylearn are usually incomprehensible to humans.

This paper discusses the use of multilayer feedforward neural networks forpredicting a stock's excess return based on its exposure to various technical and fundamental factors. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach a hedged portfolio which consists of equally capitalized long and short positions is constructed and its historical returns are benchmarked against T-bill returns and the S&P500 index. 1 Introduction

Harmony networks have been proposed as a means by which connectionist modelscan perform symbolic computation. Indeed, proponents claim that a harmony network can be built that constructs parse trees for strings in a context free language. This paper shows that harmony networks do not work in the following sense: they construct many outputs that are not valid parse trees. In order to show that the notion of systematicity is compatible with connectionism, Paul Smolensky, Geraldine Legendre and Yoshiro Miyata (Smolensky, Legendre, and Miyata 1992; Smolensky 1993; Smolensky, Legendre, and Miyata 1994) proposed amechanism, "Harmony Theory," by which connectionist models purportedly perform structure sensitive operations without implementing classical algorithms. Harmony theory describes a "harmony network" which, in the course of reaching a stable equilibrium, apparently computes parse trees that are valid according to the rules of a particular context-free grammar.

In this paper we examine the practical use of hardware neural networks in an autonomous mobile robot. We have developed a hardware neural system based around a custom VLSI chip, EP SILON III, designed specifically for embedded hardware neural applications. We present here a demonstration application of an autonomous mobile robot that highlights the flexibility of this system.

This paper describes the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to the difficult real world problem of elevator dispatching. The elevator domainposes a combination of challenges not seen in most RL research to date. Elevator systems operate in continuous state spaces and in continuous time as discrete event dynamic systems. Their states are not fully observable and they are nonstationary due to changing passenger arrival rates. In addition, we use a team of RL agents, each of which is responsible for controlling one elevator car.The team receives a global reinforcement signal which appears noisy to each agent due to the effects of the actions of the other agents, the random nature of the arrivals and the incomplete observation of the state.

Geoffrey Towell Siemens Corporate Research 755 College Road East Princeton, NJ 08540 Abstract Many classification problems have the property that the only costly part of obtaining examples is the class label. This paper suggests a simple method for using distribution information contained in unlabeled examples to augment labeled examples in a supervised training framework. Empirical tests show that the technique described inthis paper can significantly improve the accuracy of a supervised learner when the learner is well below its asymptotic accuracy level. 1 INTRODUCTION Supervised learning problems often have the following property: unlabeled examples have little or no cost while class labels have a high cost. For example, it is trivial to record hours of heartbeats from hundreds of patients. However, it is expensive to hire cardiologists to label each of the recorded beats.

We introduce and analyze a mixture model for supervised learning of probabilistic transducers. We devise an online learning algorithm that efficiently infers the structure and estimates the parameters of each model in the mixture. Theoretical analysis and comparative simulations indicate that the learning algorithm tracks the best model from an arbitrarily large (possibly infinite) pool of models. We also present an application of the model for inducing a noun phrase recognizer.

AndersKrogh'" NORDITA, Blegdamsvej 17 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark kroghGsanger.ac.uk Abstract We study the characteristics of learning with ensembles. Solving exactly the simple model of an ensemble of linear students, we find surprisingly rich behaviour. For learning in large ensembles, it is advantageous to use under-regularized students, which actually over-fitthe training data. Globally optimal performance can be obtained by choosing the training set sizes of the students appropriately. Forsmaller ensembles, optimization of the ensemble weights can yield significant improvements in ensemble generalization performance,in particular if the individual students are subject to noise in the training process.

In natural contexts, visual object recognition in humans is remarkably fast, reliable, and viewpoint invariant. The present approach to object recognition is "view-based" (e.g.