Digital technologies and artificial intelligence’s present and foreseeable impact on lawyering,judging, policing and law enforcement

‘AI & Law’ research has been around since the 1970s, even though with shifting emphasis. This is an overview of the contributions of digital technologies, both artificial intelligence and non-AI smart tools, to both the legal professions and the police. For example, we briefly consider text mining and case-automated summarization, tools supporting argumentation, tools concerning sentencing based on the technique of case-based reasoning, the role of abductive reasoning, research into applying AI to legal evidence, tools for fighting crime and tools for identification.     

Rethinking Construction: On Luciano Floridi’s ‘Against Digital Ontology’

In the fourteenth chapter of The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi puts forth a criticism of ‘digital ontology’ as a step toward the articulation of an ‘informational structural realism’. Based on the claims made in the chapter, the present paper seeks to evaluate the distinctly Kantian scope of the chapter from a rather unconventional viewpoint: while in sympathy with the author’s doubts ‘against’ digital philosophy, we follow a different route. We turn our attention to the concept of construction as used in the book with the hope of raising some additional questions that might contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake in Floridi’s experimental epistemological response to digital ontology.     

Extending Amdahl’s law and Gustafson’s law by evaluating interconnections on multi-core processors

Multicore chips are emerging as the mainstream solution for high performance computing. Generally, communication overheads cause large performance degradation in multi-core collaboration. Interconnects in large scale are needed to deal with these overheads. Amdahl’s and Gustafson’s law have been applied to multi-core chips but inter-core communication has not been taken into account. In this paper, we introduce interconnection into Amdahl’s and Gustafson’s law so that these laws work more precisely in the multi-core era. We further propose an area cost model and analyse our speedup models under area constraints. We find optimized parameters according to our speedup model. These parameters provide useful feedbacks to architects at an initial phase of their designs. We also present a case study to show the necessity of incorporating interconnection into Amdahl’s and Gustafson’s law.     

Rethinking Turing’s Test and the Philosophical Implications

Minds and Machines - In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of...     

Forecasting — where computational intelligence meets the stock market

Forecasting is an important activity in finance. Traditionally, forecasting has been done with in-depth knowledge in finance and the market. Advances in computational intelligence have created opportunities that were never there before. Computational finance techniques, machine learning in particular, can dramatically enhance our ability to forecast. They can help us to forecast ahead of our competitors and pick out scarce opportunities. This paper explains some of the opportunities offered by computational intelligence and some of the achievements so far. It also explains the underlying technologies and explores the research horizon.     

Zipf’s law analysis on the leaked Iranian users’ passwords

Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques - Textual passwords are one of the most common methods of authentication and an important factor in systems security. Knowing the correct...     

BRAVE—a parallel logic language for artificial intelligence

This paper presents the first results for the implementation of the logic language BRAVE on a parallel architecture. We explain the operational semantics of BRAVE with common programming examples and show how both and and or parallelism can be exploited and controlled using BRAVE syntax. The design of an abstract machine for the parallel execution of BRAVE is given along with the principles of compilation and example codings. Results are presented from running example programs on a three-processor prototype, using an interpreter for BRAVE written in C.     

Extending Zipf’s law to n-grams for large corpora

Experiments show that for a large corpus, Zipf’s law does not hold for all ranks of words: the frequencies fall below those predicted by Zipf’s law for ranks greater than about 5,000 word types in the English language and about 30,000 word types in the inflected languages Irish and Latin. It also does not hold for syllables or words in the syllable-based languages, Chinese or Vietnamese. However, when single words are combined together with word n-grams in one list and put in rank order, the frequency of tokens in the combined list extends Zipf’s law with a slope close to ?1 on a log-log plot in all five languages. Further experiments have demonstrated the validity of this extension of Zipf’s law to n-grams of letters, phonemes or binary bits in English. It is shown theoretically that probability theory alone can predict this behavior in randomly created n-grams of binary bits.     

Structural optimization complexity: what has Moore’s law done for us?

Rapid increases in computer processing power, memory and storage space have not eliminated computational cost and time constraints on the use of structural optimization for design. This is due to the constant increase in the required fidelity (and hence complexity) of analysis models. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that analysis models of acceptable accuracy have required at least six to eight hours of computer time (an overnight run) throughout the last thirty years. This poses a severe challenge for global optimization or reliability-based design. In this paper, we review how increases in computer power were utilized in structural optimization. We resolve problem complexity into components relating to complexity of analysis model, analysis procedure and optimization methodology. We explore the structural optimization problems that we can solve at present and conclude that we can solve problems with the highest possible complexity in only two of the three components of model, analysis procedure or optimization. We use examples of optimum design of composite structures to guide the discussion due to our familiarity with such problems. However, these are supplemented with other structural optimization examples to illustrate the universality of the message.     

Enhanced interpolation-based AMBTC image compression using Weber’s law

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, we propose a new enhanced absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) image compression method based on interpolation. The proposed...     

Constitute: The world’s constitutions to read,search, and compare

Constitutional design and redesign is constant. Over the last 200 years, countries have replaced their constitutions an average of every 19 years and some have amended them almost yearly. A basic problem in the drafting of these documents is the search and analysis of model text deployed in other jurisdictions. Traditionally, this process has been ad hoc and the results suboptimal. As a result, drafters generally lack systematic information about the institutional options and choices available to them. In order to address this informational need, the investigators developed a web application, Constitute [online at http://www.constituteproject.org], with the use of semantic technologies. Constitute provides searchable access to the world’s constitutions using the conceptualization, texts, and data developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project. An OWL ontology represents 330 “topics”–e.g. right to health–with which the investigators have tagged relevant provisions of nearly all constitutions in force as of September of 2013. The tagged texts were then converted to an RDF representation using R2RML mappings and Capsenta’s Ultrawrap. The portal implements semantic search features to allow constitutional drafters to read, search, and compare the world’s constitutions. The goal of the project is to improve the efficiency and systemization of constitutional design and, thus, to support the independence and self-reliance of constitutional drafters.     

Prediction of artificial soil’s unconfined compression strength test using statistical analyses and artificial neural networks

Laboratory prediction of the unconfined compression strength (UCS) of cohesive soils is important to determine the shear strength properties. However, this study presents the application of different methods simple–multiple analysis and artificial neural networks for the prediction of the UCS from basic soil properties. Regression analysis and artificial neural networks prediction indicated that there exist acceptable correlations between soil properties and unconfined compression strength. Besides, artificial neural networks showed a higher performance than traditional statistical models for predicting UCS. Regression analysis and artificial neural network prediction indicated strong correlations (R² = 0.71–0.97) between basic soil properties and UCS. It has been shown that the correlation equations obtained by regression analyses are found to be reliable in practical situations.     

Dinosaur meets Archaeopteryx? or: Is there an alternative for Rational’s Unified Process?

Since 1999, Rationals Unified Process (RUP) is being offered as a guideline for software projects using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). RUP has been advertised to be iterative, and incremental, use case-driven and architecture-centric. These claims are discussed while RUP core concepts like phase, iteration, discipline (formerly: workflow) and milestone are reviewed in more detail. It turns out that the RUP constitutes a considerable step towards a broad dissemination of software process modelling ideas but some of the RUP definitions and structures lack clear structure and are too complex and overloaded for practical use.Among others, I see the following particular problems: (1) phases do still dominate the process and iteration structure, (2) the term software architecture is not clearly defined and its role is still underestimated, (3) RUP disciplines are a partly redundant concept complicating the process more than supporting it, (4) powerful and transparent structuring principles like recursion and orthogonality do not get the attention they deserve. As an alternative, our model for Evolutionary, Object-oriented Software development (EOS) is contrasted with the RUP.     

Classification of image distortion based on the generalized Benford’s law

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Distortion classification is an important step in blind image quality assessment. In this paper, a new image distortion classification algorithm is presented....     

Weber’s law based multi-level convolution correlation features for image retrieval

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Weber’s law reveals the relationship between human perception and perceptual stimuli. Inspired by the theory, this paper designs a multi-level convolution...     

Soil–conduit interaction: an artificial intelligence application for reinforced concrete and corrugated steel conduits

Neural Computing and Applications - Marston’s load theory is commonly used for understanding the soil–conduit interaction. However, there are no practical methods available which can...     

Employing a recommendation expert system based on mental accounting and artificial neural networks into mining business intelligence for study abroad’s P/S recommendations

Successfully designing and positioning product/service will lead most enterprises to have the chance to keep the competitive advantages, and consumers also will have clear and strong preferences for product/service (P/S) during competitive environment. At Taiwan, study abroad service which being provided by travel agencies can be viewed as a new market during the recent years. Most travel agencies intend to develop the novel techniques and mine the useful business intelligence (BI) for improving their quality of P/S or adjusting their strategies of marketing. In this article, a recommendation expert system (ES) based on mental accounting and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed to address the issue of BI mining. The travel agencies can obtain BI relating to consumers’ decision-making, consumers’ responses for different mental accounting and the recommended features for P/S by inputting referenced information into such recommendation ES. Finally, we also take an illustrative example owing to a local travel agency at Taiwan to demonstrate the feasibility and rationality of the proposed architecture.