A survey on data fusion: what for? in what form? what is next?

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Data fusion is the process of merging records from multiple sources which represent the same real-world object into a single representation. This review...     

ERG’s plan for success

Gemplus and SchlumbergerSema make more smart cards than anyone else. But ERG from Western Australia is bidding to take a place alongside the two European leaders as one of the world’s major providers of smart card-based systems.     

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.     

Access to medicines and the TRIPS Agreement: what next for sub-Saharan Africa?

When the proposal for an international intellectual property (IP) rights protection was included as an item in the agenda for negotiation in the Uruguay Round of World Trade Organization negotiations, it was strongly opposed by developing countries including Brazil, India, Argentina and others. The developing countries and least developed countries (LDCs) from Africa, realising the difficulties the Agreement would put them in, had vigorously campaigned against the inclusion of IP rights protection within the multilateral trading system. One of the chief areas of concern for the developing countries and LDCs was the difficulty of accessing affordable medicines under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime. While the resistance was gradually eroded and eventually neutralised during the long drawn Uruguay Round of Negotiations, the developing countries and the LDCs gained a few concessions in the post-TRIPS era in the form of Doha Declaration, which in their opinion would have given them the opportunity to invoke the emergency provisions of the Agreement in times of need to access essential medicines for their citizens. This was not to be the case, as the ground realities were difficult to manoeuvre and there were more impediments to invoking the flexibilities than originally perceived. This article will suggest that the best option available for sub-Saharan Africa is seeking an outright amendment of the TRIPS Agreement, as working within the parameters of the Agreement to achieve the goal of access to affordable medicines is not a viable option. It will also be argued that unless it acts urgently to seek the amendment it may be too late, as it could find itself left behind by both developing countries from other continents and patent-holding developed countries alike.     

Opening the black box: Managers’ perceptions of IS project success mechanisms

In general, works on information system (IS) project success focus on either project success factors or project success criteria, neglecting the relationships (mechanisms) between these concepts. Accordingly, it is mainly unclear how success factors actually contribute to success criteria. We attempt to illuminate this black box by conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews with experienced IS project managers by applying Repertory Grid and Laddering. Our exploratory study yields numerous success mechanisms, revealing project-related motivation to be the central hub in the factors-criteria network. Factors preceding project-related motivation such as transparency, certainty, and management attention are described.     

On Smoothed Analysis of?Quicksort?and?Hoare’s Find

We provide a smoothed analysis of Hoare’s find algorithm, and we revisit the smoothed analysis of quicksort. Hoare’s find algorithm—often called quickselect or one-sided quicksort—is an easy-to-implement algorithm for finding the k-th smallest element of a sequence. While the worst-case number of comparisons that Hoare’s find needs is Θ(n ²), the average-case number is Θ(n). We analyze what happens between these two extremes by providing a smoothed analysis. In the first perturbation model, an adversary specifies a sequence of n numbers of [0,1], and then, to each number of the sequence, we add a random number drawn independently from the interval [0,d]. We prove that Hoare’s find needs $\Theta(\frac{n}{d+1} \sqrt{n/d} + n)$ comparisons in expectation if the adversary may also specify the target element (even after seeing the perturbed sequence) and slightly fewer comparisons for finding the median. In the second perturbation model, each element is marked with a probability of p, and then a random permutation is applied to the marked elements. We prove that the expected number of comparisons to find the median is $\Omega((1-p) \frac{n}{p} \log n)$ . Finally, we provide lower bounds for the smoothed number of comparisons of quicksort and Hoare’s find for the median-of-three pivot rule, which usually yields faster algorithms than always selecting the first element: The pivot is the median of the first, middle, and last element of the sequence. We show that median-of-three does not yield a significant improvement over the classic rule.     

Eliciting children’s recall of events: how do computers compare with humans?

This study investigated the usefulness of an interactive computer program in eliciting children's reports about an event. Fifty-four 5–6- and fifty-nine 7–8-year old children participated in an event with their regular class teacher which involved several activities and a mildly negative secret. Four days and again 14 days later, the children were interviewed individually by computer (alone) or by a human interviewer. The computer program incorporated animation and audio whereby an animated figure asked the questions and the children were required to provide a verbal response. The accuracy and detail of the children’s reports was similar across the interview conditions. The children were more willing to review their answers with the computer than the adult interviewer. However, responses to the computer were less consistent across the interviews, and the children were less willing to disclose the secret in the second interview to the computer compared with the human interviewer. Overall, the computer revealed little benefit in eliciting children’s recall of the event over the standard face-to-face interview.     

15 challenges for AI: or what AI (currently) can’t do

AI & SOCIETY - The current “AI Summer” is marked by scientific breakthroughs and economic successes in the fields of research, development, and application of systems with...     

Formalization of Shannon’s Theorems

The most fundamental results of information theory are Shannon’s theorems. These theorems express the bounds for (1) reliable data compression and (2) data transmission over a noisy channel. Their proofs are non-trivial but are rarely detailed, even in the introductory literature. This lack of formal foundations is all the more unfortunate that crucial results in computer security rely solely on information theory: this is the so-called “unconditional security”. In this article, we report on the formalization of a library for information theory in the SSReflect extension of the Coq proof-assistant. In particular, we produce the first formal proofs of the source coding theorem, that introduces the entropy as the bound for lossless compression, and of the channel coding theorem, that introduces the capacity as the bound for reliable communication over a noisy channel.     

From Berman and Hafner’s teleological context to Baude and Sachs’ interpretive defaults: an ontological challenge for the next decades of AI and Law

This paper revisits the challenge of Berman and Hafner’s “missing link” paper on representing teleological structure in case-based legal reasoning. It is noted that this was mainly an ontological challenge to represent some of what made legal reasoning distinctive, which was given less attention than factual similarity in the dominant AI and Law paradigm, deriving from HYPO. The response to their paper is noted and briefly evaluated. A parallel is drawn to a new challenge to provide deep structure to the legal context of textual meaning, drawing on the forthcoming work of two Constitutional law scholars who appear to place some faith in the ways of thinking that AI and Law has developed.     

The next generation of language labs: Can mobiles help? A case study

One major challenge regarding the use of today's language labs relates to teachers' and students' awareness and computer skills. Most teachers and students may not have the requisite computer skills and might soon become overwhelmed by the sophisticated functionality of today's digital lab systems. Thus, they should be provided with the appropriate training and technical support to reduce the apprehension that is usually associated with new technology. Recurrent technical problems are another shortcoming. Failure to operate the lab equipment efficiently due to hardware or software problems will inevitably cause delays and frustration for both students and instructors.To overcome such problems in existing language labs, this paper presents a novel cross-platform mobile lab system for language learning, called Mlab. The target users of MLab are language teachers and students, and the system offers them the freedom to move around and use their own devices at any time and in any place. Therefore, this research paper presents Mlab development and evaluation through three approaches: a holistic test case scenario, think aloud and interview sessions. The results showed high usability rates and generally positive attitudes toward using the mobile lab system.     

In the Palm of Leonardo’s Hand: Modeling Polyhedra

George W. Hart presents three examples of new computer-based “3D printing” techniques for recreating the historically important polyhedral models of Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli. It is hoped that such models will inspire students and the public to appreciate the history and beauty of polyhedra for architectural and other applications.     

Conserved quantities in discrete dynamics: what can be recovered from Noether’s theorem, how, and why?

The connections between symmetries and conserved quantities of a dynamical system brought to light by Noether??s theorem depend in an essential way on the symplectic nature of the underlying kinematics. In the discrete dynamics realm, a rather suggestive analogy for this structure is offered by second-order cellular automata. We ask to what extent the latter systems may enjoy properties analogous to those conferred, for continuous systems, by Noether??s theorem. For definiteness, as a second-order cellular automaton we use the Ising spin model with both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic bonds. We show that??and why??energy not only acts as a generator of the dynamics for this family of systems, but is also conserved when the dynamics is time-invariant. We then begin to explore the issue of whether, in these systems, it may hold as well that translation invariance entails momentum conservation.     

SALDO: a touch of yin to WordNet’s yang

The English-language Princeton WordNet (PWN) and some wordnets for other languages have been extensively used as lexical–semantic knowledge sources in language technology applications, due to their free availability and their size. The ubiquitousness of PWN-type wordnets tends to overshadow the fact that they represent one out of many possible choices for structuring a lexical–semantic resource, and it could be enlightening to look at a differently structured resource both from the point of view of theoretical–methodological considerations and from the point of view of practical text processing requirements. The resource described here—SALDO—is such a lexical–semantic resource, intended primarily for use in language technology applications, and offering an alternative organization to PWN-style wordnets. We present our work on SALDO, compare it with PWN, and discuss some implications of the differences. We also describe an integrated infrastructure for computational lexical resources where SALDO forms the central component.     

The problem of electronic argument: a humanist’s perspective

This article attempts to explain the absence of a new rhetoric, as repurposed for electronic media. Such a rhetoric would provide, among other things, a blueprint for electronic arguments conducted in hypermedia form. Without an electronic rhetoric, the artifacts generated in new media inevitably fall into a narrow range: e-commerce and edutainment. One role of the humanist in this technological age, whose mother tongue is the conceptual language of the technologist, is to speak in an alternative language out of which an electronic rhetoric could emerge. The hallmark of the humanist’s alternative language or vocabulary is that it does not find technological innovation synonymous with rhetorical invention.