Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Most of the signal processing that we will study in this course involves local operations on a signal, namely transforming the signal by applying linear combinations of values in the neighborhood of each sample point. You are familiar with such operations from Calculus, namely, taking derivatives and you are also familiar with this from optics namely blurring a signal. We will be looking at sampled signals only. Let's start with a few basic examples. Local difference Suppose we have a 1D image and we take the local difference of intensities, DI(x) = 1 2 (I(x + 1) − I(x − 1)) which give a discrete approximation to a partial derivative. (We compute this for each x in the image.) What is the effect of such a transformation? One key idea is that such a derivative would be useful for marking positions where the intensity changes. Such a change is called an edge. It is important to detect edges in images because they often mark locations at which object properties change. These can include changes in illumination along a surface due to a shadow boundary, or a material (pigment) change, or a change in depth as when one object ends and another begins. The computational problem of finding intensity edges in images is called edge detection. We could look for positions at which DI(x) has a large negative or positive value. Large positive values indicate an edge that goes from low to high intensity, and large negative values indicate an edge that goes from high to low intensity. Example Suppose the image consists of a single (slightly sloped) edge:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5/31307/01456462.pdf

Linear systems

Software systems dealing with distributed applications in changing environments normally require human supervision to continue operation in all conditions. These (re-)configuring, troubleshooting, and in general maintenance tasks lead to costly and time-consuming procedures during the operating phase. These problems are primarily due to the open-loop structure often followed in software development. Therefore, there is a high demand for management complexity reduction, management automation, robustness, and achieving all of the desired quality requirements within a reasonable cost and time range during operation. Self-adaptive software is a response to these demands; it is a closed-loop system with a feedback loop aiming to adjust itself to changes during its operation. These changes may stem from the software system's self (internal causes, e.g., failure) or context (external events, e.g., increasing requests from users). Such a system is required to monitor itself and its context, detect significant changes, decide how to react, and act to execute such decisions. These processes depend on adaptation properties (called self-a properties), domain characteristics (context information or models), and preferences of stakeholders. Noting these requirements, it is widely believed that new models and frameworks are needed to design self-adaptive software. This survey article presents a taxonomy, based on concerns of adaptation, that is, how, what, when and where, towards providing a unified view of this emerging area. Moreover, as adaptive systems are encountered in many disciplines, it is imperative to learn from the theories and models developed in these other areas. This survey article presents a landscape of research in self-adaptive software by highlighting relevant disciplines and some prominent research projects. This landscape helps to identify the underlying research gaps and elaborates on the corresponding challenges.

/pdf/self-adaptive-software-landscape-and-research-challenges-4rt6vhdmq2.pdf

Self-adaptive software: Landscape and research challenges

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes: Preface

A vulnerability scan combined with information about a computer network can be used to create an attack graph, a model of how the elements of a network could be used in an attack to reach specific states or goals in the network. These graphs can be understood probabilistically by turning them into Bayesian attack graphs (BAGs), making it possible to quantitatively analyse the security of large networks. In the event of an attack, probabilities on the graph change depending on the evidence discovered (e.g., by an intrusion detection system or knowledge of a host’s activity). Since such scenarios are difficult to solve through direct computation, we discuss three stochastic simulation techniques for updating the probabilities dynamically based on the evidence and compare their speed and accuracy. From our experiments we conclude that likelihood weighting is most efficient for most uses. We also consider sensitivity analysis of BAGs, to identify the most critical nodes for protection of the network and solve the uncertainty problem for the assignment of priors to nodes. Since sensitivity analysis can easily become computationally expensive, we present and demonstrate an efficient sensitivity analysis approach that exploits a quantitative relation with stochastic inference.

Stochastic Simulation Techniques for Inference and Sensitivity Analysis of Bayesian Attack Graphs

Welcome to the Proceedings of the EDOC 2006 workshop Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2006! The workshop is a follow-up to the successful MWS 2005 workshop held at the EDOC 2005 conference and the subsequent special issue of the International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management (IJBPIM, published by Inderscience Publishers). Similarly to these past venues, the MWS 2006 workshop is sponsored by the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA). During the past several years, Web services technologies have become very prominent in both the research community and the industry. Web services are distributed computing application components implementing the service-oriented architecture (SOA). They rely on Extensible Markup Language (XML) interface description languages, such as the standardized Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and communication protocols, such as the standardized SOAP protocol (previously known as the Simple Object Access Protocol). In addition, Web services can use a number of other standardized and/or proprietary XML-based formats, such as the standardized Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) for describing business processes implemented as Web service compositions. Implementation-independence of Web services technologies allows different businesses to collaborate and achieve common business goals despite the fact that the collaborating Web services can be distributed over the Internet, run on different platforms, and implemented in different programming languages. Web services technologies are already embedded in various products and services of all major computing companies and used for diverse purposes.

Introduction to the Proceedings of the EDOC 2006 Workshop Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2006

In this paper we discuss the current state of our work regarding the development and planned in-situ testing of a computer-based system to enhance community relations through the Neighbourhood Watch scheme. The system is intended for use in a community to help the residents interact with each other more easily and to encourage the reporting of suspicious behaviour or crime. We discuss some details of the system and how we plan to test it in the field using an iterative process. We also discuss the possible implications of the work for the future.

Towards the implementation of an internet-based neighbourhood watch scheme-Impacts of inclusive technologies on societies

Credit card fraud is one of the most common cybercrimes experienced by consumers today. Machine learning approaches are increasingly used to improve the accuracy of fraud detection systems. However, most of the approaches proposed so far have been based on supervised models, i.e., models trained with labelled historical fraudulent transactions, thus limiting the ability of the approach to recognise unknown fraud patterns. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised fraud detection system for card payments transactions. The unsupervised approach learns the characteristics of normal transactions and then identify anomalies as potential frauds. We introduce the challenges on modelling card payment transactions and discuss how to select the best features. Our approach can reduce the equal error rate (EER) significantly over previous approaches (from \(11.2\%\) to \(8.55\% ERR\)), for a real-world transaction dataset.

Aad van Moorsel

Papers

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes: Preface

Stochastic Simulation Techniques for Inference and Sensitivity Analysis of Bayesian Attack Graphs

Introduction to the Proceedings of the EDOC 2006 Workshop Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2006

Towards the implementation of an internet-based neighbourhood watch scheme-Impacts of inclusive technologies on societies

Unsupervised Machine Learning for Card Payment Fraud Detection