Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents;researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

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Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

From the Publisher: 
The accessible presentation of this book gives both a general view of the entire computer vision enterprise and also offers sufficient detail to be able to build useful applications. Users learn techniques that have proven to be useful by first-hand experience and a wide range of mathematical methods. A CD-ROM with every copy of the text contains source code for programming practice, color images, and illustrative movies. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this book includes essential topics that either reflect practical significance or are of theoretical importance. Topics are discussed in substantial and increasing depth. Application surveys describe numerous important application areas such as image based rendering and digital libraries. Many important algorithms broken down and illustrated in pseudo code. Appropriate for use by engineers as a comprehensive reference to the computer vision enterprise.

Computer vision : a modern approach = 计算机视觉 : 一种现代的方法

We present a new system, Genesis, that processes sets of human patches to automatically infer code transforms and search spaces for automatic patch generation. We present results that characterize the effectiveness of the Genesis inference algorithms and the resulting complete Genesis patch generation system working with real-world patches and errors collected from top 1000 github Java software development projects. To the best of our knowledge, Genesis is the first system to automatically infer patch generation transforms or candidate patch search spaces from successful patches.

Automatic Inference of Code Transforms and Search Spaces for Automatic Patch Generation Systems

We present a technique that enables the focused application of multiple analyses to different modules in the same program. Our re- search has two goals: 1) to address the scalability limitations of precise analyses by focusing the analysis on only those parts of the program that are relevant to the properties that the analysis is designed to verify, and 2) to enable the application of specialized analyses that verify proper- ties of specific classes of data structures to programs that simultaneously manipulate several different kinds of data structures. In our approach, each module encapsulates a data structure and uses membership in abstract sets to characterize how objects participate in its data structure. Each analysis verifies that the implementation of the module 1) preserves important internal data structure representation invariants and 2) conforms to a specification that uses formulas in a set algebra to characterize the effects of operations on the data structure. The analyses use the common set abstraction to 1) characterize how objects participate in multiple data structures and to 2) enable the inter- analysis communication required to verify properties that depend on multiple modules analyzed by different analyses. We characterize the key soundness property that an analysis plugin must satisfy to successfully participate in our system and present several anal- ysis plugins that satisfy this property: a flag plugin that analyzes modules in which abstract set membership is determined by a flag field in each object, and a graph types plugin that analyzes modules in which abstract set membership is determined by reachability properties of objects stored in tree-like data structures.

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On Modular Pluggable Analyses Using Set Interfaces

We present a study that characterizes the way developers use automatically generated patches when fixing software defects. Our study tasked two groups of developers with repairing defects in C programs. Both groups were provided with the defective line of code. One was also provided with five automatically generated and validated patches, all of which modified the defective line of code, and one of which was correct. Contrary to our initial expectations, the group with access to the generated patches did not produce more correct patches and did not produce patches in less time. We characterize the main behaviors observed in experimental subjects: a focus on understanding the defect and the relationship of the patches to the original source code. Based on this characterization, we highlight various potentially productive directions for future developer-centric automatic patch generation systems.

Characterizing Developer Use of Automatically Generated Patches

This paper introduces an analysis technique, commutativity analysis, for automatically parallelizing computations that manipulate dynamic, pointer-based data structures. Commutativity analysis views computations as composed of operations on objects. It then analyzes the program to discover when operations commute, i.e. leave the objects in the same state regardless of the order in which they execute. If all of the operations required to perform a given computation commute, the compiler can automatically generate parallel code. Commutativity analysis eliminates many of the limitations that have prevented existing compilers, which use data dependence analysis from successfully parallelizing pointer-based applications. It enables compilers to parallelize computations that manipulate graphs and eliminates the need to analyze the data structure construction code to extract global properties of the data structure topology. This paper shows how to use symbolic execution and expression manipulation to statically determine that operations commute and how to exploit the extracted commutativity information to generate parallel code. It also presents performance results that demonstrate that commutativity analysis can be used to successfully parallelize the Barnes-Hut hierarchical N-body solver, an important scientific application that manipulates a complex pointer-based data structure.

Commutativity analysis: a technique for automatically parallelizing pointer-based computations

We present AVATARSAT, a SAT solver that uses machine-learning classifiers to automatically tune the heuristics of an off-the-shelf SAT solver on a per-instance basis. The classifiers use features of both the input and conflict clauses to select parameter settings for the solver’s tunable heuristics. On a randomly selected set of SAT problems chosen from the 2007 and 2008 SAT competitions, AVATARSAT is, on average, over two times faster than MINISAT based on the geometric mean speedup measure and 50% faster based on the arithmetic mean speedup measure. Moreover, AVATARSAT is hundreds to thousands of times faster than MINISAT on many hard SAT instances and is never more than twenty times slower than MINISAT on any SAT instance.

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Martin Rinard

Papers

Automatic Inference of Code Transforms and Search Spaces for Automatic Patch Generation Systems

On Modular Pluggable Analyses Using Set Interfaces

Characterizing Developer Use of Automatically Generated Patches

Commutativity analysis: a technique for automatically parallelizing pointer-based computations

AvatarSAT: An Auto-tuning Boolean SAT Solver