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

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

How to Do Things With Words

Cybersecurity breaches cause enormous harm to the safety, privacy, and prosperity of individuals and organizations. Many security breaches occur due to people not following security regulations such as applying software patches, updating software applications, and so on. We term these regulations as cybersecurity hygiene. This paper investigates different sanctioning mechanisms with respect to the success in establishing these regulations for cybersecurity hygiene. Our findings have implications for workforce training to promote cybersecurity.

Applying Norms and Sanctions to Promote Cybersecurity Hygiene

Modern information architectures place business logic in an application server and persistent objects in a relational DBMS. To effectively realize such architectures, we must surmount the problem of effectively fetching objects from DBMS to the application server. Object access patterns are not random; they are driven by applications and user behaviors. Naive implementations retrieve objects from the DBMS as such objects are requested by the application, costing a DBMS roundtrip for each query. This fact, coupled with the growing performance bottleneck of computer storage systems, has resulted in a significant amount of research improving object access behavior through predicting future access objects because throughput will continue to improve but latency will not. Latency will be an ever-increasing component of object access cost. In turn, object access cost is usually the bottleneck for modern high performance systems. This yields unacceptably poor performance when application server submits sequence of relational queries to DBMSs. 
A reasonable approach would be to generate prefetch queries that retrieve objects that would later be requested by the application. However, whereas some prefetch queries would be beneficial, some would not. Distinguishing between them is nontrivial in practice, because commercial DBMSs do not expose efficient query response-time estimators. First, there is no standardized interface for an application server to force the database system to calculate the costs (e.g., response time) for a given query. Second, we still have the entire roundtrip costs between application servers and the DBMSs to estimate the total cost of query evaluation. Consequently, in current practice, programmers spend enormous amounts of time tuning the queries by which objects are retrieved by an application. 
This dissertation develops an application-independent approach for generating prefetch queries that can be implemented in conventional middleware systems. The main contribution of this dissertation is a set of application-independent guidelines for selecting, based on application's access patterns and additional parameters, efficient ways of merging the application's data requests into prefetch queries. Our guidelines take the current configuration such as local or wide area networks into account, allowing it to select strategies that give good performance in a wider range of configurations. The ensuing performance gains are evaluated via realistic settings based on a retail database inspired by the SPECJ performance test suite.

Deriving efficient sql sequences via prefetching

As the technology advances, we can expect the development of specialized agents to be used as standardized building blocks for information systems. Two trends lend credence to such a prediction. First, software systems in general are being constructed with larger components, such as ActiveX and JavaBeans, which are becoming closer to being agents themselves. They have more functionality than simple objects, respond to events autonomously, and, most importantly, respond to system builders at development time, as well as to events at runtime. Moreover, there is a move toward more cooperative information systems, in which the architecture itself plays an important role in the effectiveness of the system, as opposed to traditional software systems where effectiveness depends on the quality of the individual components. These architectures are generating a set of standardized agents. Architectures based on standardized agent types should be easier to develop, understand, and use. Perhaps most important of all, these architectures will make it easier for separately developed information systems to interoperate.

Agents on the Web: All Agents are Not Created Equal.

Multiparty agreements often arise in a multiagent system where autonomous agents interact with each other to achieve a global goal. Multiparty agreements are traditionally represented by messaging protocols or event-condition-action rule sets in which agents exchange messages in a predefined sequence to ensure both global and local consistencies. However, these models do not readily incorporate agents' autonomy and heterogeneity, which limits their ability to help build a flexible open system. Commitments have been studied for modelling various agent interactions. This paper introduces commitments as the key elements in formulating multiparty agreements. Our model focuses on how agents may negotiate with each other to build a mutual agreement based on their individual constraints. The actual execution sequence is validated by checking the compliance of commitment casual relations. Our approach is geared toward constructing business processes where agents are mutually constrained in a manner that preserves their autonomy and heterogeneity.

Analyzing Multiparty Agreements with Commitments

Spoken dialogue interfaces apply in a number of applications. Engaging in meaningful conversation presupposes the ability to recognize and generate different conversational moves, and to adaptively carry on a dialogue. Although the portability of dialogue interfaces is highly desirable, few current approaches address it seriously.

/pdf/automating-spoken-dialogue-systems-38by8z88ps.pdf

Munindar P. Singh

Papers

Applying Norms and Sanctions to Promote Cybersecurity Hygiene

Deriving efficient sql sequences via prefetching

Agents on the Web: All Agents are Not Created Equal.

Analyzing Multiparty Agreements with Commitments

Automating Spoken Dialogue Systems