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

We propose Cupid, a language for specifying commitments that supports their information-centric aspects, and offers crucial benefits. One, Cupid is first-order, enabling a systematic treatment of commitment instances. Two, Cupid supports features needed for real-world scenarios such as deadlines, nested commitments, and complex event expressions for capturing the lifecycle of commitment instances. Three, Cupid maps to relational database queries and thus provides a set-based semantics for retrieving commitment instances in states such as being violated, discharged, and so on. We prove that Cupid queries are safe. Four, to aid commitment modelers, we propose the notion of well-identified commitments, and finitely violable and finitely expirable commitments. We give syntactic restrictions for obtaining such commitments.

/pdf/cupid-commitments-in-relational-algebra-9svn6tsl9z.pdf

Cupid: commitments in relational algebra

The authors consider agents on the World Wide Web, including information retrieval agents. They propose a test for agenthood, involving communication in multi-agent systems.

Agents on the Web: The Agent Test.

A contract is a legally binding agreement between real-world business entities whom we treat as providing services to one another. We focus on business rather than technical services. We think of a business contract as specifying the functional and nonfunctional behaviors of and interactions among the services. In current practice, contracts are produced as text documents. Thus the relevant service capabilities, requirements, qualities, and risks are hidden and difficult to access and reason about. We describe a simple but effective unsupervised information extraction approach and tool, Contract Miner, for discovering service exceptions at the phrase level from a large contract repository. Our approach involves preprocessing followed by an application of linguistic patterns and parsing to extract the service exception phrases. Identifying such (noun) phrases can help build service exception vocabularies that support the development of a taxonomy of business terms, and also facilitate modeling and analyzing service engagements. A lightweight online tool that comes with Contract Miner highlights the relevant text in service contracts and thereby assists users in reviewing contracts. Contract Miner produces promising results in terms of precision and recall when evaluated over a corpus of manually annotated contracts.

Mining Business Contracts for Service Exceptions

Ethics is inherently a multiagent concern However, research on AI ethics today is dominated by work on individual agents: (1) how an autonomous robot or car may harm or (differentially) benefit people in hypothetical situations (the so-called trolley problems) and (2) how a machine learning algorithm may produce biased decisions or recommendations The societal framework is largely omitted To develop new foundations for ethics in AI, we adopt a sociotechnical stance in which agents (as technical entities) help autonomous social entities or principals (people and organizations) This multiagent conception of a sociotechnical system (STS) captures how ethical concerns arise in the mutual interactions of multiple stakeholders These foundations would enable us to realize ethical STSs that incorporate social and technical controls to respect stated ethical postures of the agents in the STSs The envisioned foundations require new thinking, along two broad themes, on how to realize (1) an STS that reflects its stakeholders' values and (2) individual agents that function effectively in such an STS

New Foundations of Ethical Multiagent Systems

Agents in an open system interact with each other based on (typically, published) protocols. An agent may, however, deviate from the protocol because of its internal policies. Such deviations pose certain challenges: (1) the agent might no longer be conformant with the protocol—how do we determine if the agent is conformant? (2) the agent may no longer be able to interoperate with other agents—how do we determine if two agents are interoperable? (3) the agent may not be able to produce some protocol computations; in other words, it may not cover the protocol—how we determine if an agent covers a protocol?

We formalize the notions of conformance, coverage and interoperability. A distinctive feature of our formalization is that the three are orthogonal to each other. Conformance and coverage are based on the semantics of runs (a run being a sequence of states), whereas interoperability among agents is based upon the traditional idea of blocking. We present a number of examples to comprehensively illustrate the orthogonality of conformance, coverage, and interoperability.

Compliance is a property of an agent's execution whereas conformance is a property of the agent's design. In order to produce only compliant executions, first and foremost the agent must be conformant; second, it must also be able to interoperate with other agents.

/pdf/producing-compliant-interactions-conformance-coverage-and-14uvn2it5e.pdf

Munindar P. Singh

Papers

Cupid: commitments in relational algebra

Agents on the Web: The Agent Test.

Mining Business Contracts for Service Exceptions

New Foundations of Ethical Multiagent Systems

Producing compliant interactions: conformance, coverage, and interoperability