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

A decentralized application involves multiple autonomous principals, e.g., humans and organizations. Autonomy motivates (i) specifying a decentralized application via a protocol that captures the interactions between the principals, and (ii) a programming model that enables each principal to independently (from other principals) construct its own protocol-compliant agent. An agent encodes its principal's decision making and represents it in the application. We contribute Deserv, the first protocol-based programming model for decentralized applications that is suited to the cloud. Specifically, Deserv demonstrates how to leverage function-as-a-service (FaaS), a popular serverless programming model, to implement agents. A notable feature of Deserv is the use declarative protocols to specify interactions. Declarative protocols support implementing stateful agents in a manner that naturally exploits the concurrency and autoscaling benefits offered by serverless computing.

Deserv: Decentralized Serverless Computing

This paper focuses on a dynamic aspect of responsible autonomy, namely, to make intelligent agents be responsible at run time. That is, it considers settings where decision making by agents impinges upon the outcomes perceived by other agents. For an agent to act responsibly, it must accommodate the desires and other attitudes of its users and, through other agents, of their users.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of consent, its benefits and misuses, and how understanding consent can help achieve responsible autonomy. Second, it outlines challenges for AI (in particular, for agents and multiagent systems) that merit investigation to form as a basis for modeling consent in multiagent systems and applying consent to achieve responsible autonomy.

Consent as a Foundation for Responsible Autonomy

In the study of agents on the Internet, we often ascribe to them human qualities, such as beliefs and intentions. These qualities are best understood as metaphors that give developers a way to talk about and design the capabilities and applications of agents. Despite all the progress in computing, users have been slow to accept the technology. They have often accepted what was thrown at them, but only under economic duress. Bringing the technology closer to their emotional needs might ease this resistance. So how can we put a human face on computing? Maybe by putting an animated face on it! Thus, an interface may consist of an agent, which has an explicit presence (for example, as an on-screen animated figure) and appears to have a personality. In computer human interfaces, especially for education and commerce where a large variety of people must deal with computers, an anthropoid agent might be more inviting. Depending on the situation, the agent might appear shy, friendly, stern, or knowledgeable. For example, people might better accept advice offered politely by a shy agent, or heed warnings uttered seriously by a stern agent. And they might be more likely to purchase goods or services offered by a friendly, knowledgeable agent that could appear empathetic to their needs.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/4236/14306/00656099.pdf

Anthropoid agents

Multiagent systems involve a rich variety of interactions among agents-situated computations that are autonomous in their behavior and heterogeneous in structure. These interactions can be realized unambiguously if they are governed by published protocols, since agents diverse in their structure and behavior can interact as long as they respect the protocols. However, traditional protocol specifications are unduly rigid for application in open settings involving autonomous entities. They represent protocols simply as an ordering of steps and stifle the participants' autonomy due to a lack of flexibility during enactment. 
Commitments among agents, which are akin to contractual obligations among businesses, are a powerful abstraction for modeling flexible protocols. Commitment-based design enables a more faithful model of the openness of the business world. However, modeling business interactions requires a rich variety of interaction protocols that can capture the needs of different applications. Whereas general (business) protocols might most flexibly characterize the interactions of their participants, protocols often must be refined based on the environment in which they are to be deployed, so as to yield improvements along various properties such as performance and risk outlay, when applied to real-world tasks such as in e-business. 
We introduce a formal semantics and an operational characterization for commitment-based protocols wherein traditional software engineering notions such as refinement and aggregation are extended to apply to protocols. We also develop a principled approach for the design of such protocols in addition to methodologies for modeling and handling exceptions in them. We demonstrate, with appropriate examples, the benefits of this approach over traditional ones when applied to business process modeling and enactment. Our chief contributions are (1) A theoretical basis for describing protocol refinement using subsumption hierarchies and an algebra for composing protocols using existing ones. (2) A methodology for modeling and handling exceptions in commitment protocols that incorporates the preferences of the protocol designer and policies of the participants and enables specification of exceptions independent of the protocol specification. (3) Two methodologies for designing commitment protocols, one by enhancing an existing agent-oriented software engineering methodology, and another by deriving protocols from agent conversations. 
Our work draws from and contributes to agent communication, business process modeling and enactment, service-oriented computing, and software engineering.

Modeling and enacting business processes via commitment protocols among agents

The notion of commitment is widely studied as a high-level abstraction for modeling multiagent interaction. An important challenge is supporting flexible decentralized enactments of commitment specifications. In this paper, we combine recent advances on specifying commitments and information protocols. Specifically, we contribute Tosca, a technique for automatically synthesizing information protocols from commitment specifications. Our main result is that the synthesized protocols support commitment alignment, which is the idea that agents must make compatible inferences about their commitments despite decentralization.

/pdf/tosca-operationalizing-commitments-over-information-bcfrlg4l1q.pdf

Munindar P. Singh

Papers

Deserv: Decentralized Serverless Computing

Consent as a Foundation for Responsible Autonomy

Anthropoid agents

Modeling and enacting business processes via commitment protocols among agents

Tosca: Operationalizing Commitments Over Information Protocols