Allocation in Practice

How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.Comment: To appear in Proc. of 37th edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014), Springer LNC

The NOMAD system : expectation-based detection and correction of errors during understanding of syntactically and semantically ill-formed text

Most large text-understanding systems have been designed under the assumption that the input text will be in reasonably "neat" form (for example, newspaper stories and other edited texts). However, a great deal of natural language text (for example, memos, messages, rough drafts, conversation transcripts, etc.) have features that differ significantly from "neat" texts, posing special problems for readers, such as misspelled words, missing words, poor syntactic construction, unclear or ambiguous interpretation, missing crucial punctuation, etc. Our solution to these problems is to make use of expectations, based both on knowledge of surface English and on world knowledge of the situation being described. These syntactic and semantic expectations can be used to figure out unknown words from context, constrain the possible word senses of words with multiple meanings (ambiguity), fill in missing words (ellipsis), and resolve referents (anaphora). This method of using expectations to aid the understanding of "scruffy" texts has bee incorporated into a working computer program called NOMAD, which understands scruffy texts in the domain of Navy ship-to-shore messages

Logic Negation with Spiking Neural P Systems

Nowadays, the success of neural networks as reasoning systems is doubtless. Nonetheless, one of the drawbacks of such reasoning systems is that they work as black-boxes and the acquired knowledge is not human readable. In this paper, we present a new step in order to close the gap between connectionist and logic based reasoning systems. We show that two of the most used inference rules for obtaining negative information in rule based reasoning systems, the so-called Closed World Assumption and Negation as Finite Failure can be characterized by means of spiking neural P systems, a formal model of the third generation of neural networks born in the framework of membrane computing.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figur

Applied Computational Intelligence for finance and economics

This article introduces some relevant research works on computational intelligence applied to finance and economics. The objective is to offer an appropriate context and a starting point for those who are new to computational intelligence in finance and economics and to give an overview of the most recent works. A classification with five different main areas is presented. Those areas are related with different applications of the most modern computational intelligence techniques showing a new perspective for approaching finance and economics problems. Each research area is described with several works and applications. Finally, a review of the research works selected for this special issue is given.Publicad

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented