Using clustering methods to deal with high number of alternatives on Group Decision Making

Novel Group Decision Making methods and Web 2.0 have augmented the quantity of data that experts have to discuss about. Nevertheless, experts are only capable of dealing with a reduced set of information. In this paper, a novel method for dealing with decision environments that include a large set of alternatives is presented. By the use of clustering methods, the available alternatives are combined into clusters according to their similarity. Afterwards, one Group Decision Making process is employed for choosing a cluster and another one for selecting the final alternative.The authors would like to thank the FEDER financial support for the Project TIN2016-75850-P by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy: A Conceptual Enterprise Big Data Cloud Architecture to Enable Market-Oriented Organisations

Market-Oriented companies are committed to understanding both the needs of their customers, and the capabilities and plans of their competitors through the processes of acquiring and evaluating market information in a systematic and anticipatory manner. On the other hand, most companies in the last years have defined that one of their main strategic objectives for the next years is to become a truly data-driven organisation in the current Big Data context. They are willing to invest heavily in Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy and build enterprise data platforms that will enable this Market-Oriented vision. In this paper, it is presented an Artificial Intelligence Cloud Architecture capable to help global companies to move from the use of data from descriptive to prescriptive and leveraging existing cloud services to deliver true Market-Oriented in a much shorter time (compared with traditional approaches).This paper has been elaborated with the financing of FEDER funds in the Spanish National research project TIN2016-75850-R from Spanish Department for Economy and Competitiveness

Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy: A Conceptual Enterprise Big Data Cloud Architecture to Enable Market-Oriented Organisations

Market-Oriented companies are committed to understanding both the needs of their customers, and the capabilities and plans of their competitors through the processes of acquiring and evaluating market information in a systematic and anticipatory manner. On the other hand, most companies in the last years have defined that one of their main strategic objectives for the next years is to become a truly data-driven organisation in the current Big Data context. They are willing to invest heavily in Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy and build enterprise data platforms that will enable this Market-Oriented vision. In this paper, it is presented an Artificial Intelligence Cloud Architecture capable to help global companies to move from the use of data from descriptive to prescriptive and leveraging existing cloud services to deliver true Market-Oriented in a much shorter time (compared with traditional approaches)

Evolutionary Multiobjective Feature Selection for Sentiment Analysis

AuthorSentiment analysis is one of the prominent research areas in data mining and knowledge discovery, which has proven to be an effective technique for monitoring public opinion. The big data era with a high volume of data generated by a variety of sources has provided enhanced opportunities for utilizing sentiment analysis in various domains. In order to take best advantage of the high volume of data for accurate sentiment analysis, it is essential to clean the data before the analysis, as irrelevant or redundant data will hinder extracting valuable information. In this paper, we propose a hybrid feature selection algorithm to improve the performance of sentiment analysis tasks. Our proposed sentiment analysis approach builds a binary classification model based on two feature selection techniques: an entropy-based metric and an evolutionary algorithm. We have performed comprehensive experiments in two different domains using a benchmark dataset, Stanford Sentiment Treebank, and a real-world dataset we have created based on World Health Organization (WHO) public speeches regarding COVID-19. The proposed feature selection model is shown to achieve significant performance improvements in both datasets, increasing classification accuracy for all utilized machine learning and text representation technique combinations. Moreover, it achieves over 70% reduction in feature size, which provides efficiency in computation time and space

European Neighbourhood Policy in the Mashreq Countries: Enhancing Prospects for Reform. CEPS Working Documents No. 229, 1 September 2005

This report assesses ways in which the Action Plan process that has been launched under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) could become a more effective driver of political and economic change in the Mashreq region (covering Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories), compared with the modest results from the Barcelona process to date. The development of the ENP has already provided a valuable systemic/institutional advance in Euro-Med relations and has been an important confidence-building measure in an increasingly uncertain political environment. But it has yet to provide momentum for economic, political and social advance in the partner states. Key elements in making the Action Plan process more effective would be the following: · The Commission needs to deepen the policy content of the ENP with sketches of different degrees of desirable EU acquis compliance as a function of different economic structures and capabilities of the partner states. · The task of policy-shaping in different sectors of the Action Plans with the partner states needs to be shared by the Commission with other international organisations, most importantly the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). · The policy-shaping recommendations in support of the economic parts of the Action Plans should be explicitly linked to financial or market-access incentives (or both) on offer from the EU and international financial institutions. The promotion of political reform in the partner states is a more delicate affair. Yet there is still some room for ‘positive conditionality’ if the Commission were to define more substantively the package of incentives that are offered to partner states

Rethinking Overcriminalization

If there is one thing American criminal law scholars agree on, it is that our justice system suffers from overcriminalization. Our codes criminalize too much conduct; outdated offenses remain too long on the books, and legislatures cannot resist adding new crimes and harsher punishments. This is so because criminal law is a distinctive issue for legislative debate and for democratic politics generally. Few lobby against crime creation; legislators respond to strong majoritarian preferences that make votes against crime creation—or votes to repeal antiquated crimes—politically implausible. Thus criminal law is “one-way ratchet”: it expands but doesn’t contract. On this account, criminal law is a challenge for democratic governance, because criminal law is the product of structural failures in political processes. Yet this story fails to account for much of American criminal law policy and practice. In fact, legislatures decline to enact bills proposing new crimes or increased punishments every year. They repeal longstanding criminal statutes and reduce punishments. Interest groups and popular opinion often support and sometimes drive these reforms, which means both that democratic sentiment is not solely in favor of ever-increasing harshness and that democratic processes can accurately respond to that sentiment. Legislatures criminalize very little conduct that most people think should be completely unregulated, and unpopular or silly offenses left on the books are routinely nullified by democratically accountable prosecutors or narrowed by courts. As a result, criminal law’s reach into most citizens’ lives is almost surely less in most respects than in the past. More than ninety percent of criminal law enforcement is state rather than federal, and state criminal justice systems on the whole more democratically responsive than the federal system. Many state legislatures recently have proven better at devising procedural frameworks to harness expertise in the reform of criminal law and punishment policy and to moderate risks of dysfunctional policymaking. Coupled with restraints from other branches, substantive overcriminalization, judged against a baseline of democratic preferences, is a modest problem in the states. And what overcriminalization exists has little effect on criminal justice’s well recognized problems such as excessive plea bargaining, racial disparities, and high incarceration rates

Towards a theory of the global event---the cases of 11 March 2004 and 7 July 2005 terrorist bombings.

How can we understand the major contradiction that seems to exist between the unilateral global strategies of certain actors and a world which is now, for the first time, largely interdependent. This question has undoubtedly been among the key themes of the globalization debate in the post 9/11 world. While writers on globalization have tended to focus their attention on the incoherencies and eventual failures of the Bush Administration's policies, the structural role that the 9/11 terrorist attacks played in the whole process has been largely overlooked by systematic scholarly research. This Master's dissertation attempts to explore the mechanism of social change that is implicit in the latter perspective. Building on Anthony Giddens' methodology of episodic characterization, global events are defined and studied as starting points of contingent, unpredictable and highly strategic sequences of structural transformation. The exploratory framework is applied to the study of the realization and aftermath of the Madrid 2004 terrorist bombings in order to give a flavour of how global event episodes can be individually characterized. The London 7/7 terrorist attacks episode is also explored, with the aim of outlining a program of comparative research towards a possible theory of the 'global event'

Mapping and Comparing Political Ideologies, Masculinity Ideologies, and Shame Ideologies

This study explored the relationships among political ideologies, masculinity ideologies, and shame ideologies within three online communities. Three different ideological communities, all on Reddit (a discussion-based social news website), were chosen based on previous research suggesting they differ in terms of their conceptualizations of gender and support for or rejection of feminism: r/TheRedPill, r/MensRights, and r/MensLib. This study uses a framework for understanding Ideologies as Complex Adaptive Systems (ICAS) as articulated by Thagard (2017), which uses Cognitive and Affective Maps (CAMs) as its primary tool of analysis. Using the postings on the Reddit sites as our raw data, we created CAMs to assist in comparing the conceptual and affective qualities of each community. We conducted the study in three phases: in Phase One, we used Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) methods and correlational analyses to create a set of general ideological CAMs for each community. We also constructed a set of CAMs depicting whom each group views as ingroups and outgroups in their creation of social identities. In Phase Two, we created a set of CAMs for each community’s dominant conception of gender. In Phase Three, we constructed a set of CAMs depicting each community’s relationship with the ideas of shame and injustice. The discussion section is organized into five main chapters. The first chapter contains reflections on the process of using CAMs, the next chapter is on the study’s limitations and future directions, and the final three are on the study findings’ empirical, theoretical, and clinical implications. The empirical implications of the study contribute to the following areas of research: the role of shame in ideology, the political construction of victimhood, and Ambivalent Sexism. In the theoretical implications chapter, I discuss the study’s potential contributions to theory development in the CAMs methodology. The final chapter offers reflections on the study\u27s clinical implications, especially related to gender identity development, sexual violence, and the role of ideology in emotion regulation

The Micro Geopolitics of (Eco)Tourism: Competing Discourses and Collaboration in New Zealand and Brazil

DVD Slideshow disc of supplementary material available with the print copy of this thesis, held at the University of Waikato Library.This social science, interdisciplinary research deals with 'competing discourses' and 'collaboration'. The thesis examines issues of power in (eco)tourism development as manifested in the discursive construction and positionality of local stakeholders. It then inquires whether collaborative schemes can bridge the various interest groups dealing with nature tourism activities in a way that they can expand social, economic and environmental benefits. The language they use, the context they live in, and their relationships and interactions are systematically deconstructed to unveil possible collaborative models for conflict resolution that can advance the practices of (eco)tourism as well as bring collective gains regionally. The study maps the micro geopolitics that exist in all levels of ecotourism development: in its conceptualisation, design, planning and management. Focusing on nodes of conflict and nodes of collaboration, case studies were chosen in New Zealand and in Brazil that encompass public and private actors in (eco)tourism such as government agencies and small-scale tour operators. The 100% Pure New Zealand campaign, Kuaka New Zealand Education Travel, and Silves and Itacar in Brazil are investigated in depth. The researcher is concerned with the values, perceptions and attitudes of local actors about the role and importance of (eco)tourism as a concentration area for conservationist networks. The author is skeptical about the constructions of (eco)tourism outside the context of local stakeholders that are 'imported' or imposed on them in a way that it increases pre-existing tensions and conflicts. With many cases in the literature showing that (eco)tourism lacks an institutional archetype to deliver all its promises, it is plausible to talk about nature-based tourism instead. However, the claim is not that simple, because ecotourism entails contentious issues; it is a complex activity as one takes it for social inclusion and as a tool for regional economic development. The author advocates that representative collaboration and partnerships can ease the move from destructive to constructive conflicts in (eco)tourism. Ecotourism is a complex activity as one uses it for social inclusion and as a tool for regional economic development. The author argues that the way (eco)tourism has been envisaged demands participatory managing structures such as local environmental governance (LEG) and deliberative associational spaces. One of the assumptions is that '(eco)tourism' can become even more meaningful and functional in its conservationist mission if locally discursively constructed, negotiated, and consensually implemented. For deconstructing the cases, 'critical contextual discourse analysis' (CCDA) was developed. It is a methodological approach and tool used to shed light on textual production (written or spoken), consumption and interpretation, and its influences on social practices within a specific regional context. Social constructionism and theory of collaboration conceptually introduce the case. The author adopted a 'critical realist' stand. In the analysis, collaborative adaptive management, triple bottom line, corporate social responsibility, accreditation programmes, and the importance of environmental education for human attachment to nature are discussed as a background. On the whole, 17 interviewees in New Zealand and 42 in Brazil contributed to this study. Yet, in order to contrast statements on the ground, questionnaires were sent to 37 tour operators in New Zealand. Secondary qualitative and quantitative data significantly added to the investigation, helping to validate or refute preliminary assumptions