An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

What is Computational Intelligence and where is it going?

What is Computational Intelligence (CI) and what are its relations with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? A brief survey of the scope of CI journals and books with ``computational intelligence'' in their title shows that at present it is an umbrella for three core technologies (neural, fuzzy and evolutionary), their applications, and selected fashionable pattern recognition methods. At present CI has no comprehensive foundations and is more a bag of tricks than a solid branch of science. The change of focus from methods to challenging problems is advocated, with CI defined as a part of computer and engineering sciences devoted to solution of non-algoritmizable problems. In this view AI is a part of CI focused on problems related to higher cognitive functions, while the rest of the CI community works on problems related to perception and control, or lower cognitive functions. Grand challenges on both sides of this spectrum are addressed

Measuring relative opinion from location-based social media: A case study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social media data with geotags provide new opportunities to unveil the geographic locations of users expressing their opinions. This paper aims to answer two questions: 1) whether quantifiable measurement of public opinion can be obtained from social media and 2) whether it can produce better or complementary measures compared to opinion polls. This research proposes a novel approach to measure the relative opinion of Twitter users towards public issues in order to accommodate more complex opinion structures and take advantage of the geography pertaining to the public issues. To ensure that this new measure is technically feasible, a modeling framework is developed including building a training dataset by adopting a state-of-the-art approach and devising a new deep learning method called Opinion-Oriented Word Embedding. With a case study of the tweets selected for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we demonstrate the predictive superiority of our relative opinion approach and we show how it can aid visual analytics and support opinion predictions. Although the relative opinion measure is proved to be more robust compared to polling, our study also suggests that the former can advantageously complement the later in opinion prediction

Knowledge-based systems and geological survey

This personal and pragmatic review of the philosophy underpinning methods of geological surveying suggests that important influences of information technology have yet to make their impact. Early approaches took existing systems as metaphors, retaining the separation of maps, map explanations and information archives, organised around map sheets of fixed boundaries, scale and content. But system design should look ahead: a computer-based knowledge system for the same purpose can be built around hierarchies of spatial objects and their relationships, with maps as one means of visualisation, and information types linked as hypermedia and integrated in mark-up languages. The system framework and ontology, derived from the general geoscience model, could support consistent representation of the underlying concepts and maintain reference information on object classes and their behaviour. Models of processes and historical configurations could clarify the reasoning at any level of object detail and introduce new concepts such as complex systems. The up-to-date interpretation might centre on spatial models, constructed with explicit geological reasoning and evaluation of uncertainties. Assuming (at a future time) full computer support, the field survey results could be collected in real time as a multimedia stream, hyperlinked to and interacting with the other parts of the system as appropriate. Throughout, the knowledge is seen as human knowledge, with interactive computer support for recording and storing the information and processing it by such means as interpolating, correlating, browsing, selecting, retrieving, manipulating, calculating, analysing, generalising, filtering, visualising and delivering the results. Responsibilities may have to be reconsidered for various aspects of the system, such as: field surveying; spatial models and interpretation; geological processes, past configurations and reasoning; standard setting, system framework and ontology maintenance; training; storage, preservation, and dissemination of digital records

Web-based strategies in the manufacturing industry

The explosive growth of Internet-based architectures is allowing an efficient access to information resources over geographically dispersed areas. This fact is exerting a major influence on current manufacturing practices. Business activities involving customers, partners, employees and suppliers are being rapidly and efficiently integrated through networked information management environments. Therefore, efforts are required to take advantage of distributed infrastructures that can satisfy information integration and collaborative work strategies in corporate environments. In this research, Internet-based distributed solutions focused on the manufacturing industry are proposed. Three different systems have been developed for the tooling sector, specifically for the company Seco Tools UK Ltd (industrial collaborator). They are summarised as follows. SELTOOL is a Web-based open tool selection system involving the analysis of technical criteria to establish appropriate selection of inserts, toolholders and cutting data for turning, threading and grooving operations. It has been oriented to world-wide Seco customers. SELTOOL provides an interactive and crossed-way of searching for tooling parameters, rather than conventional representation schemes provided by catalogues. Mechanisms were developed to filter, convert and migrate data from different formats to the database (SQL-based) used by SELTOOL.TTS (Tool Trials System) is a Web-based system developed by the author and two other researchers to support Seco sales engineers and technical staff, who would perform tooling trials in geographically dispersed machining centres and benefit from sharing data and results generated by these tests. Through TTS tooling engineers (authorised users) can submit and retrieve highly specific technical tooling data for both milling and turning operations. Moreover, it is possible for tooling engineers to avoid the execution of new tool trials knowing the results of trials carried out in physically distant places, when another engineer had previously executed these trials. The system incorporates encrypted security features suitable for restricted use on the World Wide Web. An urgent need exists for tools to make sense of raw data, extracting useful knowledge from increasingly large collections of data now being constructed and made available from networked information environments. This explosive growth in the availability of information is overwhelming the capabilities of traditional information management systems, to provide efficient ways of detecting anomalies and significant patterns in large sets of data. Inexorably, the tooling industry is generating valuable experimental data. It is a potential and unexplored sector regarding the application of knowledge capturing systems. Hence, to address this issue, a knowledge discovery system called DISKOVER was developed. DISKOVER is an integrated Java-application consisting of five data mining modules, able to be operated through the Internet. Kluster and Q-Fast are two of these modules, entirely developed by the author. Fuzzy-K has been developed by the author in collaboration with another research student in the group at Durham. The final two modules (R-Set and MQG) have been developed by another member of the Durham group. To develop Kluster, a complete clustering methodology was proposed. Kluster is a clustering application able to combine the analysis of quantitative as well as categorical data (conceptual clustering) to establish data classification processes. This module incorporates two original contributions. Specifically, consistent indicators to measure the quality of the final classification and application of optimisation methods to the final groups obtained. Kluster provides the possibility, to users, of introducing case-studies to generate cutting parameters for particular Input requirements. Fuzzy-K is an application having the advantages of hierarchical clustering, while applying fuzzy membership functions to support the generation of similarity measures. The implementation of fuzzy membership functions helped to optimise the grouping of categorical data containing missing or imprecise values. As the tooling database is accessed through the Internet, which is a relatively slow access platform, it was decided to rely on faster Information retrieval mechanisms. Q-fast is an SQL-based exploratory data analysis (EDA) application, Implemented for this purpose

Gamma-ray spectrometry in the field: Radioactive heat production in the Central Slovakian Volcanic Zone

We report 62 sets of measurements from central-southern Slovakia, obtained using a modern portable gamma-ray spectrometer, which reveal the radioactive heat production in intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks of the Late Cenozoic Central Slovakian Volcanic Zone. Sites in granodiorite of the Štiavnica pluton are thus shown to have heat production in the range ~ 2.2–4.9 μW m− 3, this variability being primarily a reflection of variations in content of the trace element uranium. Sites in dioritic parts of this pluton have a lower, but overlapping, range of values, ~ 2.1–4.4 μW m− 3. Sites that have been interpreted in adjoining minor dioritic intrusions of similar age have heat production in the range ~ 1.4–3.3 μW m− 3. The main Štiavnica pluton has zoned composition, with potassium and uranium content and radioactive heat production typically increasing inward from its margins, reflecting variations observed in other granodioritic plutons elsewhere. It is indeed possible that the adjoining dioritic rocks, hitherto assigned to other minor intrusions of similar age, located around the periphery of the Štiavnica pluton, in reality provide further evidence for zonation of the same pluton. The vicinity of this pluton is associated with surface heat flow ~ 40 mW m− 2 above the regional background. On the basis of our heat production measurements, we thus infer that the pluton has a substantial vertical extent, our preferred estimate for the scale depth for its downward decrease in radioactive heat production being ~ 8 km. Nonetheless, this pluton lacks any significant negative Bouguer gravity anomaly. We attribute this to the effect of the surrounding volcanic caldera, filled with relatively low-density lavas, ‘masking’ the pluton's own gravity anomaly. We envisage that emplacement occurred when the pluton was much hotter, and thus of lower density, than at present, its continued uplift, evident from the local geomorphology, being the isostatic consequence of localized erosion. The heat production in this intrusion evidently plays a significant role, hitherto unrecognized, in the regional geothermics

An overview of decision table literature.

The present report contains an overview of the literature on decision tables since its origin. The goal is to analyze the dissemination of decision tables in different areas of knowledge, countries and languages, especially showing these that present the most interest on decision table use. In the first part a description of the scope of the overview is given. Next, the classification results by topic are explained. An abstract and some keywords are included for each reference, normally provided by the authors. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. Other examined topics are the theoretical or practical feature of each document, as well as its origin country and language. Finally, the main body of the paper consists of the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.