An agent-based fuzzy cognitive map approach to the strategic marketing planning for industrial firms

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Industrial Marketing Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Industrial marketing planning is a typical example of an unstructured decision making problem due to the large number of variables to consider and the uncertainty imposed on those variables. Although abundant studies identified barriers and facilitators of effective industrial marketing planning in practice, the literature still lacks practical tools and methods that marketing managers can use for the task. This paper applies fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) to industrial marketing planning. In particular, agent based inference method is proposed to overcome dynamic relationships, time lags, and reusability issues of FCM evaluation. MACOM simulator also is developed to help marketing managers conduct what-if scenarios to see the impacts of possible changes on the variables defined in an FCM that represents industrial marketing planning problem. The simulator is applied to an industrial marketing planning problem for a global software service company in South Korea. This study has practical implication as it supports marketing managers for industrial marketing planning that has large number of variables and their cause–effect relationships. It also contributes to FCM theory by providing an agent based method for the inference of FCM. Finally, MACOM also provides academics in the industrial marketing management discipline with a tool for developing and pre-verifying a conceptual model based on qualitative knowledge of marketing practitioners.Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea

SMILE: smart monitoring intelligent learning engine. An ontology-based context-aware system for supporting patients subjected to severe emergencies

Remote healthcare has made a revolution in the healthcare domain. However, an important problem this field is facing is supporting patients who are subjected to severe emergencies (as heart attacks) to be both monitored and protected while being at home. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework with the main objectives of: 1) emergency handling through monitoring patients, detecting emergencies and insuring fast emergency responses; 2) preventing an emergency from happening in the first place through protecting patients by organising their lifestyles and habits. To achieve these objectives, we propose a layered middleware. Our context model combines two modelling methods: probabilistic modelling to capture uncertain information and ontology to ease knowledge sharing and reuse. In addition, our system uses a two-level reasoning approach (ontology-based reasoning and Bayesian-based reasoning) to manage both certain and uncertain contextual parameters in an adaptive manner. Bayesian network is learned from ontology. Moreover, to ensure a more sophisticated decision-making for service presentation, influence diagram and analytic hierarchy process are used along with regular probabilistic rules (confidence level) and basic semantic logic rules

Probabilistic (logic) programming concepts

A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution mechanisms that they require and use these to position and survey state-of-the-art probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which have been considered for over 20 years