From Music to Museum: Applications of Multi-Objective Ant Colony Systems to Real World Problems

International audienceRecommender systems are a flourishing domain in computer science for almost 30 years now. This rising popularity follows closely the number of data collected all around the world. Each and every internet user produces a huge amount of content during his lifetime. Recommender systems proactively help users to navigate these pieces of information by gathering, and selecting the items to users' needs. In this paper, we discuss the possibility and interest of applying our Multi-Objective Ant Colony System called AntRS to recommend items in different application domains. In particular, we show how our model performs better than the state-of-the-art models with music dataset, and describe our work-in-progress with the museum of fine arts in Nancy (France). The motivation behind this change of application domain is the recommendation of progressive sequences rather than unordered lists of items

Learner course recommendation in e-learning based on swarm intelligence

Se dan unas recomendaciones en la enseñanza asistida por ordenador (e-learning) basada en la inteligencia colectiva.This paper analyses aspects about the recommendation process in distributedinformation systems. It extracts similarities and differences between recommendations in estores and the recommendations applied to an e-learning environment. It also explains the phenomena of self-organization and cooperative emergence in complex systems coupled with bio-inspired algorithms to improve knowledge discovery and association rules. Finally, the present recommendation is applied to e-learning by proposing recommendation by emergence in a multi.agent system architecture

Clustering in Recommendation Systems Using Swarm Intelligence

Ένα σύστημα συστάσεων είναι μία εφαρμογή που εκμεταλλεύεται πληροφορίες για να βοηθήσει τους χρήστες στη λήψη αποφάσεων προτείνοντας αντικείμενα που μπορεί να τους αρέσουν. Ένα σύστημα συστάσεων που βασίζεται στην τεχνική του συνεργατικού φιλτραρίσματος (collaborative filtering) δημιουργεί συστάσεις στους χρήστες με βάση τις προτιμήσεις παρόμοιων χρηστών. Ωστόσο, αυτός ο τύπος συστήματος συστάσεων δεν είναι τόσο αποτελεσματικός όταν τα δεδομένα αυξάνονται σε μεγάλο βαθμό (scalability) ή όταν δεν υπάρχει αρκετή πληροφορία (sparsity), καθώς δεν ομαδοποιούνται σωστά οι παρόμοιοι χρήστες. Αυτή η διπλωματική εργασία προτείνει τρείς υβριδικούς αλγορίθμους που ο καθένας συνδυάζει τον αλγόριθμο k-means με έναν αλγόριθμο ευφυΐας σμήνους για να βελτιώσει την ομαδοποίηση των χρηστών, και κατ’ επέκταση την ποιότητα των συστάσεων. Οι αλγόριθμοι ευφυΐας σμήνους που χρησιμοποιούνται είναι o αλγόριθμος τεχνητής κοινωνίας μελισσών (artificial bee colony), ο αλγόριθμος βελτιστοποίησης αναζήτησης κούκων (cuckoo search optimization) και ο αλγόριθμος βελτιστοποίησης γκρίζων λύκων (grey-wolf optimization). Οι προτεινόμενες μέθοδοι αξιολογήθηκαν χρησιμοποιώντας ένα σύνολο δεδομένων του MovieLens. Η αξιολόγηση δείχνει πως τα προτεινόμενα συστήματα συστάσεων αποδίδουν καλύτερα σε σύγκριση με τις ήδη υπάρχουσες τεχνικές όσον αφορά τις μετρικές του μέσου απόλυτου σφάλματος (mean absolute error - MAE), της ακρίβειας (precision), του αθροίσματος των τετραγωνικών σφαλμάτων (sum of squared errors - SSE) και της ανάκλησης (recall). Επιπλέον, τα αποτελέσματα της αξιολόγησης δείχνουν πως ο υβριδικός αλγόριθμος που χρησιμοποιεί την μέθοδο της τεχνητής κοινωνίας μελισσών αποδίδει ελαφρώς καλύτερα από τους άλλους δύο προτεινόμενους αλγορίθμους.A recommender system (RS) is an application that exploits information to help users in decision making by suggesting items they might like. A collaborative recommender system generates recommendations to users based on their similar neighbor’s preferences. However, this type of recommender system faces the data sparsity and scalability problems making the neighborhood selection a challenging task. This thesis proposes three hybrid collaborative recommender systems that each one combines the k-means algorithm with a different bio-inspired technique to enhance the clustering task, and therefore to improve the recommendation quality. The used bio-inspired techniques are artificial bee colony (ABC), cuckoo search optimization (CSO), and grey-wolf optimizer (GWO). The proposed approaches were evaluated over a MovieLens dataset. The evaluation shows that the proposed recommender systems perform better compared to already existing techniques in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), precision, sum of squared errors (SSE), and recall. Moreover, the experimental results indicate that the hybrid recommender system that uses the ABC method performs slightly better than the other two proposed hybrid algorithms

FANET: Smart city mobility off to a flying start with self‐organized drone‐based networks

Due to recent advancements in smart city traffic and transport monitoring industry 4.0 applications. Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) ability to cover geographically large areas, makes it a suitable technology to address the challenges faced during remote areas traffic monitoring. The implementation of drone based FANETs have several advantages in remote traffic monitoring, including free air-to-air drone assisted communication zone and smart surveillance and security. The drone-based FANETs can be deployed within minutes without requiring physical infrastructure, making it suitable for mission critical applications in several areas of interests. Here a drone-based FANETs application for smart city remote traffic monitoring is presented while addressing several challenges including coverage of larger geographical area and data communication links between FANETs nodes. A FANET-inspired enhanced ACO algorithm that easily coped with drone assisted technology of FANETs is proposed to cover the large areas. Simulation results are presented to compare the proposed technique against different network lifetime and number of received packets. The presented results show that the proposed technique perform better compared to other state-of-the-art techniques

Hybrid ant colony system algorithm for static and dynamic job scheduling in grid computing

Grid computing is a distributed system with heterogeneous infrastructures. Resource management system (RMS) is one of the most important components which has great influence on the grid computing performance. The main part of RMS is the scheduler algorithm which has the responsibility to map submitted tasks to available resources. The complexity of scheduling problem is considered as a nondeterministic polynomial complete (NP-complete) problem and therefore, an intelligent algorithm is required to achieve better scheduling solution. One of the prominent intelligent algorithms is ant colony system (ACS) which is implemented widely to solve various types of scheduling problems. However, ACS suffers from stagnation problem in medium and large size grid computing system. ACS is based on exploitation and exploration mechanisms where the exploitation is sufficient but the exploration has a deficiency. The exploration in ACS is based on a random approach without any strategy. This study proposed four hybrid algorithms between ACS, Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Tabu Search (TS) algorithms to enhance the ACS performance. The algorithms are ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS(TS), and ACS+TS. These proposed hybrid algorithms will enhance ACS in terms of exploration mechanism and solution refinement by implementing low and high levels hybridization of ACS, GA, and TS algorithms. The proposed algorithms were evaluated against twelve metaheuristic algorithms in static (expected time to compute model) and dynamic (distribution pattern) grid computing environments. A simulator called ExSim was developed to mimic the static and dynamic nature of the grid computing. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform ACS in terms of best makespan values. Performance of ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS(TS), and ACS+TS are better than ACS by 0.35%, 2.03%, 4.65% and 6.99% respectively for static environment. For dynamic environment, performance of ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS+TS, and ACS(TS) are better than ACS by 0.01%, 0.56%, 1.16%, and 1.26% respectively. The proposed algorithms can be used to schedule tasks in grid computing with better performance in terms of makespan

Clustering Arabic Tweets for Sentiment Analysis

The focus of this study is to evaluate the impact of linguistic preprocessing and similarity functions for clustering Arabic Twitter tweets. The experiments apply an optimized version of the standard K-Means algorithm to assign tweets into positive and negative categories. The results show that root-based stemming has a significant advantage over light stemming in all settings. The Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence similarity function clearly outperforms the Cosine, Pearson Correlation, Jaccard Coefficient and Euclidean functions. The combination of the Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence and root-based stemming achieved the highest purity of 0.764 while the second-best purity was 0.719. These results are of importance as it is contrary to normal-sized documents where, in many information retrieval applications, light stemming performs better than root-based stemming and the Cosine function is commonly used

Clustering Arabic Tweets for Sentiment Analysis

The focus of this study is to evaluate the impact of linguistic preprocessing and similarity functions for clustering Arabic Twitter tweets. The experiments apply an optimized version of the standard K-Means algorithm to assign tweets into positive and negative categories. The results show that root-based stemming has a significant advantage over light stemming in all settings. The Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence similarity function clearly outperforms the Cosine, Pearson Correlation, Jaccard Coefficient and Euclidean functions. The combination of the Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence and root-based stemming achieved the highest purity of 0.764 while the second-best purity was 0.719. These results are of importance as it is contrary to normal-sized documents where, in many information retrieval applications, light stemming performs better than root-based stemming and the Cosine function is commonly used

Panorama of Recommender Systems to Support Learning

This chapter presents an analysis of recommender systems in TechnologyEnhanced Learning along their 15 years existence (2000-2014). All recommender systems considered for the review aim to support educational stakeholders by personalising the learning process. In this meta-review 82 recommender systems from 35 different countries have been investigated and categorised according to a given classification framework. The reviewed systems have been classified into 7 clusters according to their characteristics and analysed for their contribution to the evolution of the RecSysTEL research field. Current challenges have been identified to lead the work of the forthcoming years.Hendrik Drachsler has been partly supported by the FP7 EU Project LACE (619424). Katrien Verbert is a post-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Olga C. Santos would like to acknowledge that her contributions to this work have been carried out within the project Multimodal approaches for Affective Modelling in Inclusive Personalized Educational scenarios in intelligent Contexts (MAMIPEC -TIN2011-29221-C03-01). Nikos Manouselis has been partially supported with funding CIP-PSP Open Discovery Space (297229

Applying autonomy to distributed satellite systems: Trends, challenges, and future prospects

While monolithic satellite missions still pose significant advantages in terms of accuracy and operations, novel distributed architectures are promising improved flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability to structural and functional changes. Large satellite swarms, opportunistic satellite networks or heterogeneous constellations hybridizing small-spacecraft nodes with highperformance satellites are becoming feasible and advantageous alternatives requiring the adoption of new operation paradigms that enhance their autonomy. While autonomy is a notion that is gaining acceptance in monolithic satellite missions, it can also be deemed an integral characteristic in Distributed Satellite Systems (DSS). In this context, this paper focuses on the motivations for system-level autonomy in DSS and justifies its need as an enabler of system qualities. Autonomy is also presented as a necessary feature to bring new distributed Earth observation functions (which require coordination and collaboration mechanisms) and to allow for novel structural functions (e.g., opportunistic coalitions, exchange of resources, or in-orbit data services). Mission Planning and Scheduling (MPS) frameworks are then presented as a key component to implement autonomous operations in satellite missions. An exhaustive knowledge classification explores the design aspects of MPS for DSS, and conceptually groups them into: components and organizational paradigms; problem modeling and representation; optimization techniques and metaheuristics; execution and runtime characteristics and the notions of tasks, resources, and constraints. This paper concludes by proposing future strands of work devoted to study the trade-offs of autonomy in large-scale, highly dynamic and heterogeneous networks through frameworks that consider some of the limitations of small spacecraft technologies.Postprint (author's final draft