Design environments for Intelligent Systems

There is a need to balance the quality of professionally designed information systems with the end user’s current knowledge of specific decision contexts. This is particularly so for intelligent systems. This paper looks at some theoretical underpinnings for the potential end- user development of intelligent systems. General requirements are characterised and the metaphor of a semantic spreadsheet is introduced. A two level process enabling end user development of knowledge-based systems is described. The first involves the development of a design environment that allows experts to develop the knowledge base. The second involves development within the design environment for the ultimate end users

American Undergraduates Undone: Social and Intellectual Dysfunction on Campus

The pivotal, formative years of typical undergraduates, ages 18-22, represent a time when students mold their distinctive identities, social personalities, and intellects more intensively than during any other period of their lives. Developmental theorists Arthur W. Chickering and Linda Reisser call this process “journeying toward individuation—the discovery and refinement of one’s unique way of being—and also toward communion with other individuals and groups, including the larger national and global society” (35). In today’s college climate, students flummox and astound parents, professors, and researchers due to their individual immaturity and disengagement with learning. Although these complaints identify nothing new in America, the fact that these issues remain, centuries after the formation of the country’s colleges, shows both their current and historical relevance. Within the undergraduate realm, the continuation of outmoded social and intellectual traditions has led to adverse outcomes for generations of students. Continual cultural nostalgia for four (or more) years of adolescent mischief and self-indulgence encourages class after class of college students to put peer activities as first priority and academics far behind their society bids, alcohol-fueled parties, and sexual conquests. Moreover, even after decades of pedagogical and learning studies, today’s classroom practices do little to amend ineffective curriculums or combat cheating epidemics, grade inflation, and the diminished value of a college degree. Patterns of dysfunctional behavior in the lifestyles of American undergraduates have been expressed throughout the past century in several important novels devoted to the college experience itself. These works reveal the sociocultural issues and educational flaws within the country’s destructive college environments. Inner turbulence of the typical college age individual fluctuates in accordance with the perceived successes and failures of his or her social interactions during this critical period of self-adjustment and identity formation, and writers who depict these struggles discerningly connect fact and fiction. As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine observes in This Side of Paradise (1920), from city to city across America, college youths create “one vast juvenile intrigue”—a uniquely defined subculture of American life informed by the nature of its colleges (67)

Omnivariate rule induction using a novel pairwise statistical test

Rule learning algorithms, for example, RIPPER, induces univariate rules, that is, a propositional condition in a rule uses only one feature. In this paper, we propose an omnivariate induction of rules where under each condition, both a univariate and a multivariate condition are trained, and the best is chosen according to a novel statistical test. This paper has three main contributions: First, we propose a novel statistical test, the combined 5 x 2 cv t test, to compare two classifiers, which is a variant of the 5 x 2 cv t test and give the connections to other tests as 5 x 2 cv F test and k-fold paired t test. Second, we propose a multivariate version of RIPPER, where support vector machine with linear kernel is used to find multivariate linear conditions. Third, we propose an omnivariate version of RIPPER, where the model selection is done via the combined 5 x 2 cv t test. Our results indicate that 1) the combined 5 x 2 cv t test has higher power (lower type II error), lower type I error, and higher replicability compared to the 5 x 2 cv t test, 2) omnivariate rules are better in that they choose whichever condition is more accurate, selecting the right model automatically and separately for each condition in a rule.Publisher's VersionAuthor Post Prin

Efficient learning of large sets of locally optimal classification rules

Conventional rule learning algorithms aim at finding a set of simple rules, where each rule covers as many examples as possible. In this paper, we argue that the rules found in this way may not be the optimal explanations for each of the examples they cover. Instead, we propose an efficient algorithm that aims at finding the best rule covering each training example in a greedy optimization consisting of one specialization and one generalization loop. These locally optimal rules are collected and then filtered for a final rule set, which is much larger than the sets learned by conventional rule learning algorithms. A new example is classified by selecting the best among the rules that cover this example. In our experiments on small to very large datasets, the approach's average classification accuracy is higher than that of state-of-the-art rule learning algorithms. Moreover, the algorithm is highly efficient and can inherently be processed in parallel without affecting the learned rule set and so the classification accuracy. We thus believe that it closes an important gap for large-scale classification rule induction.Comment: article, 40 pages, Machine Learning journal (2023

Playing Hitler: The representation of Nazism in Hearts of Iron IV

Mastergradsoppgave i digital kommunikasjon og kultur, Høgskolen i Innlandet, 2020.Hearts of Iron IV is a strategy game set during the Second World War, and it features a representation of Nazi-Germany that some right-wing extremists online have taken interest in. This thesis seeks to analyse that representation of Nazi-Germany in order to work out what it communicates about Nazism and how much room for interpretation it leaves open to the player. To answer the research question of how the formalistic devices of Hearts of Iron IV create its representation of Nazi-Germany, this thesis employs textual analysis with a neoformalist approach. The analysis suggests that the room for interpretation left open to the player of the game is quite large, with the game making very few overt value judgements about Nazi-Germany. This means that the game itself does not contain a pro-Nazi message, but instead it serves as a blank slate representation of Nazi-Germany onto which players are able to project their ideology. Consequently, the game on its own is unlikely to contribute directly to radicalisation, as it doesn’t contain much in the way of radicalising content. However, it is probable that it is the open interpretative space that appeals to neo-Nazis, as it allows them to project their ideology onto the game