Conservation Measures in the Interim Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Groundfish

The conservation measures used in the Interim Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Groundfish (IFMP) were analyzed. The management techniques used include a minimum mesh size, minimum fish size and haddock spawning area closure. However the mesh regulation does not adequately address the IFMP conservation objectives. Without amendment, the IFMP cannot prevent overfishing as it is required to do by the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MFCMA). The use of a non-numeric Optimum Yield (OI) for groundfish is inappropriate without a definition of overfishing and without a contingency plan to prevent overfishing

Towards Comprehensive Foundations of Computational Intelligence

Abstract. Although computational intelligence (CI) covers a vast variety of different methods it still lacks an integrative theory. Several proposals for CI foundations are discussed: computing and cognition as compression, meta-learning as search in the space of data models, (dis)similarity based methods providing a framework for such meta-learning, and a more general approach based on chains of transformations. Many useful transformations that extract information from features are discussed. Heterogeneous adaptive systems are presented as particular example of transformation-based systems, and the goal of learning is redefined to facilitate creation of simpler data models. The need to understand data structures leads to techniques for logical and prototype-based rule extraction, and to generation of multiple alternative models, while the need to increase predictive power of adaptive models leads to committees of competent models. Learning from partial observations is a natural extension towards reasoning based on perceptions, and an approach to intuitive solving of such problems is presented. Throughout the paper neurocognitive inspirations are frequently used and are especially important in modeling of the higher cognitive functions. Promising directions such as liquid and laminar computing are identified and many open problems presented.

Clustering semantic spaces of suicide notes and newsgroups articles

Historically, suicide risk assessment has relied on question-and-answer type tools. These tools, built on psychometric advances, are widely used because of availability. Yet there is no known tool based on biologic and cognitive evidence. This absence often cause a vexing clinical problem for clinicians who question the value of the result as time passes. The purpose of this paper is to describe one experiment in a series of experiments to develop a tool that combines Biological Markers (Bm) with Thought Markers (Tm), and use machine learning to compute a real-time index for assessing the likelihood repeated suicide attempt in the next six-months. For this study we focus using unsupervised machine learning to distinguish between actual suicide notes and newsgroups. This is important because it gives us insight into how well these methods discriminate between real notes and general conversation

W.: A shared task involving multi-label classification of clinical free text

This paper reports on a shared task involving the assignment of ICD-9-CM codes to radiology reports. Two features distinguished this task from previous shared tasks in the biomedical domain. One is that it resulted in the first freely distributable corpus of fully anonymized clinical text. This resource is permanently available and will (we hope) facilitate future research. The other key feature of the task is that it required categorization with respect to a large and commercially significant set of labels. The number of participants was larger than in any previous biomedical challenge task. We describe the data production process and the evaluation measures, and give a preliminary analysis of the results. Many systems performed at levels approaching the inter-coder agreement, suggesting that human-like performance on this task is within the reach of currently available technologies.