The AQ21 Natural Induction Program for Pattern Discovery: Initial Version and its Novel Features

The AQ21 program aims to perform natural induction, a process of generating inductive hypotheses in humanoriented forms that are easy to interpret and understand. This is achieved by employing a highly expressive representation language, Attributional Calculus, whose statements resemble natural language descriptions. This paper focuses on the Pattern Discovery mode of AQ21, which produces attributional rules that capture strong regularities in the data, but may not be fully consistent or complete with regard to the training data. AQ21 integrates several novel features, such as optimizing patterns according to multiple criteria, learning attributional rules with exceptions, generating optimized sets of alternative hypotheses, and handling data with unknown, irrelevant and/or non-applicable meta-values. 1

On the Automation of Ports and Logistics Chains in the Adriatic Region

Recently, automation is gaining an even more important role in the port and maritime industry. In particular, several technological innovations are changing both the freight and passenger transport sector. The introduction of these technologies in port terminals (smart ports) require involved stakeholders to adapt their asset and organisations in order to improve the economic competi-tiveness in global markets. The geographical context where new technologies are put in place can also influence their deployment and foreseen impacts. Hence, in order to take the proper decisions at a strategic level and maximize the positive effects in a selected scenario, a feasibility analysis is essential. In the present study, this challenge is addressed for the Adriatic region by proposing a proce-dure for evaluating and selecting the most promising innovations. Several rele-vant stakeholders from the selected area are inquired to assess the relevance and deployment difficulties for a set of new technologies dealing with automation in port areas. Then, the impacts on technical operation and labour market are as-sessed, thus, providing valuable information to support the regional organisations in facing the change and deploying procedures to be potentially replicated in other geographical areas