Antichaos in a Class of Random Boolean Cellular Automata

A variant of Kauffman's model of cellular metabolism is presented. It is a randomly generated network of boolean gates, identical to Kauffman's except for a small bias in favor of boolean gates that depend on at most one input. The bias is asymptotic to 0 as the number of gates increases. Upper bounds on the time until the network reaches a state cycle and the size of the state cycle, as functions of the number of gates $n$, are derived. If the bias approaches 0 slowly enough, the state cycles will be smaller than $n^c$ for some $c<1$. This lends support to Kauffman's claim that in his version of random network the average size of the state cycles is approximately $n^{1/2}$.Comment: 12 pages. A uuencoded, tar-compressed postscipt file containing figures has been adde

A Case Study in a Recommender System Based on Purchase Data

International audienceCollaborative filtering has been extensively studied in the context of ratings prediction. However, industrial recommender systems often aim at predicting a few items of immediate interest to the user, typically products that (s)he is likely to buy in the near future. In a collaborative filtering setting, the prediction may be based on the user's purchase history rather than rating information, which may be unreliable or unavailable. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of various collaborative filtering algorithms on a real-world dataset of purchase history from customers in a store of a French home improvement and building supplies chain. These experiments are part of the development of a prototype recommender system for salespeople in the store. We show how different settings for training and applying the models, as well as the introduction of domain knowledge may dramatically influence both the absolute and the relative performances of the different algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, the influence of these parameters on the quality of the predictions of recommender systems has rarely been reported in the literature

Interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence: challenges and opportunities

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a variety of research fields is speeding up multiple digital revolutions, from shifting paradigms in healthcare, precision medicine and wearable sensing, to public services and education offered to the masses around the world, to future cities made optimally efficient by autonomous driving. When a revolution happens, the consequences are not obvious straight away, and to date, there is no uniformly adapted framework to guide AI research to ensure a sustainable societal transition. To answer this need, here we analyze three key challenges to interdisciplinary AI research, and deliver three broad conclusions: 1) future development of AI should not only impact other scientific domains but should also take inspiration and benefit from other fields of science, 2) AI research must be accompanied by decision explainability, dataset bias transparency as well as development of evaluation methodologies and creation of regulatory agencies to ensure responsibility, and 3) AI education should receive more attention, efforts and innovation from the educational and scientific communities. Our analysis is of interest not only to AI practitioners but also to other researchers and the general public as it offers ways to guide the emerging collaborations and interactions toward the most fruitful outcomes