VPOET: Using a Distributed Collaborative Platform for Semantic Web Applications

This paper describes a distributed collaborative wiki-based platform that has been designed to facilitate the development of Semantic Web applications. The applications designed using this platform are able to build semantic data through the cooperation of different developers and to exploit that semantic data. The paper shows a practical case study on the application VPOET, and how an application based on Google Gadgets has been designed to test VPOET and let human users exploit the semantic data created. This practical example can be used to show how different Semantic Web technologies can be integrated into a particular Web application, and how the knowledge can be cooperatively improved.Comment: accepted for the 2nd International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing - IDC'2008. September 18-20, 2008, Catania, Ital

Wealth breeds decline : Reversals of leadership and consumption habits

In a two- region model, we formalize Kindleberger’s idea that wealth breeds first more wealth, and then decline : when one region leads, its inhabitants develop consumption habits incompatible with the necessary investment in knowledge to remain the leader. This gives the other region a window of opportunity to gain economic primacy. We learn from the theoretical model that differences across regions that have similar characteristics may persist even if physical capital flows from rich to poor regions. By exploiting the economics of the Hopf bifurcation we study patterns of alternating privacy, irreversible decline and monotonic convergence, according to the initial dispersion of knowledge and the strength of consumption habits. Even though exogenous factors may matter on some occasions, we show that they are not necessary to reverse economic leadership.consumption habits; over-taking;regional primacy; capital mobility

Contextual Information Retrieval based on Algorithmic Information Theory and Statistical Outlier Detection

The main contribution of this paper is to design an Information Retrieval (IR) technique based on Algorithmic Information Theory (using the Normalized Compression Distance- NCD), statistical techniques (outliers), and novel organization of data base structure. The paper shows how they can be integrated to retrieve information from generic databases using long (text-based) queries. Two important problems are analyzed in the paper. On the one hand, how to detect "false positives" when the distance among the documents is very low and there is actual similarity. On the other hand, we propose a way to structure a document database which similarities distance estimation depends on the length of the selected text. Finally, the experimental evaluations that have been carried out to study previous problems are shown.Comment: Submitted to 2008 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (6 pages, 6 figures

The Last Orchard

The Last Orchard is a screenplay about two rival groups of ten-year-olds in 1989 Pharr, Texas. Their elementary school conflicts create a neighborhood war within their mobile home park, coinciding with the entire park\u27s wide eviction and land ownership crisis. The story is written with a mythic fiction approach – a method I learned through Carl Jung\u27s and Joseph Campbell\u27s works on archetypes, mythology, and the hero\u27s journey; it is a practical tool for storytelling. The Last Orchard is based on Homer\u27s Iliad: the Trojan War, its heroes, and gods. Some plays and numerous films have their mythic counterparts, along with those that have employed mythic fiction in the same manner that I have for my script. These films include: Pygmalion (1938) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

An Efficient Maximization Algorithm With Implications in Min-Max Predictive Control

n this technical note, an algorithm for binary quadratic programs defined by matrices with band structure is proposed. It was shown in the article by T. Alamo, D. M. de la Pentildea, D. Limon, and E. F. Camacho, ldquoConstrained min-max predictive control: modifications of the objective function leading to polynomial complexity,rdquo IEEE Tran. Autom. Control , vol. 50, pp. 710-714, May 2005, that this class of problems arise in robust model predictive control when min-max techniques are applied. Although binary quadratic problems belongs to a class of NP-complete problems, the computational burden of the proposed maximization algorithm for band matrices is polynomial with the dimension of the optimization variable and exponential with the band size. Computational results and comparisons on several hundred test problems demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm

Magnitud, composición y patrones espaciotemporales de la mortalidad de vertebrados en las carreteras a escala regional

Although roadkill studies on a large scale are challenging, they can provide valuable information to assess the impact of road traffic on animal populations. Over 22 months (between July 2009–June 2010, and April 2011–March 2012) we surveyed 45 road sections of 10 km within a global biodiversity hotspot in Andalusia (87,000 km2), in southern Spain. We divided the region into five ecoregions differing in environmental conditions and landscape characteristics and recorded the relative magnitude, composition and spatiotemporal patterns of vertebrate (birds, mammal, amphibians, and reptiles) mortality. We used roadkill data from monthly surveys of road stretches with different speed limits, traffic volume, road design, and adjacent landscape composition. Roadkills varied over time and were not randomly distributed across ecoregions and road types. Overall, the groups most frequently encountered were mammals (54.4% of total roadkills) and birds (36.2%). Mortality rates in these two groups were higher on highways than on national or local roads, whereas those of amphibians (4.6%) and reptiles (4.3%) did not differ between road types. Except for mammals, the observed variation in vertebrate roadkills across ecoregions reflects the patterns of species richness previously described in the literature. Roadkills were concentrated over relatively short periods and this pattern was repeated over study periods and for all vertebrate classes. Our findings provide baseline information about road types, time periods and taxa with a higher probability of roadkills across an extensive region. These data represent an essential step towards the future implementation of broad–scale mitigation measures.A pesar de que los estudios a gran escala sobre mortalidad de animales en las carreteras son complejos, pueden aportar información valiosa para evaluar la incidencia del tráfico en las poblaciones de animales. Durante 22 meses (entre julio de 2009 y junio de 2010 y entre abril de 2011 y marzo de 2012), muestreamos 45 tramos de carretera de 10 km de longitud distribuidos en una zona con una gran diversidad en la región de Andalucía (87.000 km2), en el sur de España. La región se dividió en cinco ecorregiones con diferentes condiciones ambientales y características del paisaje, y se analizaron la magnitud, la composición y los patrones espaciotemporales de la mortalidad de vertebrados (aves, mamíferos, anfibios y reptiles). Usamos datos de atropellos obtenidos durante muestreos mensuales en tramos de carretera con diferentes límite de velocidad, volumen de tráfico, diseño de la carretera y composición del paisaje adyacente. Los animales atropellados fueron distintos en el tiempo y no se distribuyeron aleatoriamente entre ecorregiones ni entre tipos de carretera. En total, los grupos que se encontraron con mayor frecuencia fueron los mamíferos (el 54,4% de los atropellos registrados) y las aves (el 36,2%). La tasa de mortalidad observada en estos dos grupos fue mayor en autopistas que en carreteras nacionales o locales, mientras que la mortalidad de anfibios (el 4,6%) y de reptiles (el 4,3%) no presentó diferencias entre tipos de carretera. A excepción de los mamíferos, la variación observada de la mortalidad en las carreteras entre las diferentes ecorregiones refleja los patrones de riqueza de especies descritos en las publicaciones científicas. Los atropellos se concentraron en períodos de tiempo relativamente cortos y este patrón se repitió en las dos temporadas de estudio y con respecto a todas las clases de vertebrados. Nuestros resultados proporcionan información de referencia sobre los tipos de carretera, los períodos de tiempo y los taxones con una mayor probabilidad de morir por atropello en una extensa región, lo que supone un paso esencial para la implementación de medidas de mitigación a gran escala.Fil: Canal Piña, David. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa. Universidad Nacional de La Pampa. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa; Argentina. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; EspañaFil: Camacho, Carlos. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; EspañaFil: Martín, Beatriz. Complejo Huerta Grande; EspañaFil: de Lucas, Manuela. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; EspañaFil: Ferrer, Miguel. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Españ

Reducing the loss of information through annealing text distortion

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Granados, A. ;Cebrian, M. ; Camacho, D. ; de Borja Rodriguez, F. "Reducing the Loss of Information through Annealing Text Distortion". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 23, no. 7 pp. 1090 - 1102, July 2011Compression distances have been widely used in knowledge discovery and data mining. They are parameter-free, widely applicable, and very effective in several domains. However, little has been done to interpret their results or to explain their behavior. In this paper, we take a step toward understanding compression distances by performing an experimental evaluation of the impact of several kinds of information distortion on compression-based text clustering. We show how progressively removing words in such a way that the complexity of a document is slowly reduced helps the compression-based text clustering and improves its accuracy. In fact, we show how the nondistorted text clustering can be improved by means of annealing text distortion. The experimental results shown in this paper are consistent using different data sets, and different compression algorithms belonging to the most important compression families: Lempel-Ziv, Statistical and Block-Sorting.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under TIN2010-19872 and TIN2010-19607 projects

Expert systems: Special issue on “New trends and Innovations in Intelligent Distributed Computing”

[Excerpt] Distributed Systems current face new challenges of adapting and reusing research results in the area of Intelligent Systems. Intelligent Systems use methods and technology derived from Knowledge‐based and Computational Intelligence. Distributed Computing develops methods and technology to build systems composed of collaborating components. The fast growth of both Big Data and Data Mining have created interesting challenges for classical methods, algorithms, and frameworks from Distributed Computing, which makes especially interesting analysis and research into new trends and innovations that have recently appeared in this area. This special issue welcomed submissions of original papers introducing research results on all the aspects covering the roles of Knowledge and Intelligence in Distributed Systems, ranging from concepts and theoretical developments to advanced technologies and innovative applications. This issue presents a expanded versions of these papers from the best of those presented at the 10th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC 2016), which was held in Paris (France). [...]As the special issue editors, we would like to take this opportunity to thank the various authors for their papers and the reviewers fortheir work. We are also grateful to Jon Hall, Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley journal Expert Systems. We would like to particularly thankthe IDC'16 programme committee members for their hard work and dedication. To conclude, we would like to acknowledge the financialsupport received from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) projects: EphemeCH (TIN2014-56494-C4-{1… 4}-P)and DeepBio (TIN2017-85727-C4-{1… 4}-P), both under the European Regional Development Fund FEDER and the support by COMPETE:POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT Fundao para a Cincia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013