Agreement technologies for coordination in smart cities

Many challenges in today's society can be tackled by distributed open systems. This is particularly true for domains that are commonly perceived under the umbrella of smart cities, such as intelligent transportation, smart energy grids, or participative governance. When designing computer applications for these domains, it is necessary to account for the fact that the elements of such systems, often called software agents, are usually made by different designers and act on behalf of particular stakeholders. Furthermore, it is unknown at design time when such agents will enter or leave the system, and what interests new agents will represent. To instil coordination in such systems is particularly demanding, as usually only part of them can be directly controlled at runtime. Agreement technologies refer to a sandbox of tools and mechanisms for the development of such open multiagent systems, which are based on the notion of agreement. In this paper, we argue that agreement technologies are a suitable means for achieving coordination in smart city domains, and back our claim through examples of several real-world applications. © 2018 by the authors

Experiments in term expansion using thesauri in Spanish

This paper presents some experiments carried out this year in the Spanish monolingual task at CLEF2002. The objective is to continue our research on term expansion. Last year we presented results regarding stemming. Now, our effort is centred on term expansion using thesauri. Many words that derive from the same stem have a close semantic content. However other words with very different stems also have semantically close senses. In this case, the analysis of the relationships between words in a document collection can be used to construct a thesaurus of related terms. The thesaurus can then be used to expand a term with the best related terms. This paper describes some experiments carried out to study term expansion using association and similarity thesauri

Functional Definition of the INFOGENMED WORKSTATION: A Virtual Laboratory for Genetic Information Management in Clinical Environments

New technologies (biochips, bioinformatics) and research approaches (Proteomics, Funtional Genomics, Individual Genomics) are revolutionising biomedical research. The Human Genome Project is making a major contribution to the knowledge of the relationships between human genes and physiopathological states. There are already 4500 genes associated with illnesses in the OMIM database. The integration of these massive amounts of genetic information in the clinical environment will give rise to a new clinical practice based on Molecular Medicine. Diagnosis will be more precise and include genetic tests that may be done at the point of care using biochip technology. Therapies will include personalised drugs that will have molecular targets

Trust and reputation mining in professional virtual communities

Communication technologies, such as e-mail, instant messaging, discussion forums, blogs, and newsgroups connect people together, forming virtual communities. This concept is not only used for private purposes, but is also attracting attention in professional environments, allowing to consult a large group of experts. Due to the overwhelming size of such communities, various reputation mechanisms have been proposed supporting members with information about people’s trustworthiness with respect to their contributions. However, most of today’s approaches rely on manual and subjective feedback, suffering from unfair ratings, discrimination, and feedback quality variations over time. To this end, we propose a system which determines trust relationships between community members automatically and objectively by mining communication data. In contrast to other approaches which use these data directly, e.g., by applying natural language processing on log files, we follow a new approach to make contributions visible. We perform structural analysis of discussions, examine interaction patterns between members, and infer social roles expressing motivation, openness to discussions, and willingness to share data, and therefore trust