Managing Interval Resources in Automated Planning

In this paper RDPPLan, a model for planning with quantitative resources specified as numerical intervals, is presented. Nearly all existing models of planning with resources require to specify exact values for updating resources modified by actions execution. In other words these models cannot deal with more realistic situations in which the resources quantities are not completely known but are bounded by intervals. The RDPPlan model allow to manage domains more tailored to real world, where preconditions and effects over quantitative resources can be specified by intervals of values, in addition mixed logical/quantitative and pure numerical goals can be posed. RDPPlan is based on non directional search over a planning graph, like DPPlan, from which it derives, it uses propagation rules which have been appropriately extended to the management of resource intervals. The propagation rules extended with resources must verify invariant properties over the planning graph which have been proven by the authors and guarantee the correctness of the approach. An implementation of the RDPPlan model is described with search strategies specifically developed for interval resources

Deep neural networks for unsupervised damage detection on the Z24 bridge

During their life-cycle, civil infrastructures are continuously prone to significant functionality losses, primarily due to material's degradation and exposure to several natural hazards. Following these concerns, many researchers have attempted to develop reliable monitoring strategies, as integration to visual inspections, to efficiently ensure bridge maintenance and early-stage damage detection. In this framework, recent improvements in sensor technologies and data science have stimulated the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). Among unsupervised learning techniques, the potential of autoencoder networks has been attracting notable interest in the context of anomaly detection. In this light, the present paper proposes two different autoencoder-based damage detection techniques, focused on the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and the Convolutional Autoencoder (CAE) networks, respectively. During the training, the selected ML models learn how reconstructing raw acceleration sequences acquired from sound conditions. Unknown data, including both healthy and damaged bridge responses, are afterwards used to test the implemented networks and to detect damage occurrence. To this aim, a specific index of reconstruction loss is selected as a damage sensitive feature with the aim to quantify the errors between the original and reconstructed sequences. The performance exhibited by the two approaches is compared and evaluated by application to the Z24 benchmark bridge. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology to perform feature classification and real time damage detection at the level of macro-sequences as new sensor data is collected, resulting suitable for continuous assessment of full-scale monitored bridges

Encouraging early mastery of computational concepts through play

Learning to code, and more broadly, learning about computer science is a growing field of activity and research. Under the label of computational thinking, computational concepts are increasingly used as cognitive tools in many subject areas, beyond computer science. Using playful approaches and gamification to motivate educational activities, and to encourage exploratory learning is not a new idea since play has been involved in the learning of computational concepts by children from the very start. There is a tension however, between learning activities and opportunities that are completely open and playful, and learning activities that are structured enough to be easily replicable among contexts, countries and classrooms. This paper describes the conception, refinement, design and evaluation of a set of playful computational activities for classrooms or code clubs, that balance the benefits of playfulness with sufficient rigor and structure to enable robust replication.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Emotional book classification from book blurbs

Knowing and predicting opinions of people is considered a strategic added value, interpreting the qualia i.e., the subjective nature of emotional content. The aim of this work is to study the feasibility of an emotion recognition and automated classification of books according to emotional tags, by means of a lexical and semantic analysis of book blurbs. A supervised learning approach is used to determine if a correlation exists between the characteristics of a book blurb and emotional icons associated to the book by users. In this paper the underlying idea of the system is presented, the preprocessing and features extraction phases are described and experimental results on the social network Zazie and its mood tags are discussed

Automated classification of book blurbs according to the emotional tags of the social network Zazie

Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining are receiving increasing attention in many sectors because knowing and predicting opinions of people is considered a strategic added value. In the last years an increasing attention has also been devoted to Emotion Recognition, often by developing automated systems that can associate user's emotions to texts, music or artworks. Zazie is an Italian social network for readers that introduces a new dimension on book characterization, the emotional icon tagging. Each book, besides user's comments and reviews, can be tagged with special icons, the moods, that are emotional tags chosen by the users. The aim of this work is to study the feasibility of an automated classification of books in Zazie according to the emotional tags, by means of the lexical analysis of book blurbs. A supervised learning approach is used to determine if a correlation between the characteristics of a book blurb and the emotional icons associated to the book by the users exists

Can We Infer Book Classification by Blurbs?

Abstract. The aim of this work is to study the feasibility of an automated classification of books in the social network Zazie by means of the lexical analysis of book blurbs. A supervised learning approach is used to determine if a correlation between the characteristics of a book blurb and the emotional icons associated to the book by the Zazie’s users exists.

Differential Evolution for Neural Networks Optimization

In this paper, a Neural Networks optimizer based on Self-adaptive Differential Evolution is presented. This optimizer applies mutation and crossover operators in a new way, taking into account the structure of the network according to a per layer strategy. Moreover, a new crossover called interm is proposed, and a new self-adaptive version of DE called MAB-ShaDE is suggested to reduce the number of parameters. The framework has been tested on some well-known classification problems and a comparative study on the various combinations of self-adaptive methods, mutation, and crossover operators available in literature is performed. Experimental results show that DENN reaches good performances in terms of accuracy, better than or at least comparable with those obtained by backpropagation