For better applications of fuzzy automata on target tracking, this paper presents an associated method of fuzzy automata by discussing the relation between fuzzy automata. The equivalence is mainly discussed regarding these fuzzy automata. The target tracking based on the associated method of fuzzy automata is given. Moreover, the simulation result shows that the associated method is better than single fuzzy automaton relatively. The development of these researches in this paper in turn can quicken the applications of the fuzzy automata in various fields.

The paper proposes a solution to the problem classification by calculating the sequence of matrices of feature indices that approximate invariants of the data matrix. Here the feature index is the index of interval for feature values, and the number of intervals is a parameter. Objects with the equal indices form granules, including information granules, which correspond to the objects of the training sample of a certain class. From the ratios of the information granules lengths, we obtain the frequency intervals of any feature that are the same for the appropriate objects of the control sample. Then, for an arbitrary object, we find object probability estimation in each class and then the class of object that corresponds to the maximum probability. For a sequence of the parameter values, we find a converging sequence of error rates. An additional effect is created by the parameters aimed at increasing the data variety and compressing rare data. The high accuracy and stability of the results obtained using this method have been confirmed for nine data set from the UCI repository. The proposed method has obvious advantages over existing ones due to the algorithm’s simplicity and universality, as well as the accuracy of the solutions.

This paper proposes a new stochastic framework based on the probabilistic load flow to consider the uncertainty effects in the Distribution Static Compensator (DSTATCOM) allocation and sizing problem. The proposed method is based on the point estimate method (PEM) to capture the uncertainty associated with the forecast error of the loads. In order to explore the search space globally, a new optimization algorithm based on bat algorithm (BA) is proposed too. The objective functions to be investigated are minimization of the total active power losses and reducing the voltage deviation of the buses. Also to reach a proper balance between the optimization of both the objective functions, the idea of interactive fuzzy satisfying method is employed in the multi-objective formulation. The feasibility and satisfying performance of the proposed method is examined on the 69-bus IEEE distribution system.

The Bengalese finch song has been widely studied for its unique features and similarity to human language. For com-putational analysis the songs must be represented in songnote sequences. An automated approach for this purpose is highly desired since manual processing makes human annotation cumbersome, and human annotation is very heu-ristic and easily lacks objectivity. In this paper, we propose a new approach for automatic detection and recognition of the songnote sequences via image processing. The proposed method is based on human recognition process to visually identify the patterns in a sonogram image. The songnotes of the Bengalese finch are dependent on the birds and similar pattern does not exist in two different birds. Considering this constraint, our experiments on real birdsong data of different Bengalese finch show high accuracy rates for automatic detection and recognition of the songnotes. These results indicate that the proposed approach is feasible and generalized for any Bengalese finch songs.

In 2004, Jeff Hawkins presented a memory-prediction theory of brain function, and later used it to create the Hierar-chical Temporal Memory model. Several of the concepts described in the theory are applied here in a computer vision system for a mobile robot application. The aim was to produce a system enabling a mobile robot to explore its envi-ronment and recognize different types of objects without human supervision. The operator has means to assign names to the identified objects of interest. The system presented here works with time ordered sequences of images. It utilizes a tree structure of connected computational nodes similar to Hierarchical Temporal Memory and memorizes frequent sequences of events. The structure of the proposed system and the algorithms involved are explained. A brief survey of the existing algorithms applicable in the system is provided and future applications are outlined. Problems that can arise when the robot’s velocity changes are listed, and a solution is proposed. The proposed system was tested on a sequence of images recorded by two parallel cameras moving in a real world environment. Results for mono- and ste-reo vision experiments are presented.

We propose the threshold updating method for terminating variable selection and two variable selection methods. In the threshold updating method, we update the threshold value when the approximation error smaller than the current threshold value is obtained. The first variable selection method is the combination of forward selection by block addi-tion and backward selection by block deletion. In this method, starting from the empty set of the input variables, we add several input variables at a time until the approximation error is below the threshold value. Then we search deletable variables by block deletion. The second method is the combination of the first method and variable selection by Linear Programming Support Vector Regressors (LPSVRs). By training an LPSVR with linear kernels, we evaluate the weights of the decision function and delete the input variables whose associated absolute weights are zero. Then we carry out block addition and block deletion. By computer experiments using benchmark data sets, we show that the proposed methods can perform faster variable selection than the method only using block deletion, and that by the threshold updating method, the approximation error is lower than that by the fixed threshold method. We also compare our method with an imbedded method, which determines the optimal variables during training, and show that our method gives comparable or better variable selection performance.

This paper presents HumanBoost, an approach that aims at improving the accuracy of detecting so-called phishing sites by utilizing users’ past trust decisions (PTDs). Web users are generally required to make trust decisions whenever their personal information is requested by a website. We assume that a database of user PTDs would be transformed into a binary vector, representing phishing or not-phishing, and the binary vector can be used for detecting phishing sites, similar to the existing heuristics. For our pilot study, in November 2007, we invited 10 participants and performed a subject experiment. The participants browsed 14 simulated phishing sites and six legitimate sites, and judged whether or not the site appeared to be a phishing site. We utilize participants’ trust decisions as a new heuristic and we let AdaBoost incorporate it into eight existing heuristics. The results show that the average error rate for HumanBoost was 13.4%, whereas for participants it was 19.0% and for AdaBoost 20.0%. We also conducted two follow-up studies in March 2010 and July 2010, observed that the average error rate for HumanBoost was below the others. We therefore conclude that PTDs are available as new heuristics, and HumanBoost has the potential to improve detection accuracy for Web user.

In this paper, an incremental learning model called Resource Allocating Network with Long-Term Memory (RAN-LTM) is extended such that the learning is conducted with some autonomy for the following functions: 1) data collection for initial learning, 2) data normalization, 3) addition of radial basis functions (RBFs), and 4) determination of RBF cen-ters and widths. The proposed learning algorithm called Autonomous Learning algorithm for Resource Allocating Network (AL-RAN) is divided into the two learning phases: initial learning phase and incremental learning phase. And the former is further divided into the autonomous data collection and the initial network learning. In the initial learning phase, training data are first collected until the class separability is converged or has a significant dif-ference between normalized and unnormalized data. Then, an initial structure of AL-RAN is autonomously determined by selecting a moderate number of RBF centers from the collected data and by defining as large RBF widths as possible within a proper range. After the initial learning, the incremental learning of AL-RAN is conducted in a sequential way whenever a new training data is given. In the experiments, we evaluate AL-RAN using five benchmark data sets. From the experimental results, we confirm that the above autonomous functions work well and the efficiency in terms of network structure and learning time is improved without sacrificing the recognition accuracy as compared with the previous version of AL-RAN.

Digit Recognition is an essential element of the process of scanning and converting documents into electronic format. In this work, a new Multiple-Cell Size (MCS) approach is being proposed for utilizing Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifier for efficient classification of Handwritten Digits. The HOG based technique is sensitive to the cell size selection used in the relevant feature extraction computations. Hence a new MCS approach has been used to perform HOG analysis and compute the HOG features. The system has been tested on the Benchmark MNIST Digit Database of handwritten digits and a classification accuracy of 99.36% has been achieved using an Independent Test set strategy. A Cross-Validation analysis of the classification system has also been performed using the 10-Fold Cross-Validation strategy and a 10-Fold classification accuracy of 99.26% has been obtained. The classification performance of the proposed system is superior to existing techniques using complex procedures since it has achieved at par or better results using simple operations in both the Feature Space and in the Classifier Space. The plots of the system’s Confusion Matrix and the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) show evidence of the superior performance of the proposed new MCS HOG and SVM based digit classification system.

Nowadays, millions of users use many social media systems every day. These services produce massive messages, which play a vital role in the social networking paradigm. As we see, an intelligent learning emotion system is desperately needed for detecting emotion among these messages. This system could be suitable in understanding users’ feelings towards particular discussion. This paper proposes a text-based emotion recognition approach that uses personal text data to recognize user’s current emotion. The proposed approach applies Dominant Meaning Technique to recognize user’s emotion. The paper reports promising experiential results on the tested dataset based on the proposed algorithm.

In medical imaging, Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) is a rapidly growing dynamic area of research. In recent years, significant attempts are made for the enhancement of computer aided diagnosis applications because errors in medical diagnostic systems can result in seriously misleading medical treatments. Machine learning is important in Computer Aided Diagnosis. After using an easy equation, objects such as organs may not be indicated accurately. So, pattern recognition fundamentally involves learning from examples. In the field of bio-medical, pattern recognition and machine learning promise the improved accuracy of perception and diagnosis of disease. They also promote the objectivity of decision-making process. For the analysis of high-dimensional and multimodal bio-medical data, machine learning offers a worthy approach for making classy and automatic algorithms. This survey paper provides the comparative analysis of different machine learning algorithms for diagnosis of different diseases such as heart disease, diabetes disease, liver disease, dengue disease and hepatitis disease. It brings attention towards the suite of machine learning algorithms and tools that are used for the analysis of diseases and decision-making process accordingly.

Automatic web page classification has become inevitable for web directories due to the multitude of web pages in the World Wide Web. In this paper an improved Term Weighting technique is proposed for automatic and effective classification of web pages. The web documents are represented as set of features. The proposed method selects and extracts the most prominent features reducing the high dimensionality problem of classifier. The proper selection of features among the large set improves the performance of the classifier. The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested on a benchmarked dataset. The results show the better performance than most of the existing term weighting techniques.

This paper presents an intelligent technique to fault diagnosis of power transformers dissolved and free gas analysis (DGA). Fuzzy Reasoning Spiking neural P systems (FRSN P systems) as a membrane computing with distributed parallel computing model is powerful and suitable graphical approach model in fuzzy diagnosis knowledge. In a sense this feature is required for establishing the power transformers faults identifications and capturing knowledge implicitly during the learning stage, using linguistic variables, membership functions with “low”, “medium”, and “high” descriptions for each gas signature, and inference rule base. Membership functions are used to translate judgments into numerical expression by fuzzy numbers. The performance method is analyzed in terms for four gas ratio (IEC 60599) signature as input data of FRSN P systems. Test case results evaluate that the proposals method for power transformer fault diagnosis can significantly improve the diagnosis accuracy power transformer.

This research aims to develop a model to enhance lymphatic diseases diagnosis by the use of random forest ensemble machine-learning method trained with a simple sampling scheme. This study has been carried out in two major phases: feature selection and classification. In the first stage, a number of discriminative features out of 18 were selected using PSO and several feature selection techniques to reduce the features dimension. In the second stage, we applied the random forest ensemble classification scheme to diagnose lymphatic diseases. While making experiments with the selected features, we used original and resampled distributions of the dataset to train random forest classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a remark-able improvement in classification accuracy rate.

Fingerprint recognition is a mature biometric technique for identification or authentication application. In this work, we describe a method based on the use of neural network to authenticate people who want to accede to an automated fingerprint system for E-learning. The idea is to apply back propagation algorithm on a multilayer perceptron during the training stage. One of the advantages of this technique is the use of a hidden layer which allows the network to make comparison by calculating probabilities on template which are invariant to translation and rotation. Results come both from the NIST special database 4 and a local database, and show that a proposed method gives good results in some cases.

Introduction to education is one of the basic courses in teacher education professional education, it covers a wide range of subjects. Thus, in order to practice the management teaching goals, the interdisciplinary developed mathematical tools are applied for the study. The participants of this study are students in course of introduction to education, and the research instruments applied are rough set, grey structural modeling (GSM), and matrix based-structural modeling (MSM). The purposes of this paper are: 1) To logically analyze educational datasets to practice the scientific traits in education; 2) To benefit from directed hierarchical analysis to identify and propose action planning; 3) To construct core-oriented educational structure as the criterion-reference for one-lesson-multiple-design and to provide the whole scope and visualized analysis with GSM and MSM.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short (~21 nt) nucleotide sequences that are either co-transcribed during the production of mRNA or are organized in intergenic regions transcribed by RNA polymerase II. In animals, Drosha, and in plants DCL1 recognize pre-miRNAs which set themselves apart by their characteristic stem loop (hairpin) structure. This structure appears important for their recognition during the process of maturation leading to functioning mature miRNAs. A large body of research is available for computational pre-miRNA detection in animals, but less within the plant kingdom. For the prediction of pre-miRNAs, usually machine learning approaches are employed. Therefore, it is necessary to convert the pre-miRNAs into a set of features that can be calculated and many such features have been described. We here select a subset of the previously described features and add sequence motifs as new features. The resulting model which we called MotifmiRNAPred was tested on known pre-miRNAs listed in miRBase and its accuracy was compared to existing approaches in the field. With an accuracy of 99.95% for the generalized plant model, it distinguishes itself from previously published results which reach an average accuracy between 74% and 98%. We believe that our approach is useful for prediction of pre-miRNAs in plants without per species adjustment.

A method has been proposed to classify handwritten Arabic numerals in its compressed form using partitioning approach, Leader algorithm and Neural network. Handwritten numerals are represented in a matrix form. Compressing the matrix representation by merging adjacent pair of rows using logical OR operation reduces its size in half. Considering each row as a partitioned portion, clusters are formed for same partition of same digit separately. Leaders of clusters of partitions are used to recognize the patterns by Divide and Conquer approach using proposed ensemble neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed method recognize the patterns accurately.

One of commonly used approach to enhance the Web performance is Web proxy caching technique. In Web proxy caching, Least-Frequently-Used-Dynamic-Aging (LFU-DA) is one of the common proxy cache replacement methods, which is widely used in Web proxy cache management. LFU-DA accomplishes a superior byte hit ratio compared to other Web proxy cache replacement algorithms. However, LFU-DA may suffer in hit ratio measure. Therefore, in this paper, LFU-DA is enhanced using popular supervised machine learning techniques such as a support vector machine (SVM), a naive Bayes classifier (NB) and a decision tree (C4.5). SVM, NB and C4.5 are trained from Web proxy logs files and then intelligently incorporated with LFU-DA to form Intelligent Dynamic- Aging (DA) approaches. The simulation results revealed that the proposed intelligent Dynamic- Aging approaches considerably improved the performances in terms of hit and byte hit ratio of the conventional LFU-DA on a range of real datasets.

In supervised learning, the imbalanced number of instances among the classes in a dataset can make the algorithms to classify one instance from the minority class as one from the majority class. With the aim to solve this problem, the KNN algorithm provides a basis to other balancing methods. These balancing methods are revisited in this work, and a new and simple approach of KNN undersampling is proposed. The experiments demonstrated that the KNN undersampling method outperformed other sampling methods. The proposed method also outperformed the results of other studies, and indicates that the simplicity of KNN can be used as a base for efficient algorithms in machine learning and knowledge discovery.

Segmenting Arabic handwritings had been one of the subjects of research in the field of Arabic character recognition for more than 25 years. The majority of reported segmentation techniques share a critical shortcoming, which is over-segmentation. The aim of segmentation is to produce the letters (segments) of a handwritten word. When a resulting letter (segment) is made of more than one piece (stroke) instead of one, this is called over-segmentation. Our objective is to overcome this problem by using an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to verify the resulting segment. We propose a set of heuristic-based rules to assemble strokes in order to report the precise segmented letters. Preprocessing phases that include normalization and feature extraction are required as a prerequisite step for the ANN system for recognition and verification. In our previous work [1], we did achieve a segmentation success rate of 86% but without recognition. In this work, our experimental results confirmed a segmentation success rate of no less than 95%.

In the world, 10% of the world population suffer with some type of disability, however the fast technological development can originate some barriers that these people have to face if they want to access to technology. This is particularly true in the case of visually impaired users, as they require special assistance when they use any computer system and also depend on the audio for navigation tasks. Therefore, this paper is focused on making a prototype of a semantic platform with web accessibility for blind people. We propose a method to interaction with user through voice commands, allowing the direct communication with the platform. The proposed platform will be implemented using Semantic Web tools, because we intend to facilitate the search and retrieval of information in a more efficient way and offer a personalized learning. Also, Google APIs (STT (Speech to Text) and TTS (Text to Speech)) and Raspberry Pi board will be integrated in a speech recognition module.

A hypothesis of the existence of dominant pattern that may affect the performance of a neural based pattern recognition system and its operation in terms of correct and accurate classification, pruning and optimization is assumed, presented, tested and proved to be correct. Two sets of data subjected to the same ranking process using four main features are used to train a neural network engine separately and jointly. Data transformation and statistical pre-processing are carried out on the datasets before inserting them into the specifically designed multi-layer neural network employing Weight Elimination Algorithm with Back Propagation (WEA-BP). The dynamics of classification and weight elimination process is correlated and used to prove the dominance of one dataset. The presented results proved that one dataset acted aggressively towards the system and displaced the first dataset making its classification almost impossible. Such modulation to the relationships among the selected features of the affected dataset resulted in a mutated pattern and subsequent re-arrangement in the data set ranking of its members.

Typical supervised classification techniques require training instances similar to the values that need to be classified. This research proposes a methodology that can utilize training instances found in a different format. The benefit of this approach is that it allows the use of traditional classification techniques, without the need to hand-tag training instances if the information exists in other data sources. The proposed approach is presented through a practical classification application. The evaluation results show that the approach is viable, and that the segmentation of classifiers can greatly improve accuracy.

In this paper, we propose a new online system that can quickly detect malicious spam emails and adapt to the changes in the email contents and the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) links leading to malicious websites by updating the system daily. We introduce an autonomous function for a server to generate training examples, in which double-bounce emails are automatically collected and their class labels are given by a crawler-type software to analyze the website maliciousness called SPIKE. In general, since spammers use botnets to spread numerous malicious emails within a short time, such distributed spam emails often have the same or similar contents. Therefore, it is not necessary for all spam emails to be learned. To adapt to new malicious campaigns quickly, only new types of spam emails should be selected for learning and this can be realized by introducing an active learning scheme into a classifier model. For this purpose, we adopt Resource Allocating Network with Locality Sensitive Hashing (RAN-LSH) as a classifier model with a data selection function. In RAN-LSH, the same or similar spam emails that have already been learned are quickly searched for a hash table in Locally Sensitive Hashing (LSH), in which the matched similar emails located in “well-learned” are discarded without being used as training data. To analyze email contents, we adopt the Bag of Words (BoW) approach and generate feature vectors whose attributes are transformed based on the normalized term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). We use a data set of double-bounce spam emails collected at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan from March 1st, 2013 until May 10th, 2013 to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results confirm that the proposed spam email detection system has capability of detecting with high detection rate.

An iterated function system crossover (IFSX) operation for real-coded genetic algorithms (RCGAs) is presented in this paper. Iterated function system (IFS) is one type of fractals that maintains a similarity characteristic. By introducing the IFS into the crossover operation, the RCGA performs better searching solution with a faster convergence in a set of benchmark test functions.

As rule-based systems (RBS) technology gains wider acceptance, the need to create and maintain large knowledge bases will assume greater importance. Demonstrating a rule base to be free from error remains one of the obstacles to the adoption of this technology. In the past several years, a vast body of research has been carried out in developing various graphical techniques such as utilizing Petri Nets to analyze structural errors in rule-based systems, which utilize propositional logic. Four typical errors in rule-based systems are redundancy, circularity, incompleteness, and inconsistency. Recently, a DNA-based computing approach to detect these errors has been proposed. That paper presents algorithms which are able to detect structural errors just for special cases. For a rule base, which contains multiple starting nodes and goal nodes, structural errors are not removed correctly by utilizing the algorithms proposed in that paper and algorithms lack generality. In this study algorithms mainly based on Adleman’s operations, which are able to detect structural errors, in any form that they may arise in rule base, are presented. The potential of applying our algorithm is auspicious giving the operational time complexity of O(n*(Max{q, K, z})), in which n is the number of fact clauses; q is the number of rules in the longest inference chain; K is the number of tubes containing antecedents which are comprised of distinct number of starting nodes; and z denotes the maximum number of distinct antecedents comprised of the same number of starting nodes.

This paper investigates experimental design (DoE) for the calibration of the triaxial accelerometers embedded in a wearable micro Inertial Measurement Unit (μ-IMU). Firstly, a new linearization strategy is proposed for the accelerometer model associated with the so-called autocalibration scheme. Then, an effective Icosahedron design is developed, which can achieve both D-optimality and G-optimality for linearized accelerometer model in ideal experimental settings. However, due to various technical limitations, it is often infeasible for the users of wearable sensors to fully implement the proposed experimental scheme. To assess the efficiency of each individual experiment, an index is given in terms of desired experimental characteristic. The proposed experimental scheme has been applied for the autocalibration of a newly developed μ-IMU.

This paper presents a novel technique for improved voting by adaptively varying the membership boundaries of a fuzzy voter to achieve realistic consensus among inputs of redundant modules of a fault tolerant system. We demonstrate that suggested dynamic membership partitioning minimizes the number of occurrences of incorrect outputs of a voter as compared to the fixed membership partitioning voter implementations. Simulation results for the proposed voter for Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) fault tolerant system indicate that our algorithm shows better safety and availability performance as compared to the existing one. However, our voter design is general and thus it can be potentially useful for improving safety and availability of critical fault tolerant systems.

The use of agent technology in a dynamic environment is rapidly growing as one of the powerful technologies and the need to provide the benefits of the Intelligent Information Agent technique to massive open online courses, is very important from various aspects including the rapid growing of MOOCs environments, and the focusing more on static information than on updated information. One of the main problems in such environment is updating the information to the needs of the student who interacts at each moment. Using such technology can ensure more flexible information, lower waste time and hence higher earnings in learning. This paper presents Intelligent Topic-Based Information Agent to offer an updated knowledge including various types of resource for students. Using dominant meaning method, the agent searches the Internet, controls the metadata coming from the Internet, filters and shows them into a categorized content lists. There are two experiments conducted on the Intelligent Topic-Based Information Agent: one measures the improvement in the retrieval effectiveness and the other measures the impact of the agent on the learning. The experiment results indicate that our methodology to expand the query yields a considerable improvement in the retrieval effectiveness in all categories of Google Web Search API. On the other hand, there is a positive impact on the performance of learning session.

There are many proposed policy-improving systems of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents which are effective in quickly adapting to environmental change by using many statistical methods, such as mixture model of Bayesian Networks, Mixture Probability and Clustering Distribution, etc. However such methods give rise to the increase of the computational complexity. For another method, the adaptation performance to more complex environments such as multi-layer environments is required. In this study, we used profit-sharing method for the agent to learn its policy, and added a mixture probability into the RL system to recognize changes in the environment and appropriately improve the agent’s policy to adjust to the changing environment. We also introduced a clustering that enables a smaller, suitable selection in order to reduce the computational complexity and simultaneously maintain the system’s performance. The results of experiments presented that the agent successfully learned the policy and efficiently adjusted to the changing in multi-layer environment. Finally, the computational complexity and the decline in effectiveness of the policy improvement were controlled by using our proposed system.

Using a genetic algorithm owing to high nonlinearity of constraints, this paper first works on the optimal design of two-span continuous singly reinforced concrete beams. Given conditions are the span, dead and live loads, compressive strength of concrete and yield strength of steel; design variables are the width and effective depth of the continuous beam and steel ratios for positive and negative moments. The constraints are built based on the ACI Building Code by considering the strength requirements of shear and the maximum positive and negative moments, the development length of flexural reinforcement, and the serviceability requirement of deflection. The objective function is to minimize the total cost of steel and concrete. The optimal data found from the genetic algorithm are divided into three groups: the training set, the checking set and the testing set for the use of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The input vector of ANFIS consists of the yield strength of steel, compressive strength of concrete, dead load, span, width and effective depth of the beam; its outputs are the minimum total cost and optimal steel ratios for positive and negative moments. To make ANFIS more efficient, the technique of Subtractive Clustering is applied to group the data to help streamline the fuzzy rules. Numerical results show that the performance of ANFIS is excellent, with correlation coefficients between the three targets and outputs of the testing data being greater than 0.99.

Computational biology plays a significant role in the discovery of new biomarkers, the analyses of disease states and the validation of potential biomarkers. Biomarkers are used to measure the progress of disease or the physiological effects of therapeutic intervention in the treatment of disease. They are also used as early warning signs for various diseases such as cancer and inflammatory diseases. In this review, we outline recent progresses of computational biology application in research on biomarkers discovery. A brief discussion of some necessary preliminaries on machine learning techniques (e.g., clustering and support vector machines—SVM) which are commonly used in many applications to biomarkers discovery is given and followed by a description of biological background on biomarkers. We further examine the integration of computational biology approaches and biomarkers. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of key challenges for computational biology to biomarkers discovery.

In this paper, a mobile assistance-system is described which supports users in performing manual working tasks in the context of assembling complex products. The assistance system contains a head-worn display for the visualization of information relevant for the workflow as well as a video camera to acquire the scene. This paper is focused on the interaction of the user with this system and describes work in progress and initial results from an industrial application scenario. We present image-based methods for robust recognition of static and dynamic hand gestures in realtime. These methods are used for an intuitive interaction with the assistance-system. The segmentation of the hand based on color information builds the basis of feature extraction for static and dynamic gestures. For the static gestures, the activation of particular sensitive regions in the camera image by the user’s hand is used for interaction. An HMM classifier is used to extract dynamic gestures depending on motion parameters determined based on the optical flow in the camera image.

Bin planning (arrangements) is a key factor in the timber industry. Improper planning of the storage bins may lead to inefficient transportation of resources, which threaten the overall efficiency and thereby limit the profit margins of sawmills. To address this challenge, a simulation model has been developed. However, as numerous alternatives are available for arranging bins, simulating all possibilities will take an enormous amount of time and it is computationally infeasible. A discrete-event simulation model incorporating meta-heuristic algorithms has therefore been investigated in this study. Preliminary investigations indicate that the results achieved by GA based simulation model are promising and better than the other meta-heuristic algorithm. Further, a sensitivity analysis has been done on the GA based optimal arrangement which contributes to gaining insights and knowledge about the real system that ultimately leads to improved and enhanced efficiency in sawmill yards. It is expected that the results achieved in the work will support timber industries in making optimal decisions with respect to arrangement of storage bins in a sawmill yard.

This paper presents a closed-loop vector control structure based on adaptive Fuzzy Logic Sliding Mode Controller (FL-SMC) for a grid-connected Wave Energy Conversion System (WECS) driven Self-Excited Induction Generator (SEIG). The aim of the developed control method is to automatically tune and optimize the scaling factors and the membership functions of the Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLC) using Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms (MOGA) and Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO). Two Pulse Width Modulated voltage source PWM converters with a carrier-based Sinusoidal PWM modulation for both Generator- and Grid-side converters have been connected back to back between the generator terminals and utility grid via common DC link. The indirect vector control scheme is implemented to maintain balance between generated power and power supplied to the grid and maintain the terminal voltage of the generator and the DC bus voltage constant for variable rotor speed and load. Simulation study has been carried out using the MATLAB/Simulink environment to verify the robustness of the power electronics converters and the effectiveness of proposed control method under steady state and transient conditions and also machine parameters mismatches. The proposed control scheme has improved the voltage regulation and the transient performance of the wave energy scheme over a wide range of operating conditions.

The coastal marine habitats are often characterized by high biological activity. Therefore, monitoring programs and conservation plans of coastal environments are needed. So, in order to contribute to decision making process of the Brazilian Information System of Coastal Management, this paper presents a preliminary analysis of the effects of simulated deletions of individual organisms within a planktonic network as knowledge acquisition platform. An in situ scanning flow cytometer was used to data acquisition. A static and undirected food web is generated and represented by a fuzzy graph structure. Our results show through a series of indices the main changes of these networks. It was also verified similar traits and properties with other food webs found in the literature.

Technological advances and the enormous flood of papers have motivated many researchers and companies to innovate new technologies. In particular, handwriting recognition is a very useful technology to support applications like electronic books (eBooks), post code readers (that sort mails in post offices), and some bank applications. This paper proposes three systems to discriminate handwritten graffiti digits (0 to 9) and some commands with different architectures and abilities. It introduces three classifiers, namely single neural network (SNN) classifier, parallel neural networks (PNN) classifier and tree-structured neural network (TSNN) classifier. The three classifiers have been designed through adopting feed forward neural networks. In order to optimize the network parameters (connection weights), the back-propagation algorithm has been used. Several architectures are applied and examined to present a comparative study about these three systems from different perspectives. The research focuses on examining their accuracy, flexibility and scalability. The paper presents an analytical study about the impacts of three factors on the accuracy of the systems and behavior of the neural networks in terms of the number of the hidden neurons, the model of the activation functions and the learning rate. Therefore, future directions have been considered significantly in this paper through designing particularly flexible systems that allow adding many more classes in the future without retraining the current neural networks.

This paper presents the automatic drug administration for the regulation of bispectral (BIS) index in the anesthesia process during the clinical surgery by controlling the concentration target of two drugs, namely, propofol and remifentanil. To realize the automatic drug administration, real clinical data are collected for 42 patients for the construction of patients’ models consisting of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models describing the dynamics reacting to the input drugs. A nominal anesthesia model is obtained by taking the average of 42 patients’ models for the design of control scheme. Three PID controllers are employed, namely linear PID controller, type-1 (T1) fuzzy PID controller and interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy PID controller, to regulate the BIS index using the nominal patient’s model. The PID gains and membership functions are obtained using genetic algorithm (GA) by minimizing a cost function measuring the control performance. The best trained PID controllers are tested under different scenarios and compared in terms of control performance. Simulation results show that the IT2 fuzzy PID controller offers the best control strategy regulating the BIS index while the T1 fuzzy PID controller comes the second.

This paper describes a computational model for the implementation of causal learning in cognitive agents. The Conscious Emotional Learning Tutoring System (CELTS) is able to provide dynamic fine-tuned assistance to users. The integration of a Causal Learning mechanism within CELTS allows CELTS to first establish, through a mix of datamining algorithms, gross user group models. CELTS then uses these models to find the cause of users' mistakes, evaluate their performance, predict their future behavior, and, through a pedagogical knowledge mechanism, decide which tutoring intervention fits best.

The success of any Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a complicated problem due to its nonlinearity and the quantitative or qualitative network traffic data stream with many features. To get rid of this problem, several types of intrusion detection methods have been proposed and shown different levels of accuracy. This is why the choice of the effective and robust method for IDS is very important topic in information security. In this work, we have built two models for the classification purpose. One is based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) and the other is Random Forests (RF). Experimental results show that either classifier is effective. SVM is slightly more accurate, but more expensive in terms of time. RF produces similar accuracy in a much faster manner if given modeling parameters. These classifiers can contribute to an IDS system as one source of analysis and increase its accuracy. In this paper, KDD’99 Dataset is used and find out which one is the best intrusion detector for this dataset. Statistical analysis on KDD’99 dataset found important issues which highly affect the performance of evaluated systems and results in a very poor evaluation of anomaly detection approaches. The most important deficiency in the KDD’99 dataset is the huge number of redundant records. To solve these issues, we have developed a new dataset, KDD99Train+ and KDD99Test+, which does not include any redundant records in the train set as well as in the test set, so the classifiers will not be biased towards more frequent records. The numbers of records in the train and test sets are now reasonable, which make it affordable to run the experiments on the complete set without the need to randomly select a small portion. The findings of this paper will be very useful to use SVM and RF in a more meaningful way in order to maximize the performance rate and minimize the false negative rate.

In this work, a nonlinear model predictive controller is developed for a batch polymerization process. The physical model of the process is parameterized along a desired trajectory resulting in a trajectory linearized piecewise model (a multiple linear model bank) and the parameters are identified for an experimental polymerization reactor. Then, a multiple model adaptive predictive controller is designed for thermal trajectory tracking of the MMA polymerization. The input control signal to the process is constrained by the maximum thermal power provided by the heaters. The constrained optimization in the model predictive controller is solved via genetic algorithms to minimize a DMC cost function in each sampling interval.

Increasing costs and competitive business strategies are pushing sawmill enterprises to make an effort for optimization of their process management. Organizational decisions mainly concentrate on performance and reduction of operational costs in order to maintain profit margins. Although many efforts have been made, effective utilization of resources, optimal planning and maximum productivity in sawmill are still challenging to sawmill industries. Many researchers proposed the simulation models in combination with optimization techniques to address problems of integrated logistics optimization. The combination of simulation and optimization technique identifies the optimal strategy by simulating all complex behaviours of the system under consideration including objectives and constraints. During the past decade, an enormous number of studies were conducted to simulate operational inefficiencies in order to find optimal solutions. This paper gives a review on recent developments and challenges associated with simulation and optimization techniques. It was believed that the review would provide a perfect ground to the authors in pursuing further work in optimizing sawmill yard operations.

Finite Element (FE) analysis has become the favoured tool in the tyre industry for virtual development of tyres because of the ability to represent the detailed lay-up of the tyre carcass. However, application of FE analysis in tyre design and development is still very time-consuming and expensive. Here, the application of various Artificial Neural Network (ANN) architectures to predicting tyre performance is assessed to select the most effective and efficient architecture, to allow extensive parametric studies to be carried out inexpensively and to optimise tyre design before a much more expensive full FE analysis is used to confirm the predicted performance.

Memory-based collaborative recommender system (CRS) computes the similarity between users based on their declared ratings. However, not all ratings are of the same importance to the user. The set of ratings each user weights highly differs from user to user according to his mood and taste. This is usually reflected in the user’s rating scale. Accordingly, many efforts have been done to introduce weights to the similarity measures of CRSs. This paper proposes fuzzy weightings for the most common similarity measures for memory-based CRSs. Fuzzy weighting can be considered as a learning mechanism for capturing the preferences of users for ratings. Comparing with genetic algorithm learning, fuzzy weighting is fast, effective and does not require any more space. Moreover, fuzzy weightings based on the rating deviations from the user’s mean of ratings take into account the different rating scales of different users. The experimental results show that fuzzy weightings obviously improve the CRSs performance to a good extent.

This paper presents an innovative approach for the fault isolation of Light Rail Vehicle (LRV) suspension system based on the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory and its improvement application case. The considered LRV has three rolling stocks and each one equips three sensors for monitoring the suspension system. A Kalman filter is applied to generate the residuals for fault diagnosis. For the purpose of fault isolation, a fault feature database is built in advance. The Eros and the norm distance between the fault feature of the new occurred fault and the one in the feature database are applied to measure the similarity of the feature which is the basis for the basic belief assignment to the fault, respectively. After the basic belief assignments are obtained, they are fused by using the D-S evidence theory. The fusion of the basic belief assignments increases the isolation accuracy significantly. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by two case studies.

Security situation awareness is a new technology about security. This paper brings it to the assessment of security situation of metro station which serves as a new way to secure the security of passengers as well as the operation of the metro station. This paper sets up an index system for assessing the security situation awareness and makes a prediction model for the security situation of metro station based on PSO/SVM after doing lots of researches and analyses. Furthermore, through case studies, we find that the model has high accuracy and ability to accurately predict the security situation of metro station in the future and a certain practical value.

With the increase of Beijing urban rail transport network, the structure of the road network is becoming more complex, and passengers have more travel options. Together with the complex paths and different timetables, taking the last train is becoming much more difficult and unsuccessful. To avoid losses, we propose feasible suggestions to the last train with reasonable selling tickets system.