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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu Oct 2009

A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxi service has undergone radical revamp in recent years. In particular, significant investments in communication system and GPS devices have improved quality of taxi services through better dispatches. In this paper, we propose to leverage on such infrastructure and build a service choice model that helps individual drivers in deciding whether to serve a specific taxi stand or not. We demonstrate the value of our model by applying it to a real-world scenario. We also highlight interesting new potential approaches that could significantly improve the quality of taxi services.


A Surprise Triggered Adaptive And Reactive (Star) Framework For Online Adaptation In Non-Stationary Environments, Truong-Huy Dinh Nguyen, Tze-Yun Leong Oct 2009

A Surprise Triggered Adaptive And Reactive (Star) Framework For Online Adaptation In Non-Stationary Environments, Truong-Huy Dinh Nguyen, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the task of developing an adaptive autonomous agent that can interact with non-stationary environments. Traditional learning approaches such as Reinforcement Learning assume stationary characteristics over the course of the problem, and are therefore unable to learn the dynamically changing settings correctly. We introduce a novel adaptive framework that can detect dynamic changes due to non-stationary elements. The Surprise Triggered Adaptive and Reactive (STAR) framework is inspired by human adaptability in dealing with daily life changes. An agent adopting the STAR framework consists primarily of two components, Adapter and Reactor. The Reactor chooses suitable actions based on predictions made …


Localizing Volumetric Motion For Action Recognition In Realistic Videos, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jintao Li, Yongdong Zhang Oct 2009

Localizing Volumetric Motion For Action Recognition In Realistic Videos, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jintao Li, Yongdong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a novel motion localization approach for recognizing actions and events in real videos. Examples include StandUp and Kiss in Hollywood movies. The challenge can be attributed to the large visual and motion variations imposed by realistic action poses. Previous works mainly focus on learning from descriptors of cuboids around space time interest points (STIP) to characterize actions. The size, shape and space-time position of cuboids are fixed without considering the underlying motion dynamics. This often results in large set of fragmentized cuboids which fail to capture long-term dynamic properties of realistic actions. This paper proposes the detection …


Sharing Mobile Multimedia Annotations To Support Inquiry-Based Learning Using Mobitop, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin-Leng Theng, Quang Minh Nguyen, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Ee Peng Lim, Chew-Hung Chang, Kalyani Chatterjea, Aixin Sun Oct 2009

Sharing Mobile Multimedia Annotations To Support Inquiry-Based Learning Using Mobitop, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin-Leng Theng, Quang Minh Nguyen, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Ee Peng Lim, Chew-Hung Chang, Kalyani Chatterjea, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile devices used in educational settings are usually employed within a collaborative learning activity in which learning takes place in the form of social interactions between team members while performing a shared task. We introduce MobiTOP (Mobile Tagging of Objects and People), a geospatial digital library system which allows users to contribute and share multimedia annotations via mobile devices. A key feature of MobiTOP that is well suited for collaborative learning is that annotations are hierarchical, allowing annotations to be annotated by other users to an arbitrary depth. A group of student-teachers involved in an inquiry-based learning activity in geography …


Multi-View Ear Recognition Based On Moving Least Square Pose Interpolation, Heng Liu, David Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhang Sep 2009

Multi-View Ear Recognition Based On Moving Least Square Pose Interpolation, Heng Liu, David Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Based on moving least square, a multi-view ear pose interpolation and corresponding recognition approach is proposed. This work firstly analyzes the shape characteristics of actual trace caused by ear pose varying in feature space. Then according to training samples pose projection, we manage to recover the complete multi-view ear pose manifold by using moving least square pose interpolation. The constructed multi-view ear pose manifolds can be easily utilized to recognize ear images captured under different views based on finding the minimal projection distance to the manifolds. The experimental results and some comparisons show the new method is superior to manifold …


Font Size: Make Font Size Smaller Make Font Size Default Make Font Size Larger Exploiting Coordination Locales In Distributed Pomdps Via Social Model Shaping, Pradeep Varakantham, Jun Young Kwak, Matthew Taylor, Janusz Marecki, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe Sep 2009

Font Size: Make Font Size Smaller Make Font Size Default Make Font Size Larger Exploiting Coordination Locales In Distributed Pomdps Via Social Model Shaping, Pradeep Varakantham, Jun Young Kwak, Matthew Taylor, Janusz Marecki, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed POMDPs provide an expressive framework for modeling multiagent collaboration problems, but NEXPComplete complexity hinders their scalability and application in real-world domains. This paper introduces a subclass of distributed POMDPs, and TREMOR, an algorithm to solve such distributed POMDPs. The primary novelty of TREMOR is that agents plan individually with a single agent POMDP solver and use social model shaping to implicitly coordinate with other agents. Experiments demonstrate that TREMOR can provide solutions orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms while achieving comparable, or even superior, solution quality.


Setting Discrete Bid Levels Adaptively In Repeated Auctions, Jilian Zhang, Hoong Chuin Lau, Jialie Shen Aug 2009

Setting Discrete Bid Levels Adaptively In Repeated Auctions, Jilian Zhang, Hoong Chuin Lau, Jialie Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The success of an auction design often hinges on its ability to set parameters such as reserve price and bid levels that will maximize an objective function such as the auctioneer revenue. Works on designing adaptive auction mechanisms have emerged recently, and the challenge is in learning different auction parameters by observing the bidding in previous auctions. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric method for determining discrete bid levels dynamically so as to maximize the auctioneer revenue. First, we propose a non-parametric kernel method for estimating the probabilities of closing price with past auction data. Then a greedy strategy …


Multilayer Image Inpainting Approach Based On Neural Networks, Quan Wang, Zhaoxia Wang, Che Sau Chang, Ting Yang Aug 2009

Multilayer Image Inpainting Approach Based On Neural Networks, Quan Wang, Zhaoxia Wang, Che Sau Chang, Ting Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes an image inpainting approach based on the self-organizing map for dividing an image into several layers, assigning each damaged pixel to one layer, and then restoring these damaged pixels by the information of their respective layer. These inpainted layers are then fused together to provide the final inpainting results. This approach takes advantage of the neural network's ability of imitating human's brain to separate objects of an image into different layers for inpainting. The approach is promising as clearly demonstrated by the results in this paper.


An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim Jul 2009

An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, an event-centric commodity trading simulation powered by the multiagent framework is presented. The purpose of this simulation platform is for training novice traders. The simulation is progressed by announcing news events that affect various aspects of the commodity supply chain. Upon receiving these events, market agents that play the roles of producers, consumers, and speculators would adjust their views on the market and act accordingly. Their actions would be based on their roles and also their private information, and collectively they shape the market dynamics. This simulation has been effectively deployed for several training sessions. We will …


Creating Human-Like Autonomous Players In Real-Time First Person Shooter Computer Games, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Gee-Wah Ng Jul 2009

Creating Human-Like Autonomous Players In Real-Time First Person Shooter Computer Games, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Gee-Wah Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper illustrates how we create a software agent by employing FALCON, a self-organizing neural network that performs reinforcement learning, to play a well-known first person shooter computer game known as Unreal Tournament 2004. Through interacting with the game environment and its opponents, our agent learns in real-time without any human intervention. Our agent bot participated in the 2K Bot Prize competition, similar to the Turing test for intelligent agents, wherein human judges were tasked to identify whether their opponents in the game were human players or virtual agents. To perform well in the competition, an agent must act like …


An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim, Chao-Chi Liu May 2009

An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim, Chao-Chi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, the study of trading in electronic markets has received significant amount of attention, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence and electronic commerce. With increasingly sophisticated technologies being applied in analyzing information and making decisions, fully autonomous software agents are expected to take up significant roles in many important fields. This trend is most obvious in the financial domain, where speed of reaction is highly valued and significant investments have been made in information and communication technologies.Despite the successes of automated trading in many important classes of financial markets, commodity trading has lagged behind, mainly because of …


Constraint-Based Dynamic Programming For Decentralized Pomdps With Structured Interactions, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein May 2009

Constraint-Based Dynamic Programming For Decentralized Pomdps With Structured Interactions, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized partially observable MDPs (DEC-POMDPs) provide a rich framework for modeling decision making by a team of agents. Despite rapid progress in this area, the limited scalability of solution techniques has restricted the applicability of the model. To overcome this computational barrier, research has focused on restricted classes of DEC-POMDPs, which are easier to solve yet rich enough to capture many practical problems. We present CBDP, an efficient and scalable point-based dynamic programming algorithm for one such model called ND-POMDP (Network Distributed POMDP). Specifically, CBDP provides magnitudes of speedup in the policy computation and generates better quality solution for all …


A Self-Organizing Neural Network Architecture For Intentional Planning Agents, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan May 2009

A Self-Organizing Neural Network Architecture For Intentional Planning Agents, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a model of neural network embodiment of intentions and planning mechanisms for autonomous agents. The model bridges the dichotomy of symbolic and non-symbolic representation in developing agents. Some novel techniques are introduced that enables the neural network to process and manipulate sequential and hierarchical structures of information. It is suggested that by incorporating intentional agent model which relies on explicit symbolic description with self-organizing neural networks that are good at learning and recognizing patterns, the best from both sides can be exploited. This paper demonstrates that plans can be represented as weighted connections and reasoning processes can …


Distributed Constraint Optimization With Structured Resource Constraints, Akshat Kumar, Boi Faltings, Adrian Petcu May 2009

Distributed Constraint Optimization With Structured Resource Constraints, Akshat Kumar, Boi Faltings, Adrian Petcu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) provides a framework for coordinated decision making by a team of agents. Often, during the decision making, capacity constraints on agents' resource consumption must be taken into account. To address such scenarios, an extension of DCOP-Resource Constrained DCOP - has been proposed. However, certain type of resources have an additional structure associated with them and exploiting it can result in more efficient algorithms than possible with a general framework. An example of these are distribution networks, where the flow of a commodity from sources to sinks is limited by the flow capacity of edges. We present …


Dynamic Programming Approximations For Partially Observable Stochastic Games, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein May 2009

Dynamic Programming Approximations For Partially Observable Stochastic Games, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) provide a rich mathematical framework for planning under uncertainty by a group of agents. However, this modeling advantage comes with a price, namely a high computational cost. Solving POSGs optimally quickly becomes intractable after a few decision cycles. Our main contribution is to provide bounded approximation techniques, which enable us to scale POSG algorithms by several orders of magnitude. We study both the POSG model and its cooperative counterpart, DEC-POMDP. Experiments on a number of problems confirm the scalability of our approach while still providing useful policies.


Optimizing Service Systems Based On Application-Level Qos, Qianhui Liang, Xindong Wu, Hoong Chuin Lau Apr 2009

Optimizing Service Systems Based On Application-Level Qos, Qianhui Liang, Xindong Wu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Making software systems service-oriented is becoming the practice, and an increasingly large number of service systems play important roles in today's business and industry. Currently, not enough attention has been paid to the issue of optimization of service systems. In this paper, we argue that the key elements to be considered in optimizing service systems are robustness, system orientation, and being dynamic and transparent. We present our solution to optimizing service systems based on application-level QoS management. Our solution incorporates three capabilities, i.e., 1) the ability to cater to the varying rigidities on Web service QoS in distinct application domains …


Describing Fuzzy Sets Using A New Concept: Fuzzify Functor, Kexin Wei, Zhaoxia Wang, Quan Wang Apr 2009

Describing Fuzzy Sets Using A New Concept: Fuzzify Functor, Kexin Wei, Zhaoxia Wang, Quan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposed a fuzzify functor as an extension of the concept of fuzzy sets. The fuzzify functor and the first-order operated fuzzy set are defined. From the theory analysis, it can be observed that when the fuzzify functor acts on a simple crisp set, we get the first order fuzzy set or type-1 fuzzy set. By operating the fuzzify functor on fuzzy sets, we get the higher order fuzzy sets or higher type fuzzy sets and their membership functions. Using the fuzzify functor we can exactly describe the type-1 fuzzy sets, type-2 fuzzy sets and higher type or higher …


Integrated Resource Allocation And Scheduling In Bidirectional Flow Shop With Multi-Machine And Cos Constraints, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhengyi Zhao, Shuzhi Sam Ge Jan 2009

Integrated Resource Allocation And Scheduling In Bidirectional Flow Shop With Multi-Machine And Cos Constraints, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhengyi Zhao, Shuzhi Sam Ge

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An integer programming (IP) model is proposed for integrated resource allocation and operation scheduling for a multiple job-agents system. Each agent handles a specific job-list in a bidirectional flowshop. For the individual agent scheduling problem, a formulation is proposed in continuous time domain and compared with an IP formulation in discrete time domain. Of particular interest is the formulation of the machine utilization function-- both in continuous time and discrete time. Fast heuristic methods are proposed with the relaxation of the machine capacity. For the integrated resource allocation and scheduling problem, a linear programming relaxation approach is applied to solve …


The Price Of Stability In Selfish Scheduling Games, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau Jan 2009

The Price Of Stability In Selfish Scheduling Games, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Game theory has gained popularity as an approach to analysing and understanding distributed systems with self-interested agents. Central to game theory is the concept of Nash equilibrium as a stable state (solution) of the system, which comes with a price − the loss in efficiency. The quantification of the efficiency loss is one of the main research concerns. In this paper, we study the quality and computational characteristics of the best Nash equilibrium in two selfish scheduling models: the congestion model and the sequencing model. In particular, we present the following results: (1) In the congestion model: first, the best …


Ontology-Based Business Process Customization For Composite Web Services, Qianhui (Althea) Liang, Xindong Wu, E. K. Park, T. Khoshgoftaar, C. Chi Jan 2009

Ontology-Based Business Process Customization For Composite Web Services, Qianhui (Althea) Liang, Xindong Wu, E. K. Park, T. Khoshgoftaar, C. Chi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A key goal of the Semantic Web is to shift social interaction patterns from a producer-centric paradigm to a consumer-centric one. Treating customers as the most valuable assets and making the business models work better for them are at the core of building successful consumer-centric business models. It follows that customizing business processes constitutes a major concern in the realm of a knowledge-pull-based human semantic Web. This paper conceptualizes the customization of service-based business processes leveraging the existing knowledge of Web services and business processes. We represent this conceptualization as a new Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language Web Ontology …


Event-Detecting Multi-Agent Mdps: Complexity And Constant-Factor Approximation, Akshat Kumar, S. Zilberstein Jan 2009

Event-Detecting Multi-Agent Mdps: Complexity And Constant-Factor Approximation, Akshat Kumar, S. Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Planning under uncertainty for multiple agents has grown rapidly with the development of formal models such as multi-agent MDPs and decentralized MDPs. But despite their richness, the applicability of these models remains limited due to their computational complexity. We present the class of event-detecting multi-agent MDPs (eMMDPs), designed to detect multiple mobile targets by a team of sensor agents. We show that eMMDPs are NP-Hard and present a scalable 2-approximation algorithm for solving them using matroid theory and constraint optimization. The complexity of the algorithm is linear in the state-space and number of agents, quadratic in the horizon, and exponential …