Upcoming spacecraft will reuse software components to the extent that some systems will form product families of similar or identical units e g a eet of spaceborne telescopes Missions such as these must be demonstrably safe but the consequences of broad reuse are hard to evaluate from a software safety perspective This paper reports experience specifying an interferometer telescope subsystem as...

Engineering and technology play an important role in strengthening the competitive power of a company and in surviving a severe competition in the world. About 70% of the total R&D investment in Japan comes from the private sector. It is the most important to decide which research projects have to be adopted for a future research out of proposals from divisions and sections in a company. The ob...

Agent-based modelling approaches are usually based on logical languages, whereas in many areas dynamical system models based on differential equations are used. This paper shows how to model complex agent systems, integrating quantitative, numerical and qualitative, logical aspects, and how to combine logical and mathematical analysis methods.

In case-based reasoning (CBR), problems are solved by retrieving prior cases and adapting their solutions to fit; learning occurs as new cases are stored. Controlling the growth of the case base is a fundamental problem, and research on case-base maintenance has developed methods for compacting case bases while maintaining system competence, primarily by competencebased deletion strategies assu...

In the diversity task, our strategy was to, first, try to improve relevance, and then to cluster similar images to improve diversity. We propose a four step framework, based on AHC clustering and different reranking strategies. A large number of tests on devset showed that most of the best strategies include text based reranking for pertinence, and visual clustering for diversity even compared ...

We propose a general framework for addressing three fundamental issues using linear combinations: (1) the properties of the examples to linearly combine, (2) the constraints, and (3) the method for estimating the linear combinations coef®cients for reconstructing an object based on noisy and incomplete visual observations. To this end, we synthesise the necessary examples from known data using ...

We present a human computation game based on the popular board game Dixit. We ask the players not only for annotations, but for a direct critique of the result of an automated system. We present the results of the initial run of the game, in which the answers of 15 players were used to profile the mistakes of an aspect-based opinion mining system. We show that the gameplay allowed us to identif...

Members of bacterial communities communicate and cooperate via diffusible chemical materials they emit into the environment, and at the same time, they also compete for nutrients and space. Agent-based models (ABMs) are useful tools for simulating the growth of communities containing multiple interacting microbial species. In this work we present numerical indices characterizing spatial distrib...

We were faced with a shelved knowledge system at a health insurance company. The system used Bayesian statistics. For correct computations such a system is of course well suited, but not for the people who use it: people do not easily formulate their expertise in numerical probabilities. We addressed the question of whether it is possible to find out in which format experts do represent their k...