Correlation-based learning (CBL) has been suggested as the mechanism that underlies the development of simple-cell receptive fields in the primary visual cortex of cats, including orientation preference (OR) and ocular dominance (OD) (Linsker, 1986; Miller, Keller, & Stryker, 1989). CBL has been applied successfully to the development of OR and OD individually (Miller, Keller, & Stryker, 1989; ...

When developing multimedia as an educational tool formative and summative evaluations should be applied during this process. Among other aspects, these evaluations can pertain to the extent and way of use, the learning contents and their formal presentation, the learning results, the acceptability and the usability of the multimedia tool. Furthermore effectivity and efficiency of the multimedia...

Rough set theory has been proposed by Pawlak in the early 80s to deal with inconsistency problems following from information granulation. It operates on an information table composed of a set U of objects described by a set Q of condition and decision attributes. Decision attributes make a partition of U into decision classes. Basic concepts of rough set theory are: indiscernibility relation on...

Soft computing offers a large variety of tools for decision making. This special issue focuses on different aspects related to soft computing and its application to decision problems. Papers were selected among the ones presented at the 5th Interantional Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence (MDAI 2008) celebrated in Sabadell (Catalonia, Spain). Eight of the papers includ...

In geostatistics it is common practice to assume that the underlying spatial process is stationary and isotropic, that is the spatial distribution is unchanged when the origin of the index set is translated and the process is stationary under rotations about the origin. However in environmental problems, it is not very realistic to make such assumptions since local innuences in the correlation ...

A new conceptualization and measurement of social dominance orientation—individual differences in the preference for group based hierarchy and inequality—is introduced. In contrast to previous measures of social dominance orientation that were designed to be unidimensional, the new measure (SDO7) embeds theoretically grounded subdimensions of SDO—SDO-Dominance (SDO-D) and SDO-Egalitarianism (SD...

The paper proposes a two-phase methodology to support groups in multicriteria classification problems. The first phase, which relies on dominance-based rough set approach, takes as input a set of assignment examples, and generates as output a set of collective decision rules representing a generalized description of the preference information of the decision makers. The second phase then applie...

Consideration of preference-orders requires the use of an extended rough set model called Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA). The rough approximations defined within DRSA are based on consistency in the sense of dominance principle. It requires that objects having not-worse evaluation with respect to a set of considered criteria than a referent object cannot be assigned to a worse class ...

We view match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., classifications, XML schemas) and produces a mapping between the nodes of these graphs that correspond semantically to each other. Semantic matching is based on two ideas: (i) we discover mappings by computing semantic relations (e.g., equivalence, more general); (ii) we determine semantic relations by analyzing the meanin...

Interpretation of artificial intelligence on the base of the philosophical fictionalism allowed discussing the educational technologies in the context of conditions for strengthening of discursive power of pupils’ thought. The artificial intelligence received broad interpretation as an embodiment of a literary image, which did not have unambiguous link with the area of logical formalisms and ma...