Cooperative breeding is a social behaviour in which certain individuals will opt to delay or forgo their own reproduction in order to help other individuals. Cooperative breeding is one of the most conspicuous examples of cooperation in nature. However, theoretical understanding of why this behaviour occurs is lacking and contradictory. In this thesis, I examine the role played by ecological co...

This paper presents a disambiguation method in which word senses are determined using a dictionary. We use a semantic proximity measure between words in the dictionary, taking into account the whole topology of the dictionary, seen as a graph on its entries. We have tested the method on the problem of disambiguation of the dictionary entries themselves, with promising results considering we do ...

In real situations, individuals often have moderate tolerance toward ambient cooperative environment in which they tend to avoid unfavorable interactions and search for favorable ones. How such social tolerance affects the evolution of cooperation and the resulting cooperative networks remains to be answered. To address this issue, here we present an effective model of co-evolutionary prisoner'...

The problem of optimal approximation of function with a linear expansion using overcomplete dictionary of non-orthogonal waveforms is NP-hard. Matching pursuit, introduced by Mallat and Zhang, is a greedy sub-optimal algorithm for finding an approximate solution to the above problem. This technique has been adopted by Neff and Zakhor as an alternative to the conventional DCT-based method for co...

It is known that determinining whether a DEC-POMDP, namely, a cooperative partially observable stochastic game (POSG), has a cooperative strategy with positive expected reward is complete for NEXP. It was not known until now how cooperation affected that complexity. We show that, for competitive POSGs, the complexity of determining whether one team has a positive-expected-reward strategy is com...

Sparse representation classification (SRC) is being widely investigated on hyperspectral images (HSI). For SRC methods to achieve high classification performance, not only is the development of sparse representation models essential, the designing and learning of quality dictionaries also plays an important role. That is, a redundant dictionary with well-designated atoms is required in order to...

In the pursuit of effective treatments for cancer, an emerging strategy is "active targeting", where nanoparticles are decorated with targeting ligands able to recognize and bind specific receptors overexpressed by tumor cells or tumor vasculature so that a greater fraction of the administered drugs are selectively trafficked to tumor sites. However, the implementation of this strategy has face...

SYSTRAN has demonstrated success in the MT field with its long history spanning nearly 30 years. As a general-purpose fully automatic MT system, SYSTRAN employs a transfer approach. Among its several components, large, carefully encoded, high-quality dictionaries are critical to SYSTRAN's translation capability. A total of over 2.4 million words and expressions are now encoded in the dictionari...