Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are rich models for cooperative decision-making under uncertainty, but are often intractable to solve optimally (NEXP-complete). The transition and observation independent Dec-MDP is a general subclass that has been shown to have complexity in NP, but optimal algorithms for this subclass are still inefficient in practice....

Ecologists studying food web interactions routinely conduct their experiments at scales of 1–10 m whereas real-world landscape-level management problems exist on scales of 10 m or larger. It is often asserted that the experimental tradition in ecology has little to offer to environmental management because small scale empirical insights are not easily, if at all, translatable to the large scale...

Machine-learning methods are becoming increasingly popular for automated data analysis. However, standard methods do not scale up to massive scientific and business data sets without expensive hardware. This paper investigates a practical alternative for scaling up: the use of distributed processing to take advantage of the often dormant PCs and workstations available on local networks. Each wo...

One of the central services provided by the University of Cambridge Computing Service is the email system, Hermes. Since its introduction in 1993 it was based on UW-IMAP and a shared Unix filestore. This architecture has a number of inherent limitations in performance, scalability, resilience, and cost-effectiveness. In order to address these problems, and particularly users’ desire for larger ...

Domains such as vision, bioinformatics, web search and web rankings involve datasets where number of features is very large. Feature selection is commonly employed to deal with high dimensional data. Recently, Quadratic Programming Feature Selection (QPFS) has been shown to outperform many of the existing feature selection methods for a variety of datasets. In this paper, we propose a Sequentia...

Weighted A* (WA*) is a popular search technique that scales up A* while sacrificing solution quality. Recently, researchers have proposed two variants of WA*: KWA* adds diversity to WA*, and MSC-WA* adds commitment to WA*. In this paper, we demonstrate that there is benefit in combining them. The resulting MSC-KWA* scales up to larger domains than WA*, KWA* and MSC-WA*, which is rather surprisi...

1 Centre for Public Mental Health, Department of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2 Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, 3 Centre for Public Mental Health, Department of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 4 Chester M. Pierce, ...

While the growing number of cores per chip allows researchers to solve larger scientific and engineering problems, the parallel efficiency of the deployed parallel software starts to decrease. This unscalability problem happens to both vendorprovided and open-source software and wastes CPU cycles and energy. By expecting CPUs with hundreds of cores to be imminent, we have designed a new framewo...

Introduction Perfusion process involves retention of the cells inside the bioreactor while simultaneously removing spent medium and adding fresh medium continuously. The flow rate of addition of fresh and removal of spent medium are generally kept the same (perfusion rate) to maintain the culture volume inside the bioreactor. Cell retention is possible with many devices but the reliability and ...

Article history: Received 21 September 2009 Received in revised form 23 August 2010 Accepted 23 August 2010 Available online 8 September 2010 Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in computing cosine similarity in many application domains. Most previous studies require the specification of a minimum similarity threshold to perform the cosine similarity computation. However, it is us...