Distance metric learning (DML) is critical for a wide variety of machine learning algorithms and pattern recognition applications. Transfer metric learning (TML) leverages the side information (e.g., similar/dissimilar constraints over pairs of samples) from related domains to help the target metric learning (with limited information). Current TML tools usually assume that different domains exp...

Our research is within the subfield of modeling trust and reputation in multi-agent systems for online communities. Specifically, in an online community involving users and entities, users provide opinions (ratings) to entities. For each user, we are interested in addressing two problems: • how to accurately model the reputation of entities by aggregating opinions from all the users (advisors);...

Multi-agent systems (MASs) are societies whose individuals are software-delegatees (agents) acting on behalf of their owners or delegators (people or organizations). When deployed in an open network such as the Internet, MASs face some trust and security issues. Agents come and go, and interact with strangers. Assumptions about security and general trustworthiness of agents and their deployers ...

In last years, trust and reputation has been gaining increasing interest in multi-agent systems (MAS). To address this issue, we propose in this paper a maintenance-based trust mechanism for agents operating in multi-agent systems. In the proposed model, a comprehensive trust assessment process is provided to assess the trustworthiness of the participating agents. The main characteristic of thi...

The Text Analysis Conference MultiLing Pilot of 2011 posed a multi-lingual summarization task to the summarization community, aiming to quantify and measure the performance of multi-lingual, multi-document summarization systems. The task was to create a 240–250 word summary from 10 news texts, describing a given topic. The texts of each topic were provided in seven languages (Arabic, Czech, Eng...

In order to cooperate in the open distributed environment, truster agents need to be aware trustworthiness of trustee agents for selecting suitable interaction partners. Most of the current computational trust models make use of the truster itself experience or reputation from community on trustees to compute the trust values. However, in some circumstances, a truster agent may have no experien...

BACKGROUND The energy requirement of species at each trophic level in an ecological pyramid is a function of the number of organisms and their average mass. Regarding human populations, although considerable attention is given to estimating the number of people, much less is given to estimating average mass, despite evidence that average body mass is increasing. We estimate global human biomass...

The NRCSE was established in 1996 at the University of Washington. Center activities include workshops and other research activities in areas of statistical methodology related to scientific problems in the environmental and ecological sciences. SUMMARY Stream health is often measured by the multimetric benthic index of biotic integrity (B-IBI). For Puget Sound Lowland (PSL) streams, the B-IBI ...

At a time when anthropogenic activities are increasingly disturbing the overall ecological integrity of freshwater ecosystems, monitoring of biological communities is central to assessing the health and function of streams. This study aimed to use a large nation-wide database to develop a multimetric index (the Korean Benthic macroinvertebrate Index of Biological Integrity—KB-IBI) applica...