behavior) and analysis of variance, including methods for detecting interactions among variables. A chapter on modeling covers the use of linear regression and related procedures in characterizing system behavior, and the final chapter presents tactics for generalizing from empirical results. One of Cohen’s most important points concerns the goals of empirical AI research. Repeatedly, he asks w...

Decision Support Systems for the environment have to incorporate and exploit knowledge about the phenomena and the interdependencies in the affected natural systems, i.e. a model. We discuss different tasks and requirements, provide a logical formalization of the tasks, and propose to use methods and techniques developed in research on modeling and model-based systems in Artificial Intelligence...

Inter-firm collaboration has become a common feature of the developing international economy. Firms as well as the nations have more relationships with each other. Even relatively closed economies or industries are becoming more open, Australia and China are examples of this case. The benefits generated from collaboration and the motivations to form collaboration are investigated by some resear...

In the 70’s and 80’s the success of knowledge-intensive approaches to problem solving eclipsed earlier work on compute-intensive weak methods. However, in recent years, compute-intensive methods have made a surprising comeback. One of the most prominent examples is the success of IBM’s Deep Blue in defeating Gary Kasparov in the 1997 ACM Challenge match. Deep Blue’s performance led Kasparov to ...

Nash equilibrium constitutes a central solution concept in game theory. The task of detecting the Nash equilibria of a finite strategic game remains a challenging problem up-to-date. This paper investigates the effectiveness of three computational intelligence techniques, namely, covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, as well as, differential evolution, ...

Ai miei genitori e mia sorella per l'aiuto concreto di questi anni A Marta che ha condiviso con me gioie e fatiche di questa tesi sostenendo sempre la mia speranza

Educational technology constitutes an important aspect in modern education providing unique learning experiences to students and improving their learning. Technological resources (especially computers) have been integrated in education for decades. However, integration of educational technology in early childhood education is a more recent trend compared to the other levels of education. This f...

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.05.028 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Gil). 1 These authors equally contributed to this work. Fertility rates have dramatically decreased in the last two decades, especially in men. It has been described that environmental factors, as well as life habits, may affect semen quality...

Forecasting the short run behavior of foreign exchange rates is a challenging problem that has attracted considerable attention. High frequency financial data are typically characterized by noise and non–stationarity. In this work we investigate the profitability of a forecasting methodology based on unsupervised clustering and feedforward neural networks and compare its performance with that o...