Most decision support systems (DSS) based on causal models fail to analyze the empirical validity of the underlying cause-and-effect hypotheses, but instead concentrate on numerous analysis techniques within the method base. However, the soundness of these cause-and-effect-relations as well as the knowledge of the approximate shape of the functional dependencies underlying these associations tu...

We argue that uncomputability and classical scepticism are both re ections of inductive underdetermination, so that Church's thesis and Hume's problem ought to receive equal emphasis in a balanced approach to the philosophy of induction. As an illustration of such an approach, we investigate how uncomputable the predictions of a hypothesis can be if the hypothesis is to be reliably investigated...

We argue that uncomputability and classical scepticism are both re ections of inductive underdetermination, so that Church's thesis and Hume's problem ought to receive equal emphasis in a balanced approach to the philosophy of induction. As an illustration of such an approach, we investigate how uncomputable the predictions of a hypothesis can be if the hypothesis is to be reliably investigated...

Reliability prediction methods for early design stages suffer from the lack of empirical failure data. However, expert knowledge and data from similar in-service components are information sources ready available. In this work, an expert elicitation procedure for failure rate prediction is presented. In contrast to direct elicitation procedures such as FMEA, relations to in-service components a...

In this paper, we present Espresso, a weakly-supervised, general-purpose, and accurate algorithm for harvesting semantic relations. The main contributions are: i) a method for exploiting generic patterns by filtering incorrect instances using the Web; and ii) a principled measure of pattern and instance reliability enabling the filtering algorithm. We present an empirical comparison of Espresso...

We present an approach for ontology driven extraction of relations from texts aimed mainly to produce enriched semantic annotations for the Semantic Web. The approach exploits linguistic and empirical strategies, by means of a pipeline method involving processes such as a parser, part-of-speech tagger, named entity recognition system, and pattern-based classification, and resources including on...

This paper develops a new framework for analyzing the relations among distributions of spatial objects. Existing analytical methods usually focus on the distribution of one or two specific types of spatial objects. This paper, on the other hand, deals with the relations among more than two distributions of spatial objects. The framework is applicable independent of the type of spatial objects. ...

We present new determinations of bolometric corrections and effective temperature scales as a function of infrared and optical colors, using a large database of photometric observations of about 6500 Population II giants in Galactic Globular Clusters (GGCs), covering a wide range in metallicity (–2.0<[Fe/H]<0.0). New relations for BCK vs (V–K), (J–K) and BCV vs (B–V), (V–I), (V–J), and new cali...