Nowadays, with a growing use of location-aware, wirelessly connected, mobile devices, we can easily capture trajectories of mobile objects. To exploit these raw trajectories, we need to enhance them with semantic information. Several research fields are currently focusing on semantic trajectories to support queries and inferences to help users for validating and discovering more knowledge about...

The goal of this article is to construct doubly robust (DR) estimators in ignorable missing data and causal inference models. In a missing data model, an estimator is DR if it remains consistent when either (but not necessarily both) a model for the missingness mechanism or a model for the distribution of the complete data is correctly specified. Because with observational data one can never be...

Given a growing sequence of observations x1,...,xn,... , one is required, at each time step n, to make some inference about the stochastic mechanism generating the sequence. Several problems that have numerous applications in different branches of mathematics and computer science can be formulated in this way. For example, one may want to forecast probabilities of the next outcome xn+1 (sequenc...

The emphasis in most hypertext systems is on the navigational methods, rather than on the global document retrieval mechanisms. When a search mechanism is provided, it is often restricted to simple string matching or to the Boolean model. As an alternate method, we propose a retrieval mechanism using Bayesian inference networks. The main contribution of our approach is the automatic constructio...

Game theory is becoming central to the design and analysis of computational mechanisms in which multiple entities interact strategically. The tools of mechanism design are used extensively to engineer incentives for truth revelation into resource allocation (e.g. combinatorial auctions) and preference aggregation protocols (e.g. voting). We argue that mechanism design can also be useful in the ...

In order to realize smart offices, which provides users with comfort via various digital services, we need to acquire context information about the target space. Contexts can be obtained from raw sensor data using context classification methods, such as Bayesian network. However, packet losses and disrupted communications in wireless sensor networks disables the context classification methods t...

Interactive array languages are powerful programming tools for the development of programs for numerical computation. They provide an environment that tends to increase productivity in software development. The trade-off is that in order to provide this nicer programming environment, array languages are usually interpreted, with the resulting negative effect on performance. The ideal programmin...

Probabilistic models have recently received much attention as accounts of human cognition. However, most research in which probabilistic models have been used has been focused on formulating the abstract problems behind cognitive tasks and their optimal solutions, rather than on mechanisms that could implement these solutions. Exemplar models are a successful class of psychological process mode...

A characteristic of natural language is that there are many different ways to express a statement: several meanings can be contained in a single text and the same meaning can be conveyed by different texts. Understanding entailment becomes cruvial to understanding natural language. Natural language inference constitutes an effective way to evaluate machine reading algorithms. It is an interesti...

It is both desirable and plausible to treat natural language itself as a "knowledge representation (KR) formalism. Every KR formalism has syntax and support certain inferences. The syntax of a KR formalism specifies the form in which knowledge must be encoded, and its inference mechanism depends on its syntax. If natural language is a formalism for representing knowledge, then its syntax provid...