Martine De Cock – författare

This book describes how to use expert knowledge—which is often formulated by using imprecise (fuzzy) words from a natural language. In the 1960s, Zadeh designed special "fuzzy" techniques for such use. In the 1980s, fuzzy techniques started controlling trains, elevators, video cameras, rice cookers, car transmissions, etc. Now, combining fuzzy with neural, genetic, and other intelligent methods leads to new state-of-the-art results: in aerospace industry (from drones to space flights), in mobile robotics, in finances (predicting the value of crypto-currencies), and even in law enforcement (detecting counterfeit banknotes, detecting online child predators and in creating explainable AI systems). The book describes these (and other) applications—as well as foundations and logistics of fuzzy techniques. This book can be recommended to specialists—both in fuzzy and in various application areas—who will learn latest techniques and their applications, and to students interested in innovative ideas.

This book describes research performed in the context of trust/distrust propagation and aggregation, and their use in recommender systems. This is a hot research topic with important implications for various application areas. The main innovative contributions of the work are:-new bilattice-based model for trust and distrust, allowing for ignorance and inconsistency-proposals for various propagation and aggregation operators, including the analysis of mathematical properties-Evaluation of these operators on real data, including a discussion on the data sets and their characteristics.-A novel approach for identifying controversial items in a recommender system-An analysis on the utility of including distrust in recommender systems-Various approaches for trust based recommendations (a.o. base on collaborative filtering), an in depth experimental analysis, and proposal for a hybrid approach-Analysis of various user types in recommender systems to optimize bootstrapping of cold start users.

This book describes research performed in the context of trust/distrust propagation and aggregation, and their use in recommender systems. This is a hot research topic with important implications for various application areas. The main innovative contributions of the work are:-new bilattice-based model for trust and distrust, allowing for ignorance and inconsistency-proposals for various propagation and aggregation operators, including the analysis of mathematical properties-Evaluation of these operators on real data, including a discussion on the data sets and their characteristics.-A novel approach for identifying controversial items in a recommender system-An analysis on the utility of including distrust in recommender systems-Various approaches for trust based recommendations (a.o. base on collaborative filtering), an in depth experimental analysis, and proposal for a hybrid approach-Analysis of various user types in recommender systems to optimize bootstrapping of cold start users.

This book describes research performed in the context of trust/distrust propagation and aggregation, and their use in recommender systems. This is a hot research topic with important implications for various application areas. The main innovative contributions of the work are:-new bilattice-based model for trust and distrust, allowing for ignorance and inconsistency-proposals for various propagation and aggregation operators, including the analysis of mathematical properties-Evaluation of these operators on real data, including a discussion on the data sets and their characteristics.-A novel approach for identifying controversial items in a recommender system-An analysis on the utility of including distrust in recommender systems-Various approaches for trust based recommendations (a.o. base on collaborative filtering), an in depth experimental analysis, and proposal for a hybrid approach-Analysis of various user types in recommender systems to optimize bootstrapping of cold start users.

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative language tailored towards solving combinatorial optimization problems. It has been successfully applied to e.g. planning problems, configuration and verification of software, diagnosis and database repairs. However, ASP is not directly suitable for modeling problems with continuous domains. Such problems occur naturally in diverse fields such as the design of gas and electricity networks, computer vision and investment portfolios. To overcome this problem we study FASP, a combination of ASP with fuzzy logic -- a class of manyvalued logics that can handle continuity. We specifically focus on the following issues:1. An important question when modeling continuous optimization problems is how we should handle overconstrained problems, i.e. problems that have no solutions. In many cases we can opt to accept an imperfect solution, i.e. a solution that does not satisfy all the stated rules (constraints). However, this leads to the question: what imperfect solutions should we choose? We investigate this question and improve upon the state-of-the-art by proposing an approach based on aggregation functions.2. Users of a programming language often want a rich language that is easy to model in. However, implementers and theoreticians prefer a small language that is easy to implement and reason about. We create a bridge between these two desires by proposing a small core language for FASP and by showing that this language is capable of expressing many of its common extensions such as constraints, monotonically decreasing functions, aggregators, S-implicators and classical negation.3. A well-known technique for solving ASP consists of translating a program P to a propositional theory whose models exactly correspond to the answer sets of P. We show how this technique can be generalized to FASP, paving the way to implement efficient fuzzy answer set solvers thatcan take advantage of existing fuzzy reasoners.

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative language tailored towards solving combinatorial optimization problems. It has been successfully applied to e.g. planning problems, configuration and verification of software, diagnosis and database repairs. However, ASP is not directly suitable for modeling problems with continuous domains. Such problems occur naturally in diverse fields such as the design of gas and electricity networks, computer vision and investment portfolios. To overcome this problem we study FASP, a combination of ASP with fuzzy logic -- a class of manyvalued logics that can handle continuity. We specifically focus on the following issues:1. An important question when modeling continuous optimization problems is how we should handle overconstrained problems, i.e. problems that have no solutions. In many cases we can opt to accept an imperfect solution, i.e. a solution that does not satisfy all the stated rules (constraints). However, this leads to the question: what imperfect solutions should we choose? We investigate this question and improve upon the state-of-the-art by proposing an approach based on aggregation functions.2. Users of a programming language often want a rich language that is easy to model in. However, implementers and theoreticians prefer a small language that is easy to implement and reason about. We create a bridge between these two desires by proposing a small core language for FASP and by showing that this language is capable of expressing many of its common extensions such as constraints, monotonically decreasing functions, aggregators, S-implicators and classical negation.3. A well-known technique for solving ASP consists of translating a program P to a propositional theory whose models exactly correspond to the answer sets of P. We show how this technique can be generalized to FASP, paving the way to implement efficient fuzzy answer set solvers thatcan take advantage of existing fuzzy reasoners.

This book comprehensively studies fuzzy temporal and spatial information, starting from the basics on fuzzy set theory and temporal/spatial reasoning, the development of a new model to represent fuzzy temporal/spatial information, the study of efficient and complete reasoning algorithms, and their application in an information retrieval context. This useful volume presents the first approach that goes beyond merely representing information, by thoroughly addressing a variety of reasoning tasks. It also focuses on applications in the domain of information retrieval, and demonstrating the practical importance of the proposed framework.

FLINS, originally an acronym for “Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent technologies in Nuclear Science”, has now been extended to include computational intelligent systems for applied research. FLINS 2004, is the sixth in a series of international conferences, covers state-of-the-art research and development in applied computational intelligence for applied research in general and for power/nuclear engineering in particular. This book presents the latest research trends and future research directions in the field.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in:• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings® (ISTP / ISI Proceedings)• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)• CC Proceedings — Engineering & Physical Sciences