One vital task of a project's owner is to determine a reliable and reasonable construction time for the project. A U.S. highway agency typically uses the bar chart or critical path method for estimating project duration, which requires the determination of construction logic. The current practice of activity sequencing is challenging, time-consuming, and heavily dependent upon the agency schedulers' knowledge and experience. Several agencies have developed templates of repetitive projects based on expert inputs to save time and support schedulers in sequencing a new project. However, these templates are deterministic, dependent on expert judgments, and get outdated quickly. This study aims to enhance the current practice by proposing a data-driven approach that leverages the readily available daily work report data of past projects to develop a knowledge base of construction sequence patterns. With a novel application of sequential pattern mining, the proposed framework allows for the determination of common sequential patterns among work items and proposed domain measures such as the confidence level of applying a pattern for future projects under different project conditions. The framework also allows for the extraction of only relevant sequential patterns for future construction time estimation.

We discuss two ways of using abduction to explain missing entailments from description logic knowledge bases, one more common, one more unusual, and then have a closer look at how current results/implementations on abduction could be used towards generating such explanations, and what still needs to be done. / This is an extended version of an article submitted to XLoKR 2021.

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Объектом настоящего исследования являются алгоритмы и методы машинного обучения, и их применение в задачах прогнозирования временных рядов и анализа текста. В данном исследовании предложено применить модифицированную архитектуру рекуррентной нейронной сети (LSTM) для предсказания цены закрытия криптовалютных котировок на следующий день от текущего, а также, применить алгоритмы классификации, такие как: логистическая регрессия, Linear SVC, Gradient Boosting, для определения эмоциональной метки новостной записи для разработки стратегии прогнозирования точек входа и выхода из торговых позиций на рынке криптовалют. Исследование фокусируется на доказательстве того, что применение методов и алгоритмов машинного обучения для создания торговой стратегии для определения точек входа и выхода из торговой позиции, повысит эффективность процесса торговли, а также, ускорит процесс сбора и обработки аналитических данных для технического анализа рынка. Для обучения используемых моделей, разработаны и использованы программные средства (парсеры), с помощью которых извлекаются данные с криптовалютной торговой биржи Binance, а также, криптовалютной социальной сети CryptoPanic. Экспериментальные результаты показывают, что среднем автоматизированный процесс определения точек входа и выхода из торговых позиций быстрее в 2 раза чем при ручном определении, а количество сделок увеличится примерно на 17.5%. В итоге можно сделать вывод о том, что, используя передовые технологии возможно разработать инструмент для повышения эффективности торговли криптовалютой. / The object of this study is the algorithms and methods of machine learning, and their application in the problems of time series forecasting and text analysis. In this study, it is proposed to apply a modified architecture of a recurrent neural network (LSTM) to predict the closing price of cryptocurrency quotes the next day from the current one, and also to apply classification algorithms, such as: logistic regression, Linear SVC, Gradient Boosting, to determine the emotional label of a news entry to develop a strategy for predicting entry and exit points for trading positions in the cryptocurrency market. The study focuses on proving that the use of machine learning methods and algorithms to create a trading strategy to determine entry and exit points from a trading position will increase the efficiency of the trading process, as well as speed up the process of collecting and processing analytical data for technical market analysis. To train the models used, software tools (parsers) were developed and used, with the help of which data is extracted from the Binance cryptocurrency trading exchange, as well as the CryptoPanic cryptocurrency social network. Experimental results show that, on average, the automated process of determining entry and exit points from trading positions is 2 times faster than with manual determination, and the number of transactions will increase by about 17.5%. As a result, we can conclude that, using advanced technologies, it is possible to develop a tool to improve the efficiency of cryptocurrency trading.

Mobile agents hold significant benefits for the rapid expansion of Internet applications and current trends in computing. Despite continued interest, the promised deployment has not taken place, indicating a need for a programming model to introduce novice mobile agent programmers to this environment/paradigm. Accordingly the research question asked was, ”Since novice mobile agent programmers1 require a paradigm shift to construct successful systems, how can they be equipped to grasp the contextual issues and gain the necessary skills within reasonable time limits?” To answer the question, a complete reference providing contextual information and knowledge of mobile agent system development was compiled. Simultaneously novices are introduced to agent orientation. A generic mobile agent system architectural model, incorporating guidelines for programming mobile agents, further provides a framework that can be used to design a mobile agent system. These two structures are presented in a knowledge base that serves as a referencing tool to unlock concepts and knowledge units to novices while developing mobile agent systems. / Computing / (M.Sc. (Computer Science))

This dissertation describes a research study conducted to determine the benefits and use of ontology technologies to support a simulation environment that evaluates countermeasures employed to protect military aircraft. Within the military, aircraft represent a significant investment and these valuable assets need to be protected against various threats, such as man-portable air-defence systems. To counter attacks from these threats, countermeasures are deployed, developed and evaluated by utilising modelling and simulation techniques. The system described in this research simulates real world scenarios of aircraft, missiles and countermeasures in order to assist in the evaluation of infra-red countermeasures against missiles in specified scenarios. Traditional ontology has its origin in philosophy, describing what exists and how objects relate to each other. The use of formal ontologies in Computer Science have brought new possibilities for modelling and representation of information and knowledge in several domains. These advantages also apply to military information systems where ontologies support the complex nature of military information. After considering ontologies and their advantages against the requirements for enhancements of the simulation system, an ontology was constructed by following a formal development methodology. Design research, combined with the adaptive methodology of development, was conducted in a unique way, therefore contributing to establish design research as a formal research methodology. The ontology was constructed to capture the knowledge of the simulation system environment and the use of it supports the functions of the simulation system in the domain. The research study contributes to better communication among people involved in the simulation studies, accomplished by a shared vocabulary and a knowledge base for the domain. These contributions affirmed that ontologies can be successfully use to support military simulation systems / Computing / M. Tech. (Information Technology)

Floods are natural phenomena which are a threat to human settlements. Flooding can result in costly repairs to buildings, loss of business and, in some cases, loss of life. The forecasts for climate change show a further increased risk of flooding in future years. Accordingly, the flooding of residential property has been observed as on the rise in the UK. It is difficult to prevent floods from occurring, but the effects of flooding can be managed in an attempt to reduce risks and costs of repair. This can be achieved through ensuring a good understanding of the problem, and thereby establishing good management systems which are capable of dealing with all aspects of the flood. The use of an intelligent system for assessment and remediation of buildings subjected to flooding damage can facilitate the management of this problem. Such a system can provide guidance for the assessment of vulnerability and the repair of flood damaged residential buildings; this could save time and money through the use of the advantages and benefits offered by knowledge base systems. A prototype knowledge base system has been developed in this research. The system comprises three subsystems: degree of vulnerability assessment subsystem; remediation options subsystem; and foundation damage assessment subsystem. The vulnerability assessment subsystem is used to calculate the degree of vulnerability, which will then be used by the remediation options subsystem to select remediation options strategy. The vulnerability assessment subsystem can subsequently be used to calculate the degree to which the building is vulnerable to damage by flooding even if it is not flooded. Remediation options subsystem recommended two strategy options: either ordinary remediation options in the case of vulnerability being low or, alternatively, resilience remediation options in the case of vulnerability being high. The foundation damage assessment subsystem is working alone and is used to assess the damage caused by flooding to the building s foundation, and to thereby recommend a repair option based on the damage caused and foundation type. The system has been developed based on the knowledge acquired from different sources and methods, including survey questionnaires, documents, interviews, and workshops. The system is then evaluated by experts and professionals in the industry. The developed system makes a contribution in the management and standardisation of residential building flooded damage and repair.

The meet up between data, processes and structural knowledge in modeling complex enterprise systems is a challenging task that has led to the study of combining formalisms from knowledge representation, database theory, and process management. Moreover, to ensure system correctness, formal verification also comes into play as a promising approach that offers well-established techniques. In line with this, significant results have been obtained within the research on data-aware business processes, which studies the marriage between static and dynamic aspects of a system within a unified framework. However, several limitations are still present. Various formalisms for data-aware processes that have been studied typically use a simple mechanism for specifying the system dynamics. The majority of works also assume a rather simple treatment of inconsistency (i.e., reject inconsistent system states). Many researches in this area that consider structural domain knowledge typically also assume that such knowledge remains fixed along the system evolution (context-independent), and this might be too restrictive. Moreover, the information model of data-aware processes sometimes relies on relatively simple structures. This situation might cause an abstraction gap between the high-level conceptual view that business stakeholders have, and the low-level representation of information. When it comes to verification, taking into account all of the aspects above makes the problem more challenging. In this thesis, we investigate the verification of data-aware processes in the presence of ontologies while at the same time addressing all limitations above. Specifically, we provide the following contributions: (1) We propose a formal framework called Golog-KABs (GKABs), by leveraging on the state of the art formalisms for data-aware processes equipped with ontologies. GKABs enable us to specify semantically-rich data-aware business processes, where the system dynamics are specified using a high-level action language inspired by the Golog programming language. (2) We propose a parametric execution semantics for GKABs that is able to elegantly accommodate a plethora of inconsistency-aware semantics based on the well-known notion of repair, and this leads us to consider several variants of inconsistency-aware GKABs. (3) We enhance GKABs towards context-sensitive GKABs that take into account the contextual information during the system evolution. (4) We marry these two settings and introduce inconsistency-aware context-sensitive GKABs. (5) We introduce the so-called Alternating-GKABs that allow for a more fine-grained analysis over the evolution of inconsistency-aware context-sensitive systems. (6) In addition to GKABs, we introduce a novel framework called Semantically-Enhanced Data-Aware Processes (SEDAPs) that, by utilizing ontologies, enable us to have a high-level conceptual view over the evolution of the underlying system. We provide not only theoretical results, but have also implemented this concept of SEDAPs. We also provide numerous reductions for the verification of sophisticated first-order temporal properties over all of the settings above, and show that verification can be addressed using existing techniques developed for Data-Centric Dynamic Systems (which is a well-established data-aware processes framework), under suitable boundedness assumptions for the number of objects freshly introduced in the system while it evolves. Notably, all proposed GKAB extensions have no negative impact on computational complexity.

Teacher stories were once relegated to informal gatherings but more recently this aspect of teacher development is being carefully studied in more formalized settings because it is believed to be an important part of teacher development. New ways are being sought to use various aspects of storytelling to help pre-service teachers develop important teaching skills through reflection on experience, dialogue journals, case studies and autobiography. Despite these efforts at the university level, it is especially difficult for pre-service teachers to integrate and apply theories from their methods courses to actual classroom practice. Less effort has been focused on storytelling processes that may occur outside these formal approaches. This study, therefore, looked at how pre-service teachers used stories told in an informal setting to process aspects of learning to teach. This study revealed that pre-service teachers engage in story telling for reasons and in ways that are different from teacher educator intents. Using interviews and private dialogues, patterns of when, how and why six pre-service teachers used oral stories emerged that illuminate challenges to using personal and appropriated stories in coursework. The findings of this study include how oral storytelling is used by pre-service teachers to process emotion and demonstrate specific identities and personal characteristics.

Cette recherche s'inscrit dans le domaine de la personnalisation d'Entrepôt de Données (ED) et concerne l'aide à l'exploitation d'un ED. Nous intéressons à l'assistance à apporter à un utilisateur lors d'une analyse en ligne, dans son utilisation de ressources d'exploitation existantes. Le domaine d'application concerné est la gestion hospitalière, dans le cadre de la nouvelle gouvernance, et en se limitant au périmètre du Programme de Médicalisation des Systèmes d'Information (PMSI). Cette recherche a été supportée par l'Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Marseille (APHM). L'approche retenue pour développer une telle assistance à l'utilisateur d'ED est sémantique et guidée par l'usage d'ontologies. Le système d'assistance mettant en oeuvre cette approche, nommé Ontologies-based Personalization System (OPS), s'appuie sur une Base de Connaissances (BC) exploitée par un moteur de personnalisation. La BC est composée des trois ontologies : de domaine, de l'ED et des ressources. Le moteur de personnalisation permet d'une part une recherche personnalisée de ressources d'exploitation de l'ED en s'appuyant sur le profil de l'utilisateur, et d'autre part pour une ressource particulière, une recommandation de ressources complémentaires selon trois stratégies possibles. Afin de valider nos propositions, un prototype du système OPS a été développé avec un moteur de personnalisation a été implémenté en Java et exploitant une base de connaissance constituée des trois ontologies en OWL interconnectées. Nous illustrons le fonctionnement de notre système sur trois scenarii d'expérimentation liés au PMSI et définis avec des experts métiers de l'APHM. / This research is situated in the domain of Data Warehouses (DW) personalization and concerns DW assistance. Specifically, we are interested in assisting a user during an online analysis processes to use existing operational resources. The application of this research concerns hospital management, for hospitals governance, and is limited to the scope of the Program of Medicalization of Information Systems (PMSI). This research was supported by the Public Hospitals of Marseille (APHM). Our proposal is a semantic approach based on ontologies. The support system implementing this approach, called Ontology-based Personalization System (OPS), is based on a knowledge base operated by a personalization engine. The knowledge base is composed of three ontologies: a domain ontology, an ontology of the DW structure, and an ontology of resources. The personalization engine allows firstly, a personalized search of resources of the DW based on users profile, and secondly for a particular resource, an expansion of the research by recommending new resources based on the context of the resource. To recommend new resources, we have proposed three possible strategies. To validate our proposal, a prototype of the OPS system was developed, a personalization engine has been implemented in Java. This engine exploit an OWL knowledge composed of three interconnected OWL ontologies. We illustrate three experimental scenarios related to PMSI and defined with APHM domain experts.