Most legal expert systems attempt to implement complex models of legal reasoning. Yet the utility of a legal expert system lies not in the extent to which it simulates a lawyer's approach to a legal problem, but in the quality of its predictions and of its arguments. A complex model of legal reasoning is not necessary: a successful legal expert system can be based upon a simplified model of legal reasoning. ¶ Some researchers have based their systems upon a jurisprudential approach to the law, yet lawyers are patently able to operate without any jurisprudential insight. A useful legal expert system should be capable of producing advice similar to that which one might get from a lawyer, so it should operate at the same pragmatic level of abstraction as does a lawyer - not at the more philosophical level of jurisprudence. ¶ A legal expert system called SHYSTER has been developed to demonstrate that a useful legal expert system can be based upon a pragmatic approach to the law. SHYSTER has a simple representation structure which simplifies the problem of knowledge acquisition. Yet this structure is complex enough for SHYSTER to produce useful advice. ¶ SHYSTER is a case-based legal expert system (although it has been designed so that it can be linked with a rule-based system to form a hybrid legal expert system). Its advice is based upon an examination of, and an argument about, the similarities and differences between cases. SHYSTER attempts to model the way in which lawyers argue with cases, but it does not attempt to model the way in which lawyers decide which cases to use in those arguments. Instead, it employs statistical techniques to quantify the similarity between cases. It decides which cases to use in argument, and what prediction it will make, on the basis of that similarity measure. ¶ SHYSTER is of a general design: it provides advice in areas of case law that have been specified by a legal expert using a specification language. Four different, and disparate, areas of law have been specified for SHYSTER, and its operation has been tested in each of those legal domains. ¶ Testing of SHYSTER in these four domains indicates that it is exceptionally good at predicting results, and fairly good at choosing cases with which to construct its arguments. SHYSTER demonstrates the viability of a pragmatic approach to legal expert system design.

<p>Om en pojke </p><p>- en pojke med Downs syndrom och kommunikationssvårigheters vardag</p><p>Uppsatsen handlar om hur den pojke som jag har valt att studera kommunicerar med sin omgivning när hans kommunikationssätt skiljer sig från det normala. Jag tar upp omgivningens inverkan och påverkan på kommunikationen och på livet i stort när förutsättningarna inte är samma som för övriga i gruppen. Pojken jag har studerat har Down syndrom och kraftig hörselnedsättning, han använder sig av teckenkommunikation och pictogrambilder för att kommunicera med sin omgivning. Jag har observerat pojken och intervjuat viktiga personer i hans närhet för att förstå hans livssituation. </p><p>Det samhälle vi lever i idag påverkar oss liksom hur tidigare samhällen har varit konstruerade. Synen på personer med funktionshinder har förändrats över tid och det har påverkat utformningarna av de olika system som finns i dag. Den kunskap och de erfarenheter vi har påverkar vårt sätt att bemöta våra medmänniskor. I det samhälle vi lever är vi separerade från varandra, vi känner bara till och förstår den grupp som vi själva tillhör. Samhället är strukturerat på ett vis där experter tar hand om många av våra existentiella frågor och funderingar, utan att vi för den sakens skull få svar på dem. Att vi i vår tid inte får tillgång till samma erfarenheter som samhällsmedborgare på medeltiden fick är naturligtvis en viktig aspekt som jag tar upp till diskussion och analys.</p>

Recently, Internet has been used widely. Many scholar digital libraries have also followed this trend and grown up quickly. However, information in these digital libraries is complex and huge. Users are difficult to discover papers they need; instead, they often get lost in the information. When they search these digital libraries, they are also limited to the documents which are embodied in these digital libraries, and can not locate important papers in other journals. Citation Analysis has been used in many areas and it is used in this research to build an expert system. Further, we will discover important papers which can represent these research areas. We called these papers as ¡§Key Papers¡¨. A citation can be classified by its relation as ¡§Direct Citation¡¨ and ¡§Indirect Citation¡¨. Many researchers showed that indirect citations held influence, but in the past they just used direct citations to calculate importance and neglected indirect citations. This research combined direct and indirect relations into one index, and used this index to build the expert system. In addition, we provided a visualization of papers¡¦ citation relations, and helped users to find key papers in their research areas. In order to test our system, we collected the top six journals in MIS, totally 7579 papers, and extracted 129114 citations from these papers. The result showed no differences between direct and indirect citations. However, key papers that didn¡¦t belong to these journals could be discovered, and using top three journals could obtain the same result as found in using top six journals.

Om en pojke - en pojke med Downs syndrom och kommunikationssvårigheters vardag Uppsatsen handlar om hur den pojke som jag har valt att studera kommunicerar med sin omgivning när hans kommunikationssätt skiljer sig från det normala. Jag tar upp omgivningens inverkan och påverkan på kommunikationen och på livet i stort när förutsättningarna inte är samma som för övriga i gruppen. Pojken jag har studerat har Down syndrom och kraftig hörselnedsättning, han använder sig av teckenkommunikation och pictogrambilder för att kommunicera med sin omgivning. Jag har observerat pojken och intervjuat viktiga personer i hans närhet för att förstå hans livssituation. Det samhälle vi lever i idag påverkar oss liksom hur tidigare samhällen har varit konstruerade. Synen på personer med funktionshinder har förändrats över tid och det har påverkat utformningarna av de olika system som finns i dag. Den kunskap och de erfarenheter vi har påverkar vårt sätt att bemöta våra medmänniskor. I det samhälle vi lever är vi separerade från varandra, vi känner bara till och förstår den grupp som vi själva tillhör. Samhället är strukturerat på ett vis där experter tar hand om många av våra existentiella frågor och funderingar, utan att vi för den sakens skull få svar på dem. Att vi i vår tid inte får tillgång till samma erfarenheter som samhällsmedborgare på medeltiden fick är naturligtvis en viktig aspekt som jag tar upp till diskussion och analys.

My research is about monitoring the software development process to assess Capability maturity level. Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was developed to improve the software process based on subjective assessment by teams of experts. We propose an objective CMM assessment, which replaces expensive and time-consuming human effort by a knowledge-based system. Compared to Subjective CMM assessment, Objective CMM assessment can be less expensive, takes less time, and is easy to estimate the software development environment maturity. The accuracy of Objective CMM assessment can be the same as Subjective CMM assessment if enough activities are represented as objective activities. For example, if subjective activities total 80 % and objective activities total 20 %, then the accuracy of Objective CMM assessment is not reliable. It would be reliable if the objective activity is increased up to 80% from 20%. This dissertation presents how to change from Subjective CMM assessment to Objective CMM assessment, and we will prove that Objective CMM Assessment is effective.

This dissertation has focused on automated power system fault analysis. New contributions to fault section estimation, protection system performance evaluation and power system/protection system interactive simulation have been achieved. Intelligent techniques including expert systems, fuzzy logic and Petri-nets, as well as data from remote terminal units (RTUs) of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, and digital protective relays have been explored and utilized to fufill the objectives. The task of fault section estimation is difficult when multiple faults, failures of protection devices, and false data are involved. A Fuzzy Reasoning Petri-nets approach has been proposed to tackle the complexities. In this approach, the fuzzy reasoning starting from protection system status data and ending with estimation of faulted power system section is formulated by Petri-nets. The reasoning process is implemented by matrix operations. Data from RTUs of SCADA systems and digital protective relays are used as inputs. Experiential tests have shown that the proposed approach is able to perform accurate fault section estimation under complex scenarios. The evaluation of protection system performance involves issues of data acquisition, prediction of expected operations, identification of unexpected operations and diagnosis of the reasons for unexpected operations. An automated protection system performance evaluation application has been developed to accomplish all the tasks. The application automatically retrieves relay files, processes relay file data, and performs rule-based analysis. Forward chaining reasoning is used for prediction of expected protection operation while backward chaining reasoning is used for diagnosis of unexpected protection operations. Lab tests have shown that the developed application has successfully performed relay performance analysis. The challenge of power system/protection system interactive simulation lies in modeling of sophisticated protection systems and interfacing the protection system model and power system network model seamlessly. An approach which utilizes the "compiled foreign model" mechanism of ATP MODELS language is proposed to model multifunctional digital protective relays in C++ language and seamlessly interface them to the power system network model. The developed simulation environment has been successfully used for the studies of fault section estimation and protection system performance evaluation.

No description available.

Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

[pt] Estudos sobre diagnóstico precoce de falhas em hidrogenadores vêm sendo realizados por várias empresas do setor elétrico brasileiro, visando o estabelecimento de uma nova estratégia de manutenção destas máquinas, de forma a reduzir custos de manutenção e operação, bem como aumentar a confiabilidade do sistema elétrico. Este trabalho tem por finalidade apresentar um Sistema Especialista para diagnóstico precoce de falhas eletromecânicas em hidrogenadores. O método de diagnóstico proposto baseia-se na análise de vibrações observadas no eixo da máquina. As informações de vibração são tratadas, essencialmente, através do seu aspectro de freqüência (Transformada de Fourier do sinal no tempo). Outras informações adicionais também são utilizadas pelo Sistema para o refinamento do diagnóstico final a ser obtido. O Sistema Especialista desenvolvido, denominado DIAGH, utiliza um Banco de Conhecimento que foi constituído a partir de informações heurísticas obtidas através de relatos de especialistas, que conseguiram estabelecer o relacionamento de certas freqüências encontradas em tais aspectros, com falhas ocorridas em hidrogenadores. O Sistema DIAGH foi testado, utilizando-se dados reais obtidos a partir de uma das unidades geradoras da usina de Porto Colômbia pertencentes à FURNAS Centrais Elétricas. / [en] Studies on early diagnosis of hydrogenerators failure have been developed in many Brazilian utilities, regarding the establishment of a new maintenance strategy for these machines. The objectives to be achieved are the reduction in operation and maintenance costs as well as the increase in the system reliability. This work aims at presenting an Expert System for the early diagnosis of eletromechanical failures in hydroelectrical generators. The proposed disagnostic method is based on the analysis of the vibrations observed on the mechine shaft. The measured shaft vibrations are represented in the frequency domain by using the Fast Fourier Tranform. Additional information is also used for the final diagnostic improvement. The Expert System built in this work, called DIAGH, uses a knowledge base which was formed from heuristic information of sécialists. This information is concerned with the relationship between the occurrence of certain frequencies and hydrogenerator faults. The DIAGH system was tested through rela data obtained from one of the generation units of Porto Colômbia Substation of FURNAS Centrais Elétricas.