Discovering knowledge from social media becomes a trend in many domains such as tourism, where users' feedback and rating are the basis of recommendation systems. In this context, cluster analysis has been a major tool to disclose user groups by which the process of collaborative filtering can better determine a personalised suggestion. Matching this to the curse of big data is a challenge with previous studies either implementing conventional techniques on a distributed system or making use of data sampling. Specific to ensemble clustering, only a few aim to obtain both scalability and privacy preserving that are significant to handling social data. This paper presents a new bi-level framework of ensemble clustering in which an instance-segment based analysis is adopted to ensure data privacy and reduce the complexity of clustering the whole dataset. Unlike existing studies, instead of drawing a single clustering from each segment, multiple clusterings are selected to better represent instances therein. Based on published tourism datasets and different experimental settings, the new approach usually outperforms its baselines whilst being competitive to related methods found in the literature. Additional case studies on simulated big datasets and noisy variations are reported and discussed in addition to the analysis of algorithmic parameters.

Attack detection is one of the main features required in modern defence systems. Despite the ongoing research, it remains challenging for a typical mechanism like network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS) to catch up with evolving adversarial attacks. They specifically aim to confuse a machine-learning based predictor. Without the knowledge of adversarial patterns, the best approach is generalising signatures learned from a dataset of legitimate connections and known intrusions. This work focuses on analysing non-payload traffics so that the resulting techniques can be exploited to a range of network-based applications. It investigates a novel means to deal with the problem of imbalanced classes. An optimised undersampling method is introduced to select a subset of majority-class representatives initially created through an ensemble clustering procedure. A weighted combination of criteria representing distributions within and between classes is proposed as the objective function for a global optimisation using the artificial bee colony (ABC). This approach usually outperforms its baselines and other state-of-the-art undersampling models, with ABC being more effective using the global best strategy than a random selection of solutions or an iterative greedy search. The paper also details the parameter analysis offering a heuristic guide for potential taking up of the proposed techniques.

Nonlinear systems, such as robotic systems, play an increasingly important role in our modern daily life and have become more dominant in many industries; however, robotic control still faces various challenges due to diverse and unstructured work environments. This article proposes a double-loop recurrent neural network (DLRNN) with the support of a Type-2 fuzzy system and a self-organizing mechanism for improved performance in nonlinear dynamic robot control. The proposed network has a double-loop recurrent structure, which enables better dynamic mapping. In addition, the network combines a Type-2 fuzzy system with a double-loop recurrent structure to improve the ability to deal with uncertain environments. To achieve an efficient system response, a self-organizing mechanism is proposed to adaptively adjust the number of layers in a DLRNN. This work integrates the proposed network into a conventional sliding mode control (SMC) system to theoretically and empirically prove its stability. The proposed system is applied to a three-joint robot manipulator, leading to a comparative study that considers several existing control approaches. The experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed system and its effectiveness and robustness in response to various external system disturbances.

Finding professional employment continues to challenge a minority of computing graduates, with graduate unemployment and underemployment being higher than ideal in many jurisdictions worldwide. Exploring the viewpoints of recently appointed Computing Graduates and their Employers is the focus of a UK Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Collaborative Enhancement project, in which seven UK Universities are employing workshops with graduates and employers to explore the idealised learner-earner journey. This poster presents preliminary findings from one university, providing insights into effective current practices, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. The insights emerging from this study can help inform future sector practice.

Abstract Representation‐based classification (RC) is an effective gauge of data similarity between a single instance and the whole dataset, which extends traditional individual‐wise distance metrics using representation coefficients. These coefficients show remarkable discrimination nature via various regularisation terms, but the interference from potentially uncorrelated objects involved in this single‐to‐global relation can degrade the effectiveness of the coefficients. In order to filter out those unproductive, or even counter‐productive, information from the decision making processes, this paper proposes a local representation‐based classification (LRC) algorithm to improve the classification accuracy or the RC approach. LRC uses a single‐to‐local relation induced by the local representation‐based neighbourhood (LRN) of each object, rather than the single‐to‐global relationship used by RC. Thanks to LRN, a compact and relevant dataset can be formed by selecting the most relevant data instances in the original dataset, to render a robust representation of a query. LRC was applied to multiple publicly available datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LRC algorithm as evidenced by the higher classification accuracy and more noise‐tolerant capability in reference to alternative RC approaches. Moreover, the sampling ability of LRN is also verified via a comparative study.

The writing sequence of numerals or letters often affects aesthetic aspects of the writing outcomes. As such, it remains a challenge for robotic calligraphy systems to perform, mimicking human writers' implicit intention. This article presents a new robot calligraphy system that is able to learn writing sequences with limited sequential information, producing writing results compatible to human writers with good diversity. In particular, the system innovatively applies a gated recurrent unit (GRU) network to generate robotic writing actions with the support of a prelabeled trajectory sequence vector. Also, a new evaluation method is proposed that considers the shape, trajectory sequence, and structural information of the writing outcome, thereby helping ensure the writing quality. A swarm optimization algorithm is exploited to create an optimal set of parameters of the proposed system. The proposed approach is evaluated using Arabic numerals, and the experimental results demonstrate the competitive writing performance of the system against state-of-the-art approaches regarding multiple criteria (including FID, MAE, PSNR, SSIM, and PerLoss), as well as diversity performance concerning variance and entropy. Importantly, the proposed GRU-based robotic motion planning system, supported with swarm optimization can learn from a small dataset, while producing calligraphy writing with diverse and aesthetically pleasing outcomes.

Learning calligraphy writing skills in robots is regarded as a sophisticated task. Current robotic researchers have proposed many methods to implement various robotic calligraphy systems. However, several limitations of these methods, such as high computational costs and few diversities of generated results constrain the development of calligraphy robots. This article proposes a robotic writing framework based on a robotic hand–eye coordination method to solve these limitations. Inspired by the internal model control (IMC) system, a vision-motor network and a motor-vision network are built to simulate the direct and reverse models, respectively, in the IMC system of a robotic manipulator. The vision-motor network works as an action generator to convert image inputs to robotic actions, and the motor-vision network assists in the training of the vision-motor network. Thus, a pretraining of the motor-vision network is established by random writing movements of a robotic manipulator. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully write strokes of Chinese characters by inputting target stroke images. Although the proposed method is applied to robotic calligraphy, the underpinning research is readily applicable to many other applications, such as human–robot motion mimicking.

Abstract Human activity recognition based on generated sensor data plays a major role in a large number of applications such as healthcare monitoring and surveillance system. Yet, accurately recognizing human activities is still challenging and active research due to people’s tendency to perform daily activities in a different and multitasking way. Existing approaches based on the recurrent setting for human activity recognition have some issues, such as the inability to process data parallelly, the requirement for more memory and high computational cost albeit they achieved reasonable results. Convolutional Neural Network processes data parallelly, but, it breaks the ordering of input data, which is significant to build an effective model for human activity recognition. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes causal convolution based on performers-attention and supervised contrastive learning to entirely forego recurrent architectures, efficiently maintain the ordering of human daily activities and focus more on important timesteps of the sensors’ data. Supervised contrastive learning is integrated to learn a discriminative representation of human activities and enhance predictive performance. The proposed network is extensively evaluated for human activities using multiple datasets including wearable sensor data and smart home environments data. The experiments on three wearable sensor datasets and five smart home public datasets of human activities reveal that our proposed network achieves better results and reduces the training time compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods and basic temporal models.

Abstract Upright balance control is a fundamental skill of bipedal robots for various tasks that are usually performed by human beings. Conventional robotic control is often realized by developing accurate dynamic models using a series of fixed torque‐ankle states, but their success is subject to accurate physical and kinematic models. This can be particularly challenging when external disturbing forces present, but this is common in unstructured robotic working environments, leading to ineffective robotic control. To address such limitation, this paper presents an adaptive ankle impedance control method with the support of the advances of adaptive fuzzy inference systems, by which the desired ankle torques are generated in real time to adaptively meet the dynamic control requirement. In particular, the control method is initialised with specific external disturbing forces first representing a general situation, which then evolves whilst performing in a real‐world working environment by acting on the feedback from the control system. This is implemented by initialising a rule base for a typical situation, and then allowing the rule base to evolve to specific robotic working environments. This closed loop feedback and action mechanism timely and effectively configures the control system to meet the dynamic control requirements. The proposed control method was applied to a bipedal robot on a moving vehicle for system validation and evaluation, with robotic loads ranging from 0 to 1.65 kg and external disturbances in terms of vehicle acceleration ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 , leading to robotic swing angles up to and anti‐disturbance timespans up to 8.5 s. These experimental results demonstrate the power of the proposed upright balance control method in improving the robustness, and thus applicability, of bipedal robots.

Since the Internet of Things (IoT) is widely adopted using Android applications, detecting malicious Android apps is essential. In recent years, Android graph-based deep learning research has proposed many approaches to extract relationships from the application as a graph to generate graph embeddings. First, we demonstrate the effectiveness of graph-based classification using graph neural networks (GNNs)-based classifier to generate API graph embedding. The graph embedding is used with “Permission” and “Intent” to train multiple machine learning and deep learning algorithms to detect Android malware. The classification achieved an accuracy of 98.33% in CICMaldroid and 98.68% in the Drebin data set. However, the graph-based deep learning is vulnerable as an attacker can add fake relationships to avoid detection by the classifier. Second, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based algorithm named VGAE-MalGAN to attack the graph-based GNN Android malware classifier. The VGAE-MalGAN generator generates adversarial malware API graphs, and the VGAE-MalGAN substitute detector (SD) tries to fit the detector. Experimental analysis shows that VGAE-MalGAN can effectively reduce the detection rate of GNN malware classifiers. Although the model fails to detect adversarial malware, experimental analysis shows that retraining the model with generated adversarial samples helps to combat adversarial attacks.

Metalearning has been widely applied for implementing few-shot learning and fast model adaptation. Particularly, existing metalearning methods have been exploited to learn the control mechanism for gradient descent processes, in an effort to facilitate gradient-based learning in gaining high speed and generalization ability. This article presents a novel method that controls the gradient descent process of the model parameters in a neural network, by limiting the model parameters within a low-dimensional latent space. The main challenge for implementing this idea is that a decoder with many parameters may be required. To tackle this problem, the article provides an alternative design of the decoder with a structure that shares certain weights, thereby reducing the number of required parameters. In addition, this work combines ensemble learning with the proposed approach to improve the overall learning performance. Systematic experimental studies demonstrate that the proposed approach offers results superior to the state of the art in performing the Omniglot classification and miniImageNet classification tasks.

Fuzzy clustering decomposes data into clusters using partial memberships by exploring the cluster structure information, which demonstrates the comparable performance for knowledge exploitation under the circumstance of information incompleteness. In general, this scheme considers the memberships of objects to cluster centroids and applies to clusters with the spherical distribution. In addition, the noises and outliers may significantly influence the clustering process; a common mitigation measure is the application of separate noise processing algorithms, but this usually introduces multiple parameters, which are challenging to be determined for different data types. This article proposes a new fuzzy-rough intrigued harmonic discrepancy clustering (HDC) algorithm by noting that fuzzy-rough sets offer a higher degree of uncertainty modeling for both vagueness and imprecision present in real-valued datasets. The HDC is implemented by introducing a novel concept of harmonic discrepancy, which effectively indicates the dissimilarity between a data instance and foreign clusters with their distributions fully considered. The proposed HDC is thus featured by a powerful processing ability on complex data distribution leading to enhanced clustering performance, particularly on noisy datasets, without the use of explicit noise handling parameters. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed HDC, which generally outperforms the popular representative clustering algorithms on both synthetic and benchmark datasets, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Abstract Electronic government (e-government) uses information and communication technologies to deliver public services to individuals and organisations effectively, efficiently and transparently. E-government is one of the most complex systems which needs to be distributed, secured and privacy-preserved, and the failure of these can be very costly both economically and socially. Most of the existing e-government systems such as websites and electronic identity management systems (eIDs) are centralized at duplicated servers and databases. A centralized management and validation system may suffer from a single point of failure and make the system a target to cyber attacks such as malware, denial of service attacks (DoS), and distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). The blockchain technology enables the implementation of highly secure and privacy-preserving decentralized systems where transactions are not under the control of any third party organizations. Using the blockchain technology, exiting data and new data are stored in a sealed compartment of blocks (i.e., ledger) distributed across the network in a verifiable and immutable way. Information security and privacy are enhanced by the blockchain technology in which data are encrypted and distributed across the entire network. This paper proposes a framework of a decentralized e-government peer-to-peer (p2p) system using the blockchain technology, which can ensure both information security and privacy while simultaneously increasing the trust of the public sectors. In addition, a prototype of the proposed system is presented, with the support of a theoretical and qualitative analysis of the security and privacy implications of such system.

The Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA) is a multi-agent artificial immune system designed for anomaly detection. The algorithm is composed of artificial dendritic cell agents that process timestamped stream data. The lifespan of a cell agent is determined by its migration threshold, which influences the algorithm's dynamics significantly. The migration threshold is fixed during cell initialisation which limits the performance on various problems. This work proposes a dynamic migration threshold adjustment mechanism by mapping the population to a 2D grid and using Von Neumann Neighbourhoods to adapt this parameter at run time. This forms a novel algorithm variant termed ‘twoDCA’, implemented using the Repast Simphony agent based java API. This new algorithm is applied on synthetic stream data using a sin function generator with two different ways of migration threshold parameter generation. The experimental results show that the introduction of the Von Neumann Neigh-bourhoods has led to a statistically significant impact on certain behaviours of the algorithm. In particular, the great dynamics of twoDCA is realised by carrying forward the updated migration thresholds between cell reincarnations. The twoDCA is readily applicable to 2D data streams, which will diversify the range of applications substantially to which the algorithm can be applied and yields opportunities to add learning components to the core functionality of the algorithm.

This study proposes an efficient intelligent control structure for uncertain nonlinear systems. The controller is implemented by a sliding mode control framework including a modified broad leaning network (BLS) with a double-loop recurrent structure. In addition, the proposed BLS involves a self-organizing mechanism to increase or decrease the size of the BLS. The technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is used to build the self-organizing mechanism. Moreover, two dynamic thresholds of TOPSIS are automatically determined according to the stability of the controller. One dynamic threshold is used to consider whether to retain or remove existing network neurons in the BLS; and the other is used to generate new neurons, so as to meet the requirements of different control states and save computing resources. To improve the network's dynamic characteristics, a double-loop recurrent structure is further introduced into the self-organizing BLS. The Lyapunov stability function is used to ensure the stability of the control system. The proposed controller is applied to the simulation control of a nonlinear chaotic system and a three-link robot manipulator. The experimental results show that the proposed controller can achieve better control performance against other network-based controllers. The source code of this work is placed at https://github.com/wzhuang-xmu/SODLRBLS

Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems play an essential role in the early detection and diagnosis of developing disease for medical applications. In order to obtain the highly recognizable representation for the medical images, a self-adaptive discriminative autoencoder (SADAE) is proposed in this paper. The proposed SADAE system is implemented under a deep metric learning framework which consists of$K$local autoencoders, employed to learn the$K$subspaces that represent the diverse distribution of the underlying data, and a global autoencoder to restrict the spatial scale of the learned representation of images. Such community of autoencoders is aided by a self-adaptive metric learning method that extracts the discriminative features to recognize the different categories in the given images. The quality of the extracted features by SADAE is compared against that of those extracted by other state-of-the-art deep learning and metric learning methods on five popular medical image data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that the medical image recognition results gained by SADAE are much improved over those by the alternatives.

Inertial measurement units (IMUs) have been widely used to provide accurate location and movement measurement solutions, along with the advances of modern manufacturing technologies. The scale factors of accelerometers and gyroscopes are linear when the range of the sensors are reasonably small, but the factor becomes nonlinear when the range gets much bigger. Based on this observation, this article presents a calibration method for low-cost IMU by effectively deriving the nonlinear scale factors of the sensors. Two motion patterns of the sensor on a rigid object are moved to collect data for calibration: One motion pattern is to upcast and rotate the rigid object, and another pattern is to place the rigid object on a stable base in different attitudes. The rotation motion produces centripetal and Coriolis force, which increases the measurement range of accelerometers. Four cost functions with different weight factors and two sets of data are utilized to optimize the IMU parameters. The weight factor comes from derived formula with input values which are the variance of the noise of the sampled data. The proposed approach was validated and evaluated on both synthetic and real-world data sets, and the experimental results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed approach in improving the accuracy of IMU for long-range use. In particular, the errors of acceleration and angular velocity led by our algorithm are significantly smaller than those resulted from the existing approaches using the same testing data sets, demonstrating a remarkable improvement of 64.12% and 47.90%, respectively.

As an interdisciplinary area, Data Science draws scientific inquiry from a broad range of subject areas such as statistics, mathematics, computer science, machine learning, optimisation, signal processing, information retrieval, databases, cloud computing, computer vision, natural language processing, and so forth. Data Science aims to deliver valuable insights from data, and to meet the challenges of processing very large datasets, that is, Big Data, with new data continuously generated from various channels, such as smart devices, web, mobile and social media. Data volumes of applications in the fields of sciences and engineering, finance, media, online information resources, and so forth, are expected to double every two years over the next decade and beyond. The importance of data intensive systems has been raising and will continue to be one of the foremost fields of research. This brings up many research issues concerning capturing and accessing data effectively and fast, processing it whilst still achieving high performance and throughput, and storing it efficiently for future use. As such, data intensive systems pose many challenges in exploiting parallelism of current and upcoming computer architectures. This special issue focuses on recent advances in Data Science (e.g., Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, Deep Learning, etc.) and data systems, and innovative real-world applications of such technologies to deliver effective and efficient solutions for current and future challenges. This special issue has attracted more than 20 submissions and 6 manuscripts were selected based on review reports. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers and went through at least two rounds of reviews. The contributions of these papers are summarized below. The first contribution by Li et al. reports a novel weighted probabilistic frequent itemset mining algorithm in uncertain databases (i.e., w-PFI), which is implemented by an efficient candidate generation and validation paradigm similar to the working principle of Apriori. This work additionally presents a new probability model to support w-PFI candidate, and three pruning techniques to effectively remove the unpromising candidates immediately to improve system efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm w-PFI yields the best performance amongst the referenced competitors in terms of running time and scalability. The second paper by Sadhukham and Palit presents a novel neighbourhood-based multi-label classifier based on the principles of reverse k-nearest neighbourhood. That is, the neighbourhood was estimated using the reverse k-nearest neighbourhood. This adaptive neighbourhood estimation with the support of implicit handling of the local imbalance works particularly well for multiple-label datasets with imbalanced labels. The proposed approach improves the efficacy of the compared methods based on the experimentation as evidenced by its competitive performance. The third publication by Tsinaslanidis and Guijarro considers chart pattern recognition for trading purposes. In particular, this work proposes the design of a trading system using generic pattern recognition technique which takes proven generic profitable patterns based on historical data as system inputs rather than restricting the search to specific technical patterns. The effectiveness of the proposed system was validated and evaluated by applying the approach to 560 NYSE stocks with generally promising results demonstrated. The article produced by Hu et al. documents an adaptive network with a stacked hourglass network and SSD for video pose estimation especially for videos with joint occlusion. The proposed network is supported by the optimisation of time series motion data using an outlier detection and a Kalman filter. The work was evaluated by applying the proposed adaptive network on two well-known benchmark human pose estimation datasets. The results show higher accuracy and good practicality. The next article by Naik et al. proposes a cognizant honeypot for active fingerprinting attack detection using dynamic fuzzy rule interpolation. This project firstly actively collected data using simulated attacks on honeypots and extracted the most influential attributes from the collected data as the signatures of active fingerprinting attacks. Then, the selected attributes were utilized to devise the dynamic fuzzy rule interpolation system and subsequently to implement the cognizant honeypot. The proposed system is featured by its dynamic rule base for more accurate and efficient detection. The final contribution by Gao et al. reports a hand gesture recognition approach using multimodal data fusion and a multiscale parallel convolutional neural network for human robot interaction. Ten hand gestures were considered in this project and the multiscale parallel convolutional neural network was trained using a dataset generated by this project. The proposed method was implemented on a seven-degree-of-freedom bionic manipulator and promising results were demonstrated based on the experiments using this manipulator. We would like to express our sincere thanks to Dr. Jon G. Hall (Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley-Blackwell Journal Expert Systems: The Journal of Knowledge Engineering) for providing the opportunity to edit this special issue. Additional thanks to the editorial staff for their excellent support. Finally, the guest editors would also like to thank all the referees for their thorough and constructive comments. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Abstract Job shop scheduling systems are widely employed to optimise the efficiency of machine utilisation in the manufacturing industry, by searching the most cost‐effective permutation of job operations based on the cost of each operation on each compatible machine and the relations between job operations. Such systems are paralysed when the cost of operations are not predictable led by the involvement of complex manual operations. This paper proposes a new genetic algorithm‐based job shop scheduling system by integrating a fuzzy learning and inference subsystem in an effort to address this limitation. In particular, the fuzzy subsystem adaptively estimates the completion time and thus cost of each manual task under different conditions based on a knowledge base that is initialised by domain experts and then constantly updated based on its built‐in learning ability and adaptability. The manufacturer of Point of Sale and Point of Purchase products has been utilised in this paper as an example case for both theoretical discussion and experimental study. The experimental results demonstrate the promising of the proposed system in improving the efficiency of manual manufacturing operations.

Abstract Systems of sensor human activity recognition are becoming increasingly popular in diverse fields such as healthcare and security. Yet, developing such systems poses inherent challenges due to the variations and complexity of human behaviors during the performance of physical activities. Recurrent neural networks, particularly long short-term memory have achieved promising results on numerous sequential learning problems, including sensor human activity recognition. However, parallelization is inhibited in recurrent networks due to sequential operation and computation that lead to slow training, occupying more memory and hard convergence. One-dimensional convolutional neural network processes input temporal sequential batches independently that lead to effectively executed operations in parallel. Despite that, a one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network is not sensitive to the order of the time steps which is crucial for accurate and robust systems of sensor human activity recognition. To address this problem, we propose a network architecture based on dilated causal convolution and multi-head self-attention mechanisms that entirely dispense recurrent architectures to make efficient computation and maintain the ordering of the time steps. The proposed method is evaluated for human activities using smart home binary sensors data and wearable sensor data. Results of conducted extensive experiments on eight public and benchmark HAR data sets show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art models based on recurrent settings and temporal models.

It has been a challenging task for a robotic arm to accurately reach and grasp objects, which has drawn much research attention. This article proposes a robotic hand-eye coordination system by simulating the human behavior pattern to achieve a fast and robust reaching ability. This is achieved by two neural-network-based controllers, including a rough reaching movement controller implemented by a pretrained radial basis function for rough reaching movements, and a correction movement controller built from a specifically designed brain emotional nesting network (BENN) for smooth correction movements. In particular, the proposed BENN is designed with high nonlinear mapping ability, with its adaptive laws derived from the Lyapunov stability theorem; from this, the robust tracking performance and accordingly the stability of the proposed control system are guaranteed by the utilization of the H∞control approach. The proposed BENN is validated and evaluated by a chaos synchronization simulation, and the overall control system by object grasping tasks through a physical robotic arm in a real-world environment. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed control system in reference to those with single neural networks.

Dendritic cell algorithm (DCA) is a class of artificial immune systems that was originally developed for anomaly detection in networked systems and later as a general binary classifier. Conventionally, in its life cycle, the DCA goes through four phases including feature categorisation into artificial signals, context detection of data items, context assignment, and finally labeling of data items as either abnormal or normal class. During the context detection phase, the DCA requires users to manually pre-define the parameters used by its weighted function to process the signals and data items. Notice that the manual derivation of the parameters of the DCA cannot guarantee the optimal set of weights being used, research attention has thus been attracted to the optimisation of the parameters. This paper reports a systematic comparative study between Genetic algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm optimisation (PSO) on parameter optimisation for DCA. In order to evaluate the performance of GADCA and PSO-DCA, twelve publicly available datasets from UCI machine learning repository were employed. The performance results based on the computational time, classification accuracy, sensitivity, F-measure, and precision show that, the GA-DCA overall outperforms PSO-DCA for most of the datasets.

Malware has remained a consistent threat since its emergence, growing into a plethora of types and in large numbers. In recent years, numerous new malware variants have enabled the identification of new attack surfaces and vectors, and have become a major challenge to security experts, driving the enhancement and development of new malware analysis techniques to contain the contagion. One of the preliminary steps of malware analysis is to remove the abundance of counterfeit malware samples from the large collection of suspicious samples. This process assists in the management of man and machine resources effectively in the analysis of both unknown and likely malware samples. Hashing techniques are one of the fastest and efficient techniques for performing this preliminary analysis such as fuzzy hashing and import hashing. However, both hashing methods have their limitations and they may not be effective on their own, instead the combination of two distinctive methods may assist in improving the detection accuracy and overall performance of the analysis. This paper proposes a Fuzzy-Import hashing technique which is the combination of fuzzy hashing and import hashing to improve the detection accuracy and overall performance of malware analysis. This proposed Fuzzy-Import hashing offers several benefits which are demonstrated through the experimentation performed on the collected malware samples and compared against stand-alone techniques of fuzzy hashing and import hashing.

YARA rules utilises string or pattern matching to perform malware analysis and is one of the most effective methods in use today. However, its effectiveness is dependent on the quality and quantity of YARA rules employed in the analysis. This can be managed through the rule optimisation process, although, this may not necessarily guarantee effective utilisation of YARA rules and its generated findings during its execution phase, as the main focus of YARA rules is in determining whether to trigger a rule or not, for a suspect sample after examining its rule condition. YARA rule conditions are Boolean expressions, mostly focused on the binary outcome of the malware analysis, which may limit the optimised use of YARA rules and its findings despite generating significant information during the execution phase. Therefore, this paper proposes embedding fuzzy rules with YARA rules to optimise its performance during the execution phase. Fuzzy rules can manage imprecise and incomplete data and encompass a broad range of conditions, which may not be possible in Boolean logic. This embedding may be more advantageous when the YARA rules become more complex, resulting in multiple complex conditions, which may not be processed efficiently utilising Boolean expressions alone, thus compromising effective decision-making. This proposed embedded approach is applied on a collected malware corpus and is tested against the standard and enhanced YARA rules to demonstrate its success.

This paper proposes a self-organizing control system for uncertain nonlinear systems. The proposed neural network is composed of a conventional brain emotional learning network (BEL) and a cerebellar model articulation controller network (CMAC). The input value of the network is feed to a BEL channel and a CMAC channel. The output of the network is generated by the comprehensive action of the two channels. The structure of the network is dynamic, using a self-organizing algorithm allows increasing or decreasing weight layers. The parameters of the proposed network are on-line tuned by the brain emotional learning rules; the updating rules of CMAC and the robust controller are derived from the Lyapunov function; in addition, stability analysis theory is used to guaranty the proposed controller's convergence. A simulated mobile robot is applied to prove the effectiveness of the proposed control system. By comparing with the performance of other neural-network-based control systems, the proposed network produces better performance.

Many factors have been shown to be important for supporting effective learning and teaching -- and thus progression and success -- in higher education. While factors such as key introductory-level (CS1) knowledge and skills, as well as pre-university learning and qualifications, have been extensively explored, the impact of measures of positive psychology are less well understood for the discipline of computer science. University study can be a period of significant transition for many students; therefore an individual's positive psychology may have considerable impact upon their response to these challenges. This work investigates the relationships between effective learning and success (first-year performance and attendance) and two measures of positive psychology: Grit and the Nicolson McBride Resilience Quotient (NMRQ). Data was captured by integrating Grit (N=58) and Resilience (N=50) questionnaires and related coaching into the first-year of the undergraduate computer science programme at a single UK university. Analyses demonstrate that NMRQ is significantly linked to attendance and performance for individual subjects and year average marks; however, this was not the case for Grit. This suggests that development of targeted interventions to support students in further developing their resilience could support their learning, as well as progression and retention. Resilience could be used, in concert with other factors such as learning analytics, to augment a range of existing models to predict future student success, allowing targeted academic and pastoral support.

Recently, image‐based scene parsing has attracted increasing attention due to its wide application. However, conventional models can only be valid on images with the same domain of the training set and are typically trained using discrete and meaningless labels. Inspired by the traditional zero‐shot learning methods which employ auxiliary side information to bridge the source and target domains, the authors propose a novel framework called semantic combined network (SCN), which aims at learning a scene parsing model only from the images of the seen classes while targeting on the unseen ones. In addition, with the assistance of semantic embeddings of classes, the proposed SCN can further improve the performances of traditional fully supervised scene parsing methods. Extensive experiments are conducted on the data set Cityscapes, and the results show that the proposed SCN can perform well on both zero‐shot scene parsing (ZSSP) and generalised ZSSP settings based on several state‐of‐the‐art scenes parsing architectures. Furthermore, the authors test the proposed model under the traditional fully supervised setting and the results show that the proposed SCN can also significantly improve the performances of the original network models.

Dynamic control, including robotic control, faces both the theoretical challenge of obtaining accurate system models and the practical difficulty of defining uncertain system bounds. To facilitate such challenges, this paper proposes a control system consisting of a novel type of fuzzy neural network and a robust compensator controller. The new fuzzy neural network is implemented by integrating a number of key components embedded in a Type-2 fuzzy cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) and a brain emotional learning controller (BELC) network, thereby mimicking an ideal sliding mode controller. The system inputs are fed into the neural network through a Type-2 fuzzy inference system (T2FIS), with the results subsequently piped into sensory and emotional channels which jointly produce the final outputs of the network. That is, the proposed network estimates the nonlinear equations representing the ideal sliding mode controllers using a powerful compensator controller with the support of T2FIS and BELC, guaranteeing robust tracking of the dynamics of the controlled systems. The adaptive dynamic tuning laws of the network are developed by exploiting the popular brain emotional learning rule and the Lyapunov function. The proposed system was applied to a robot manipulator and a mobile robot, demonstrating its efficacy and potential; and a comparative study with alternatives indicates a significant improvement by the proposed system in performing the intelligent dynamic control.

Feature extraction plays a vital role in visual action recognition. Many existing gradient-based feature extractors, including histogram of oriented gradients, histogram of optical flow, motion boundary histograms, and histogram of motion gradients, build histograms for representing different actions over the spatio-temporal domain in a video. However, these methods require to set the number of bins for information aggregation in advance. Varying numbers of bins usually lead to inherent uncertainty within the process of pixel voting with regard to the bins in the histogram. This article proposes a novel method to handle such uncertainty by fuzzifying these feature extractors. The proposed approach has two advantages: it better represents the ambiguous boundaries between the bins and, thus, the fuzziness of the spatio-temporal visual information entailed in videos; and the contribution of each pixel is flexibly controlled by a fuzziness parameter for various scenarios. The proposed family of fuzzy descriptors and a combination of them are evaluated on two publicly available datasets, demonstrating that the proposed approach outperforms the original counterparts and other state-of-the-art methods.

Traditional methods for motion comparison consider features from individual characters. However, the semantic meaning of many human activities is usually defined by the interaction between them, such as a high-five interaction of two characters. There is little success in adapting interaction-based features in activity comparison, as they either do not have a fixed topology or are in high dimensional. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for activity comparison from the interaction point of view. Our new metric evaluates the similarity of interaction by adapting the Earth Mover's Distance onto a customized geometric mesh structure that represents spatial-temporal interactions. This allows us to compare different classes of interactions and discover their intrinsic semantic similarity. We created five interaction databases of different natures, covering both two-characters (synthetic and real-people) and character-object interactions, which are open for public uses. We demonstrate how the proposed metric aligns well with the semantic meaning of the interaction. We also apply the metric in interaction retrieval and show how it outperforms existing ones. The proposed method can be used for unsupervised activity detection in monitoring systems and activity retrieval in smart animation systems.

The rapid expansion of the Internet has experienced a significant increase in cases of child abuse, as more and more young children have greater access to the Internet. In particular, adults and minors are able to exchange sexually explicit messages and media via a variety of online platforms that are widely available, which leads to an increasing concern of child grooming. Traditionally, the identification of child grooming relies on the analysis and localisation of conversation texts, but this is usually time-consuming and associated with other implications such as psychological pressure on the investigators. Therefore, automatic methods to detect grooming conversations have attracted the attention of many researchers. This paper proposes such a system to identify child grooming in online chat conversations, where the training data of the system were harvested from publicly available information. The data processing is based on a group of AI technologies, including fuzzy-rough feature selection and fuzzy twin support vector machine. Evaluation shows the promise of the proposed approach in identifying online grooming conversations to be implemented in the future after further development to support real-world cases.

Dendritic cell algorithm (DCA) is an immune-inspired classification algorithm which is developed for the purpose of anomaly detection in computer networks. The DCA uses a weighted function in its context detection phase to process three categories of input signals including safe, danger and pathogenic associated molecular pattern to three output context values termed as co-stimulatory, mature and semi-mature, which are then used to perform classification. The weighted function used by the DCA requires either manually pre-defined weights usually provided by the immunologists, or empirically derived weights from the training dataset. Neither of these is sufficiently flexible to work with different datasets to produce optimum classification result. To address such limitation, this work proposes an approach for computing the three output context values of the DCA by employing the recently proposed TSK+ fuzzy inference system, such that the weights are always optimal for the provided data set regarding a specific application. The proposed approach was validated and evaluated by applying it to the two popular datasets KDD99 and UNSW NB15. The results from the experiments demonstrate that, the proposed approach outperforms the conventional DCA in terms of classification accuracy.

Ransomware is currently one of the most significant cyberthreats to both national infrastructure and the individual, often requiring severe treatment as an antidote. Triaging ran-somware based on its similarity with well-known ransomware samples is an imperative preliminary step in preventing a ransomware pandemic. Selecting the most appropriate triaging method can improve the precision of further static and dynamic analysis in addition to saving significant t ime a nd e ffort. Currently, the most popular and proven triaging methods are fuzzy hashing, import hashing and YARA rules, which can ascertain whether, or to what degree, two ransomware samples are similar to each other. However, the mechanisms of these three methods are quite different and their comparative assessment is difficult. Therefore, this paper presents an evaluation of these three methods for triaging the four most pertinent ransomware categories WannaCry, Locky, Cerber and CryptoWall. It evaluates their triaging performance and run-time system performance, highlighting the limitations of each method.

Threat actors are constantly seeking new attack surfaces, with ransomeware being one the most successful attack vectors that have been used for financial gain. T his has been achieved through the dispersion of unlimited polymorphic samples of ransomware whilst those responsible evade detection and hide their identity. Nonetheless, every ransomware threat actor adopts some similar style or uses some common patterns in their malicious code writing, which can be significant evidence contributing to their identification. he first step in attempting to identify the source of the attack is to cluster a large number of ransomware samples based on very little or no information about the samples, accordingly, their traits and signatures can be analysed and identified. T herefore, this paper proposes an efficient fuzzy analysis approach to cluster ransomware samples based on the combination of two fuzzy techniques fuzzy hashing and fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering. Unlike other clustering techniques, FCM can directly utilise similarity scores generated by a fuzzy hashing method and cluster them into similar groups without requiring additional transformational steps to obtain distance among objects for clustering. Thus, it reduces the computational overheads by utilising fuzzy similarity scores obtained at the time of initial triaging of whether the sample is known or unknown ransomware. The performance of the proposed fuzzy method is compared against k-means clustering and the two fuzzy hashing methods SSDEEP and SDHASH which are evaluated based on their FCM clustering results to understand how the similarity score affects the clustering results.

The activation function is introduced to determine the output of neural networks by mapping the resulting values of neurons into a specific range. The activation functions often suffer from ‘gradient vanishing’, ‘non zero-centred function outputs’, ‘exploding gradients’, and ‘dead neurons’, which may lead to deterioration in the classification performance. This paper proposes an activation function generation approach using the Takagi-Sugeno-Kang inference in an effort to address such challenges. In addition, the proposed method further optimises the coefficients in the activation function using the genetic algorithm such that the activation function can adapt to different applications. This approach has been applied to a digital forensics application of online grooming detection. The evaluations confirm the superiority of the proposed activation function for online grooming detection using an unbalanced data set.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is one of the most common diseases threatening the human lives globally, requiring effective and early risk analysis for which learning classifiers supported with automated feature selection offer a potential robust solution. MOTIVATION: Computer aided risk analysis of breast cancer typically works with a set of extracted mammographic features which may contain significant redundancy and noise, thereby requiring technical developments to improve runtime performance in both computational efficiency and classification accuracy. HYPOTHESIS: Use of advanced feature selection methods based on multiple diagnosis criteria may lead to improved results for mammographic risk analysis. METHODS: An approach for multi-criterion based mammographic risk analysis is proposed, by adapting the recently developed multi-label fuzzy-rough feature selection mechanism. RESULTS: A system for multi-criterion mammographic risk analysis is implemented with the aid of multi-label fuzzy-rough feature selection and its performance is positively verified experimentally, in comparison with representative popular mechanisms. CONCLUSIONS: The novel approach for mammographic risk analysis based on multiple criteria helps improve classification accuracy using selected informative features, without suffering from the redundancy caused by such complex criteria, with the implemented system demonstrating practical efficacy.

Conventional Chinese calligraphy robots often suffer from the limited sizes of predefined font databases, which prevent the robots from writing new characters. This paper presents a robotic handwriting system to address such limitations, which extracts Chinese characters from textbooks and uses a robot's manipulator to write the characters in a different style. The key technologies of the proposed approach include the following: 1) automatically decomposing Chinese characters into strokes using Harris corner detection technology and 2) matching the decomposed strokes to robotic writing trajectories learned from human gestures. Briefly, the system first decomposes a given Chinese character into a set of strokes and obtains the stroke trajectory writing ability by following the gestures performed by a human demonstrator. Then, it applies a stroke classification method that recognizes the decomposed strokes as robotic writing trajectories. Finally, the robot arm is driven to follow the trajectories and thus write the Chinese character. Seven common Chinese characters have been used in an experiment for system validation and evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate the power of the proposed system, given that the robot successfully wrote all the testing characters in the given Chinese calligraphic style.

Intrusion detection systems are developed with the abilities to discriminate between normal and anomalous traffic behaviours. The core challenge in implementing an intrusion detection systems is to determine and stop anomalous traffic behavior precisely before it causes any adverse effects to the network, information systems, or any other hardware and digital assets which forming or in the cyberspace. Inspired by the biological immune system, Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA) is a classification algorithm developed for the purpose of anomaly detection based on the danger theory and the functioning of human immune dendritic cells. In its core operation, DCA uses a weighted sum function to derive the output cumulative values from the input signals. The weights used in this function are either derived empirically from the data or defined by users. Due to this, the algorithm opens the doors for users to specify the weights that may not produce optimal result (often accuracy). This paper proposes a weight optimisation approach implemented using the popular stochastic search tool, genetic algorithm. The approach is validated and evaluated using the KDD99 dataset with promising results generated.

Type-2 fuzzy sets and systems can better handle uncertainties compared to its type-1 counterpart, and the widely applied Mamdani and TSK fuzzy inference approaches have been both extended to support interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Fuzzy interpolation enhances the conventional Mamdani and TKS fuzzy inference systems, which not only enables inferences when inputs are not covered by an incomplete or sparse rule base but also helps in system simplification for very complex problems. This paper extends the recently proposed fuzzy interpolation approach TSK+ to allow the utilization of interval type-2 TSK fuzzy rule bases. One illustrative case based on an example problem from the literature demonstrates the working of the proposed system, and the application on the cart centering problem reveals the power of the proposed system. The experimental investigation confirmed that the proposed approach is able to perform fuzzy inferences using either dense or sparse interval type-2 TSK rule bases with promising results generated.

The development of a robust strategy for network security is reliant upon a combination of in-house expertise and for completeness attack vectors used by attackers. A honeypot is one of the most popular mechanisms used to gather information about attacks and attackers. However, low-interaction honeypots only emulate an operating system and services, and are more prone to a fingerprinting attack, resulting in severe consequences such as revealing the identity of the honeypot and thus ending the usefulness of the honeypot forever, or worse, enabling it to be converted into a bot used to attack others. A number of tools and techniques are available both to fingerprint low-interaction honeypots and to defend against such fingerprinting; however, there is an absence of fingerprinting techniques to identify the characteristics and behaviours that indicate fingerprinting is occurring. Therefore, this paper proposes a fuzzy technique to correlate the attack actions and predict the probability that an attack is a fingerprinting attack on the honeypot. Initially, an experimental assessment of the fingerprinting attack on the low- interaction honeypot is performed, and a fingerprinting detection mechanism is proposed that includes the underlying principles of popular fingerprinting attack tools. This implementation is based on a popular and commercially available low-interaction honeypot for Windows - KFSensor. However, the proposed fuzzy technique is a general technique and can be used with any low-interaction honeypot to aid in the identification of the fingerprinting attack whilst it is occurring; thus protecting the honeypot from the fingerprinting attack and extending its life.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500 Series Firewall is amongst the most popular and technically advanced for securing organisational networks and systems. One of its most valuable features is its threat detection function which is available on every version of the firewall running a software version of 8.0(2) or higher. Threat detection operates at layers 3 and 4 to determine a baseline for network traffic, analysing packet drop statistics and generating threat reports based on traffic patterns. Despite producing a large volume of statistical information relating to several security events, further effort is required to mine and visually report more significant information and conclude the security status of the network. There are several commercial off-the-shelf tools available to undertake this task, however, they are expensive and may require a cloud subscription. Furthermore, if the information transmitted over the network is sensitive or requires confidentiality, the involvement of a third party or a third-party tool may place organisational security at risk. Therefore, this paper presents a fuzzy logic aided intelligent threat detection solution, which is a cost-free, intuitive and comprehensible solution, enhancing and simplifying the threat detection process for all. In particular, it employs a fuzzy reasoning system based on the threat detection statistics, and presents results/threats through a developed dashboard user interface, for ease of understanding for administrators and users. The paper further demonstrates the successful utilisation of a fuzzy reasoning system for selected and prioritised security events in basic threat detection, although it can be extended to encompass more complex situations, such as complete basic threat detection, advanced threat detection, scanning threat detection, and customised feature based threat detection.

Online child grooming detection has recently attracted intensive research interests from both the machine learning community and digital forensics community due to its great social impact. The existing data-driven approaches usually face the challenges of lack of training data and the uncertainty of classes in terms of the classification or decision boundary. This paper proposes a grooming detection approach in an effort to address such uncertainty based on a data set derived from a publicly available profiling data set. In particular, the approach firstly applies the conventional text feature extraction approach in identifying the most significant words in the data set. This is followed by the application of a fuzzy-rough feature selection approach in reducing the high dimensions of the selected words for fast processing, which at the same time addressing the uncertainty of class boundaries. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed approach in detecting child grooming.

Conventional approaches of robotic writing of Chinese character strokes often suffer from limited font generation methods, and thus the writing results often lack of diversity. This has seriously restricted the high quality writing ability of robots. This paper proposes a generative adversarial nets-based calligraphic robotic framework, which enables a robot to learn writing fundamental Chinese strokes with rich diversity and good originality. In particular, the framework considers the learning process of robotic writing as an adversarial procedure which is implemented by three interactive modules including a stroke generation module, a stroke discriminative module and a training module. Noting that the stroke generative module included in the conventional generative adversarial nets cannot solve the non-differentiable problem, the policy gradient commonly used in reinforcement learning is thus adapted in this work to train the generative module by regarding the outputs from the discriminative module as rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework allows a calligraphic robot to successfully write fundamental Chinese strokes with good quality in various styles. The experiment also suggests the proposed approach can achieve human-level stroke writing quality without the requirement of a performance evaluation system. This approach therefore significantly boosts the robotic autonomous creation ability.

A rule base covering the entire input domain is required for the conventional Mamdani inference and Takagi–Sugeno–Kang (TSK) inference. Fuzzy interpolation enhances conventional fuzzy rule inference systems by allowing the use of sparse rule bases by which certain inputs are not covered. Given that almost all of the existing fuzzy interpolation approaches were developed to support the Mamdani inference, this paper presents a novel fuzzy interpolation approach that extends the TSK inference. This paper also proposes a data-driven rule base generation method to support the extended TSK inference system. The proposed system enhances the conventional TSK inference in two ways: (1) workable with incomplete or unevenly distributed data sets or incomplete expert knowledge that entails only a sparse rule base and (2) simplifying complex fuzzy inference systems by using more compact rule bases for complex systems without the sacrificing of system performance. The experimentation shows that the proposed system overall outperforms the existing approaches with the utilisation of smaller rule bases.

The Quality of Services (QoS) is the measure of data transmission quality and service availability of a network, aiming to maintain the data, especially delay-sensitive data such as VoIP, to be transmitted over the network with the required quality. Major network device manufacturers have each developed their own smart dynamic QoS solutions, such as AutoQoS supported by Cisco, CoS (Class of Service) by Netgear devices, and QoS Maps on SROS (Secure Router Operating System) provided by HP, to maintain the service level of network traffic. Such smart QoS solutions usually only work for manufacture qualified devices and otherwise only a pre-defined static policy mapping can be applied. This paper presents a dynamic QoS solution based on the differentiated services (DiffServ) approach for enterprise networks, which is able to modify the priority level of a packet in real time by adjusting the value of Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) in Internet Protocol (IP) header of network packets. This is implemented by a 0-order TSK fuzzy model with a sparse rule base which is developed by considering the current network delay, application desired priority level and user current priority group. DSCP values are dynamically generated by the TSK fuzzy model and updated in real time. The proposed system has been evaluated in a real network environment with promising results generated.

Network intrusion detection systems identify malicious connections and thus help protect networks from attacks. Various data-driven approaches have been used in the development of network intrusion detection systems, which usually lead to either very complex systems or poor generalization ability due to the complexity of this challenge. This paper proposes a data-driven network intrusion detection system using fuzzy interpolation in an effort to address the aforementioned limitations. In particular, the developed system equipped with a sparse rule base not only guarantees the online performance of intrusion detection, but also allows the generation of security alerts from situations which are not directly covered by the existing knowledge base. The proposed system has been applied to a well-known data set for system validation and evaluation with competitive results generated.

This paper develops a fuzzy adaptive control system consisting of a new type of fuzzy neural network and a robust controller for uncertain nonlinear systems. The new designed neural network contains the key mechanisms of a typical fuzzy CMAC network and a brain emotional learning controller network. First, the input values of the new network are delivered to a receptive field structure that is inspired from the fuzzy CMAC. Then, the values are divided into a sensory and an emotional channels; and the two channels interact with each other to generate the final outputs of the proposed network. The parameters of the proposed network are on-line tuned by the brain emotional learning rules; in addition, stability analysis theory is used to guaranty the proposed controller's convergence. In the experimentation, a “Duffing-Holmes” chaotic system and a simulated mobile robot are applied to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control system. By comparing with the performances of other neural network based control systems, we believe our proposed network is capable of producing better control performances of complex uncertain nonlinear systems control.

Automatic evaluation of sports skills has been an active research area. However, most of the existing research focuses on low-level features such as movement speed and strength. In this work, we propose a framework for automatic motion analysis and visualization, which allows us to evaluate high-level skills such as the richness of actions, the flexibility of transitions and the unpredictability of action patterns. The core of our framework is the construction and visualization of the posture-based graph that focuses on the standard postures for launching and ending actions, as well as the action-based graph that focuses on the preference of actions and their transition probability. We further propose two numerical indices, the Connectivity Index and the Action Strategy Index, to assess skill level according to the graph. We demonstrate our framework with motions captured from different boxers. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can effectively visualize the strengths and weaknesses of the boxers.

As a substantial extension to fuzzy rule interpolation that works based on two neighboring rules flanking an observation, adaptive fuzzy rule interpolation is able to restore system consistency when contradictory results are reached during interpolation. The approach first identifies the exhaustive sets of candidates, with each candidate consisting of a set of interpolation procedures which may jointly be responsible for the system inconsistency. Then, individual candidates are modified such that all contradictions are removed, and thus, interpolation consistency is restored. It has been developed on the assumption that contradictions may only be resulted from the underlying interpolation mechanism, and that all the identified candidates are not distinguishable in terms of their likelihood to be the real culprit. However, this assumption may not hold for real-world situations. This paper, therefore, further develops the adaptive method by taking into account observations, rules, and interpolation procedures, all as diagnosable and modifiable system components. In addition, given the common practice in fuzzy systems that observations and rules are often associated with certainty degrees, the identified candidates are ranked by examining the certainty degrees of its components and their derivatives. From this, the candidate modification is carried out based on such ranking. This study significantly improves the efficacy of the existing adaptive system by exploiting more information during both the diagnosis and modification processes.

Fuzzy modelling has been widely and successfully applied to control problems. Traditional fuzzy modelling requires either complete experts' knowledge or large data sets to generate rule bases such that the input spaces can be fully covered. Although fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI) relaxes this requirement by approximating rules using their neighbouring ones, it is still difficult for some real world applications to obtain sufficient experts' knowledge and/or data to generate a reasonable sparse rule base to support FRI. Also, the generated rule bases are usually fixed and therefore cannot support dynamic situations. In order to address these limitations, this paper presents a novel rule base generation and adaptation system to allow the creation of rule bases with minimal a priori knowledge. This is implemented by adding accurate interpolated rules into the rule base guided by a performance index from the feedback mechanism, also considering the rule's previous experience information as a weight factor in the process of rule selection for FRI. In particular, the selection of rules for interpolation in this work is based on a combined metric of the weight factors and the distances between the rules and a given observation, rather than being simply based on the distances. Two digitally simulated scenarios are employed to demonstrate the working of the proposed system, with promising results generated for both rule base generation and adaptation.

Fuzzy inference systems have been successfully applied to many real-world applications. Traditional fuzzy inference systems are only applicable to problems with dense rule bases by which the entire input domain is fully covered, whilst fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI) is also able to work with sparse rule bases that may not cover certain observations. Thanks to its ability to work with fewer rules, fuzzy rule interpolation approaches have also been utilised to reduce system complexity by removing those rules which can be approximated by their neighbouring ones for complex fuzzy models. A number of important fuzzy rule base generation approaches have been proposed in the literature, but the majority of these only target dense rule bases for traditional fuzzy inference systems. This paper proposes a novel sparse fuzzy rule base generation method to support FRI. The approach first identifies important rules that cannot be accurately approximated by their neighbouring ones to initialise the rule base. Then the raw rule base is optimised by fine-tuning the membership functions of the fuzzy sets. Experimentation is conducted to demonstrate the working principles of the proposed system, with results comparable to those of traditional methods.

Due to the recent advancement of computer graphics hardware and software algorithms, deformable characters have become more and more popular in real-time applications such as computer games. While there are mature techniques to generate primary deformation from skeletal movement, simulating realistic and stable secondary deformation such as jiggling of fats remains challenging. On one hand, traditional volumetric approaches such as the finite element method require higher computational cost and are infeasible for limited hardware such as game consoles. On the other hand, while shape matching based simulations can produce plausible deformation in real-time, they suffer from a stiffness problem in which particles either show unrealistic deformation due to high gains, or cannot catch up with the body movement. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-layer lattice model to simulate the primary and secondary deformation of skeleton-driven characters. The core idea is to voxelize the input character mesh into multiple anatomical layers including the bone, muscle, fat and skin. Primary deformation is applied on the bone voxels with lattice-based skinning. The movement of these voxels is propagated to other voxel layers using lattice shape matching simulation, creating a natural secondary deformation. Our multi-layer lattice framework can produce simulation quality comparable to those from other volumetric approaches with a significantly smaller computational cost. It is best to be applied in real-time applications such as console games or interactive animation creation.

Fuzzy rule interpolation enables fuzzy inference with sparse rule bases by interpolating inference results, and may help to reduce system complexity by removing similar (often redundant) neighbouring rules. In particular, the recently proposed closed form fuzzy interpolation offers a unique approach which guarantees convex interpolated results in a closed form. However, the difficulty in defining the required precise-valued membership functions still poses significant restrictions over the applicability of this approach. Such limitations can be alleviated by employing type-2 fuzzy sets as their membership functions are themselves fuzzy. This paper extends the closed form fuzzy rule interpolation using interval type-2 fuzzy sets. In this way, as illustrated in the experiments, closed form fuzzy interpolation is able to deal with uncertainty in data and knowledge with more flexibility.

Due to the advance of modern computing technology, decisions can be made based on all the existing related data instances scattered across multiple data storages, such that available information has been entirely taken into consideration. Particularly in the predictive toxicology domain, because of the heterogeneity of data sources, multiple data instances with respect to the same endpoint are usually inconsistent, and the quality (or reliability) of the data instances is typically different. Also, the quantity of data instances is often not sufficient to conduct a study using conventional statistics-based methods. This paper presents a novel risk analysis approach for chemical toxicity assessment which considers all the available heterogeneous data instances in the same time, assisted by their quality (or reliability) values. The system is developed on the basis of possibility-probability distribution, where the uncertainty of the approximated probability values based on traditional statistics methods is represented by possibility. The uncertainty considered herein is led not only by the statistics on limited small number of data instances, but also by the poor quality (or reliability) of data instances. The possibility-probability distribution is automatically computed from available data instances by employing a modified diffused-interior-outer-set model (where the reliability of data is considered) based on information diffusion theory. Toxicity value for a given chemical compound is then estimated as the fuzzy expected value based on the resulted possibility-probability distribution. Toxicity risk with respect to regulatory threshold is also introduced, in order to evaluate the probability of which the toxicity may be classified into a certain regulatory range. The proposed approach is applied to a real-world dataset to illustrate the utility and the potential of the approach in risk assessment of chemical toxicity.

Adaptive fuzzy interpolation strengthens the potential of fuzzy interpolative reasoning. It first identifies all possible sets of faulty fuzzy reasoning components, termed the candidates, each of which may have led to all the contradictory interpolations. It then tries to modify one selected candidate in an effort to remove all the contradictions and thus restore interpolative consistency. This approach assumes that all the candidates are equally likely to be the real culprit. However, this may not be the case in real situations as certain identified reasoning components may be more liable to resulting in inconsistencies than others. This paper extends the adaptive approach by prioritizing all the generated candidates. This is achieved by exploiting the certainty degrees of fuzzy reasoning components and hence of derived propositions. From this, the candidate with the highest priority is modified first. This extension helps to quickly spot the real culprit and thus considerably improves the approach in terms of efficiency.

Adaptive fuzzy interpolation strengthens the potential of fuzzy interpolative reasoning. It views interpolation procedures as artificially created system components, and identifies all possible sets of faulty components that may each have led to all detected contradictory results. From this, a modification procedure takes place, which tries to modify each of such components, termed candidates, in an effort to remove all the contradictions and thus restore consistency. This approach assumes that the employed interpolation mechanism is the only cause of contradictions, that is all given observations and rules are believed to be true and fixed. However, this may not be the case in certain real situations. It is common in fuzzy systems that each observation or rule is associated with a certainty degree. This paper extends the adaptive approach by taking into consideration both observations and rules also, treating them as diagnosable and modifiable components in addition to interpolation procedures. Accordingly, the modification procedure is extended to cover the cases of modifying observations or rules in a given rule base along with the modification of fuzzy reasoning components. This extension significantly improves the robustness of the existing adaptive approach.

Fuzzy interpolative reasoning strengthens the power of fuzzy inference by the enhancement of the robustness of fuzzy systems and the reduction of the systems’ complexity. However, after a series of interpolations, it is possible that multiple object values for a common variable are inferred, leading to inconsistency in interpolated results. Such inconsistencies may result from defective interpolated rules or incorrect interpolative transformations. This paper presents a novel approach for identification and correction of defective rules in interpolative transformations, thereby removing the inconsistencies. In particular, an assumption-based truth-maintenance system (ATMS) is used to record dependences between interpolations, and the underlying technique that the classical general diagnostic engine (GDE) employs for fault localization is adapted to isolate possible faulty interpolated rules and their associated interpolative transformations. From this, an algorithm is introduced to allow for the modification of the original linear interpolation to become first-order piecewise linear. The approach is applied to a realistic problem, which predicates the diarrheal disease rates in remote villages, to demonstrate the potential of this study.

Adaptive fuzzy interpolation strengthens the potential of fuzzy interpolative reasoning owning to its efficient identification and correction of defective interpolated rules during the interpolation process. This approach assumes that: i) two closest adjacent rules which flank the observation or a previously inferred result are always available; ii) only single-antecedent rules are involved. In practice, however, variable values of these rules may lie just on one side of the observation or inferred result. Also, there may be certain rules with multiple antecedents in the rule base. This paper extends the adaptive approach, in order to cover fuzzy extrapolation and to support rule base with multiple-antecedent rules. Adaptive fuzzy interpolation and extrapolation complement each other, which jointly improve the applicability of fuzzy interpolative reasoning, as it significantly reduces the restriction over the given rule base.

Fuzzy interpolative reasoning has been extensively studied due to its ability to enhance the robustness of fuzzy systems and to reduce system complexity. However, during the interpolation process, it is possible that multiple object values for a common variable are inferred which may lead to inconsistency in interpolated results. Such inconsistencies may result from defective interpolated rules or incorrect interpolative transformations. This paper presents a novel approach for identification and correction of defective rules in transformations, thereby removing the inconsistencies. In particular, an assumption-based truth maintenance system (ATMS) is used to record dependencies between reasoning results and interpolated rules, while the underlying technique that the general diagnostic engine (GDE) employs for fault localization is adapted to isolate possible faulty interpolated rules and their associated interpolative transformations. From this, an algorithm is introduced to allow for the modification of the original linear interpolation to become first-order piecewise linear. The approach is applied to a carefully chosen practical problem to illustrate the potential in strengthening the power of interpolative reasoning.