The Z-number is a new fuzzy-theoretic concept, proposed by Zadeh in 2011. It extends the basic philosophy of Computing With Words (CWW) to include the perception of uncertainty of the information conveyed by a natural language statement. The Z-number

This paper describes a surfer model which incorporates information about topic continuity derived from the surfer's history. Therefore, unlike earlier models, it captures the interrelationship between categorization (context) and ranking of Web documents simultaneously. The model is mathematically formulated. A scalable and convergent iterative procedure is provided for its implementation. Its different characteristic features, as obtained from the joint probability matrix, and their significance in Web intelligence are mentioned. Experiments performed on Web pages obtained from WebBase confirm the superiority of the model.

Over the past decade, case-based reasoning (CBR) has emerged as a major research area within the artificial intelligence research field due to both its widespread usage by humans and its appeal as a methodology for building intelligent systems. Conventional CBR systems have been largely designed as automated problem-solvers for producing a solution to a given problem by adapting the solution to a similar, previously solved problem. Such systems have had limited success in real-world applications. More recently, there has been a search for new paradigms and directions for increasing the utility of CBR systems for decision support. The paper focuses on the synergism between the research areas of CBR and decision support systems (DSSs). A conceptual framework for DSSs is presented and used to develop a taxonomy of three different types of CBR systems: 1) conventional, 2) decision-aiding, and 3) stimulative. The major characteristics of each type of CBR system are explained with a particular focus on decision-aiding and stimulative CBR systems. The research implications of the evolution in the design of CBR systems from automation toward decision-aiding and stimulation are also explored.

The identification, combination, and interaction of the many factors which influence software development productivity makes the measurement, estimation, comparison and tracking of productivity rates very difficult. Through the analysis of a European Space Agency database consisting of 99 software development projects from 37 companies in a European countries, the paper seeks to provide significant and useful Information about the major factors which influence the productivity of European space, military, and industrial applications, as well as to determine the best metric for measuring the productivity of these projects. Several key findings emerge from the study. The results indicate that some organizations are obtaining significantly higher productivity than others. Some of this variation is due to the differences in the application category and programming language of projects in each company; however, some differences must also be due to the ways in which these companies manage their software development projects. The use of tools and modern programming practices were found to be major controllable factors in productivity improvement. Finally, the lines-of-code productivity metric is shown to be superior to the process productivity metric for projects in the authors' database.

This paper presents a new approach to planning in dynamic and uncertain environments. Planning is viewed as a process in which an agent's long term goals are transformed into short term tasks and objectives, given the agent's strategy and the context of planning. The developed model allows for a dynamic balance between long term strategic planning and short term tactical planning. The notion of a strategy hierarchy is introduced to explicitly represent the process of strategy formulation and refinement. A combination of rules and plan scripts is used. Rules are used for representing domain knowledge and reasoning about strategic choices. Plan scripts are used for representing specific tasks and objectives. The uncertainty calculi of RUM/PRIMO are used for supporting reasoning under uncertainty. In the proposed model, it is also possible to achieve a seamless integration of case-based reasoning into the planning process. These ideas have been implemented in a system called MARS, which plans in the financial domain of mergers and acquisitions.>

The concepts of temporal entities and temporal events are distinguished, and the conventional crisp notion of events is extended to define generalized events. Novel definitions are provided for temporal operators used for generalized events. A temporal data model is chosen which is independent of conventional data models, but is similar to temporal data models proposed by other researchers and is sufficiently general to suitable extensions of conventional data models. It is shown how to combine different generalized events and apply temporal operators to such compound events. An outline of a possible implementation of present ideas in the relational data model is provided.>