Effective document retrieval using domain knowledge and semantics is one of the major challenges in Information Retrieval. Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in ontologies as an artifact for human knowledge representation and a critical component…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

In the last decade several ways to formalize defeasible reasoning have been studied. A particular approach, defeasible argumentation, has been particularly successful to achieve this goal.
The inference process of argument-based systems is based on the interaction of ar- guments…

Similarity search systems are designed to help









people to organize multimedia non-text data and find valuable









information. The multimedia data intrinsically has…

Seasonality is a characteristic and important feature of the birth rate, but hitherto largely undocumented for sub-Saharan Africa. The research we present in Chapter 2 helps close the gap by providing contemporary documentation of the seasonal patterns of births in…

The CRISTAL project has had significant achievements in the coordination of
the research work carried out by the consortium members on renewables, the enhancement of partners’ knowledge on Renewable Energy Sources and their integrated control and use, which contributes to…

When there is a need to understand the data stored in a database, one of the main requirements is being able to extract knowledge in the form of rules. Classification strategies allow extracting rules almost naturally. In this paper, the…

In this paper we present a method to automatically identify linguistic contexts which contain possible causes of emotions or emotional states from Italian newspaper articles (La Repubblica Corpus). Our methodology is based on the interplay between relevant linguistic patterns and…

In this paper we introduce a probabilistic approach to support visual supervision and gesture recognition. Task knowledge is both of geometric and visual nature and it is encoded in parametric eigenspaces. Learning processes for compute modal subspaces (eigenspaces) are the…

The process of neolithisation of the Mediterranean face of the Iberian Peninsula has traditionally been associated with the Cardial paradigm of the Franco-Iberian region. However, better knowledge of the material record from the arc of the north-western Mediterranean, the revision…