to the subject at hand, the first pertains to the structure of the external systems that affect the family and the manner in which they exert their influence. The second dimension relates to the degree of explicitness and differentiation accorded to intrafamilial processes that are influenced by the external

We propose a new family of Description Logics (DLs), called DL-Lite, specifically tailored to capture basic ontology languages, while keeping low complexity of reasoning. Reasoning here means not only computing subsumption between concepts, and checking satisfiability of the whole knowledge base

This work focuses on algorithms which learn from examples to perform multiclass text and speech categorization tasks. Our approach is based on a new and improved family of boosting algorithms. We describe in detail an implementation, called BoosTexter, of the new boosting algorithms for text

Many systems that exhibit nonmonotonic behavior have been described and studied already in the literature. The general notion of nonmonotonic reasoning, though, has almost always been described only negatively, by the property it does not enjoy, i.e. monotonicity. We study here general patterns

Most current approaches to concurrency control in database systems rely on locking of data objects as a control mechanism. In this paper, two families of nonlocking concurrency controls are presented. The methods used are “optimistic ” in the sense that they rely mainly on transaction backup as a

The design and correctness of a communication facility for a distributed computer system are reported on. The facility provides support for fault-tolerant process groups in the form of a family of reliable multicast protocols that can be used in both local- and wide-area networks. These protocols

We describe a family of caching protocols for distrib-uted networks that can be used to decrease or eliminate the occurrence of hot spots in the network. Our protocols are particularly designed for use with very large networks such as the Internet, where delays caused by hot spots can be severe

the theoretical core of the thesis, generalising the expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm for learning maximum likelihood parameters to the VB EM al-gorithm which integrates over model parameters. The algorithm is then specialised to the large family of conjugate-exponential (CE) graphical models, and several

By a switched system, we mean a hybrid dynamical system consisting of a family of continuous-time subsystems and a rule that orchestrates the switching between them. This article surveys recent developments in three basic problems regarding stability and design of switched systems. These problems

We present a new method for solving stochastic differential equations based on Galerkin projections and extensions of Wiener's polynomial chaos. Specifically, we represent the stochastic processes with an optimum trial basis from the Askey family of orthogonal polynomials that reduces