Despite a half century of advances, the software construction industry still shows signs of immaturity. Professional software development organizations continue to struggle to produce reliable software in a predictable and repeatable manner. While a variety of development practices are advocated...

Today, it is almost inevitable that software is licensed, rather than sold outright. As a part of the licensing policy, some protection mechanisms, whether hardware, legal or code-based, are invariably built into the license. The application of such mechanisms has primarily been in the realm of...

There is a long established history of applying Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to financial data sets. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the use of this methodology to develop a financially viable, short-term trading system. When developing short-term systems, the authors typically site...

Goodness-of-fit test statistics are widely used in health and medicine related surveys however little regard is usually given to their statistical power. This paper investigates the simulated power of five categorical goodness-of-fit test statistics used to analyze health and medicine survey...

Eligibility traces have been shown to speed reinforcement learning, to make it more robust to hidden states, and to provide a link between Monte Carlo and temporal-difference methods. Here we generalize eligibility traces to off-policy learning, in which one learns about a policy different from...

A new method for making software is stealthily gaining ground in the computer industry, offering a promise of better, cheaper software and the empowerment of the user. The open source movement could revolutionize the software industry...if it succeeds. Open source means software that you are...

Learning, planning, and representing knowledge at multiple levels of temporal abstraction are key challenges for AI. In this paper we develop an approach to these problems based on the mathematical framework of reinforcement learning and Markov decision processes (MDPs). We extend the usual...