This paper reports the use, in the UK Home Office Prison Department, of cognitive mapping techniques for policy analysis. The methodology used has been developed to facilitate more effective management of messy problems by management teams. Here it is used for the collation, comparison and analysis of the views of many experts in relation to a major policy issue. The analysis makes use of the s...

E-learning products such as cognitive diagnosers interact with learners and collect assessment data to build a picture of some aspect of a learner’s thinking. One concern for this rapidly emerging area of e-learning is whether the diagnostic conclusions of such products are based on sound evidence, including whether or not the diagnostics are reliable. In online settings, the information may be...

Fuzzy cognitive mapping is commonly used as a participatory modelling technique whereby stakeholders create a semi-quantitative model of a system of interest. This model is often turned into an iterative map, which should (ideally) have a unique stable fixed point. Several methods of doing this have been used in the literature but little attention has been paid to differences in output such dif...

The necessity to use various tools – instructional media and technology for effective teaching using combined overlap block fuzzy cognitive maps (COBFCMS) defined by W.B. Vasantha Kandaswamy is analyzed in this paper. The combined overlap block FCM’s defined in this method become effective when the number of concepts can be grouped and are large in numbrs. In this paper we have analyzed the var...

Using soft computing methods, the authors collect and process relevant user-generated information from the web. Through the use of self-organizing maps, fuzzy cognitive maps are constructed. The fuzzy cognitive map is a generated representation of the emergent web semantics of the dataset. In the next step, the fuzzy cognitive maps are enriched with related lexical content and stored in a graph...

Rule Based Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (RBFCM) are proposed as an evolution of Fuzzy Causal Maps (FCM) that allow a more complete representation of cognition, since relations other than monotonic causality are made possible. Their structure is based on traditional fuzzy systems with feedback. The main problem to solve while trying to implement a RBFCM is the causal relation itself, since traditional f...

A fuzzy cognitive map is a graphical means of representing arbitrary complex models of interrelations between concepts. The purpose of this paper is to describe a dynamic/adaptive fuzzy cognitive map based on the random neural network model. Previously, we have developed a random fuzzy cognitive map and illustrated its application in the modeling of processes. The adaptive fuzzy cognitive map c...

This paper describes a generic approach to the design of a 3D virtual environment for visual navigation. The basic design principle is that users need to understand how an environment is organised and how they can utilise the knowledge to find their way through the environment. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between implicit semantic structures associated with a collection of domai...

Machines will replace therapists and counsellors. This was the confident prediction made a decade ago. In this article, I discuss the inherent limitations of machines as conversationalists that have prevented the prediction from coming true. Machines can, however, be exploited to assist therapy and I consider the following digital tools: test administration; managing procedural, symptom-relievi...