Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all other things being equal, rational scientists ought to prefer simpler theories to more complex ones. In recent years, philosophers have argued the simpler theories make better predictions, possess theoretical virtues like explanatory power, and have other pragmatic virtues like computational tractability. However, such arguments fail to explain why and ...

The design of computational systems that support group decisions, allocate resources to distributed tasks, or mediate social interactions is fundamentally different from the corresponding design problem serving individual or centralized users. When multiple parties, or agents, are involved, the designer’s objectives are complicated by the fact that the interests of these parties are rarely, if ...

This paper provides an in-depth investigation into the various security issues in Agile software development methodologies currently in use. We have as part of our research identified a number of issues from multiple perspectives and points of view throughout the literature and from industrial sources. These shed light into what the most important issues are and what is the best way forward in ...

An ensemble consists of a set of individually trained classifiers (such as neural networks or decision trees) whose predictions are combined when classifying novel instances. Previous research has shown that an ensemble is often more accurate than any of the single classifiers in the ensemble. Bagging (Breiman, 1996c) and Boosting (Freund & Schapire, 1996; Schapire, 1990) are two relatively new...

Selecting a research method for empirical software engineering research is problematic because the benefits and challenges to using each method are not yet well catalogued. Therefore, this chapter describes a number of empirical methods available. It examines the goals of each and analyzes the types of questions each best addresses. Theoretical stances behind the methods, practical consideratio...

We present an empirical comparison of decomposition techniques for CSPs. We compare three popular heuristics for tree decomposition and an exact method for optimal tree decomposition, along with two methods for hypertree decomposition. We use a small sample of instances in the experiments. We find that the connected hypertree decomposition method finds more optimal width decompositions than the...

We examine a long-standing research program in empirical Political Science, fact-pattern analysis (FPA). We connect FPA to definitions of legal rules in jurisprudence and positive political theory. Foundationally, theoretical treatments view rules as functions partitioning case spaces into equivalence classes. Connecting FPA to formal theory has two advantages: first, many elements of the tradi...

The growth in the the number of news articles, blogs, images, and videos available on the Web is making if more challenging for people to find potentially useful information People have relied on search engines to satisfy their short-term needs, such as finding the telephone number for a restaurant; however, these systems have not been designed to support long-term needs, such as the research i...

This article reviews some recently invented methods for au tomatically extracting translation lexicons from parallel texts The ac curacy of these methods has been signi cantly improved by exploiting known properties of parallel texts and of particular language pairs The state of the art has advanced to the point where translations can be found automatically and with high reliability even for no...

Four outlier detection methods are compared using both publicly available smaller statistical datasets and real-life Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) datasets [1]. The smaller datasets provide insight (via visualisations) into the relative strengths and weaknesses of the compared methods. The real-life large datasets test scalability and practicality of application. We are unaware of prev...