The aim of this study was to define breeding goals and determine the suitable selection index in Rayeni cashmere goat using simulated data. To select animals for increased quantity of meat, milk and cashmere produced, body weight of the doe (BWD), milk weight (MW), cashmere weight (CW), weight of kids for sale (WK) and number of kids for sale per doe (NK) was used as selection criteria. Four se...

Action selection is typically a “built-in” feature of agent architectures and hence not subject to change in instantiated architectures. While often (especially in simple agents) this lack of flexibility does not matter, there are circumstances where dynamic adjustments of an action selection strategy are desirable. In this paper, we present an architecture framework, called APOC, that provides...

Saliency algorithms in content-based image retrieval are employed to retrieve the most important regions of an image with the idea that these regions hold the essence of representative information. Such regions are then typically analysed and described for future retrieval/classification tasks rather than the entire image itself thus minimising computational resources required. We show that we ...

In content-based image retrieval, precision is usually regarded as the top metric used for performance measurement. With image databases reaching hundreds of millions of records, it is apparent that many retrieval strategies will not scale. Data representation and organization has to be better understood. This paper focuses on: (a) feature selection and optimal representation of features and (b...

Homeowners face a major challenge in choosing their optimal electricity tariff by having to predict their yearly energy consumption and then optimise their usage according to the complex pricing structure built into such tariffs. To address this challenge, we develop AgentSwitch, a prototype agent-based platform to solve the tariff selection problem. AgentSwitch incorporates novel algorithms th...