Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have emerged over the past few years. Their exponential network effects depend on fact that each user can share her daily digital footprints with different communities, in places, and at times (for example form of check-in activities). Unlike other types networks, activities an LBSN potentially be performed by several users a collaborative way. Existing st...

The digital revolution requires greater reliability from electric power systems. However, predicting the growth of electricity demand is challenging as there still much uncertainty in terms demographics, industry changes, and irregular consumption patterns. Machine learning has emerged a powerful tool, particularly with latest developments deep learning. Such tools can predict and, thus, contri...

In this paper, a belief based correlated topic model (BCTM) is proposed for the semantic region analysis of pedestrian motion patterns in the crowded scenes. The inputs of the BCTM can be holistic trajectories or fragments of trajectories. By integrating the sources, sinks, and a forest of randomly spanning trees of trajectories as priors, the proposed BCTM improves the learning of semantic reg...

The present study examined whether the formation of associations is affected by individual differences in perceptual style (analytic vs. holistic). Ninety undergraduate students were tested on their ability to associate concurrent events (i.e. word—colour) and were assessed on measures of field dependence and intelligence. The analysis revealed that analytic perceptual style (field independence...

Despite the success of connectionist systems to model some aspects of cognition, critics argue that the lack of symbol processing makes them inadequate for modelling high-level cognitive tasks which require the representation and processing of hierarchical structures. In this thesis we investigate four mechanisms for encoding hierarchical structures in distributed representations that are suita...

The demands on academic staff in all sectors to adopt best ODL practices to create effective and efficient models of learning in the face of increasing external pressures show no signs of abating. The massification of higher education, diversified access, and pressures to meet institutional visions and research objectives demand of teaching staff an increasingly public design process subject to...