Current approaches for answering queries with imprecise constraints require users to provide distance metrics and importance measures for attributes of interest metrics that are hard to elicit from lay users. Moreover they assume the ability to modify the architecture of the underlying database. Given that most Web databases are autonomous and may have users with limited expertise over the asso...

Gert de Cooman’s work is an important contribution to a better understanding of how to deal with imprecise probabilities. But there is an important issue which is not addressed. How can imprecise probabilites be dealt with not in isolation but in the broader context of imprecise probability distributions, imprecise events and imprecise relations? What is needed for this purpose is the concept o...

Imprecision arises naturally in the context of computer models and their relation to reality. An imprecise treatment of general computer models is presented, illustrated with an analysis of a complex galaxy formation simulation known as Galform. The analysis involves several different types of uncertainty, one of which (the Model Discrepancy) comes directly from expert elicitation regarding the...

Given the ambiguity and imprecision of the "concept" in the Internet, which may be described with both textual and image information, the use of Fuzzy Conceptual Matching (FCM) is a necessity for search engines. In the FCM approach, the "concept" is defined by a series of keywords with different weights depending on the importance of each keyword. Ambiguity in concepts can be defined by a set o...

The scheduling of tasks in dynamic multitasking computer systems using imprecise (partial) computations is studied. In our system, tasks arrive randomly during run-time, and they are to be processed as quickly as possible. We model the task in such a way that each task has two parts of computation: a mandatory part, and an optional part. The tasks are scheduled such that: if the total number of...

There has been a recent surge of research on the topic of poor-pitch singing. However, this research has not addressed an important distinction in measurement: that between accuracy and precision. With respect to singing, accuracy refers to the average difference between sung and target pitches. Precision, by contrast, refers to the consistency of repeated attempts to produce a pitch. A group o...

This paper addresses the issue of qualitative reasoning in imprecise spatial domains. In particular, the uncertainty in the nature of the spatial relationships between objects in space is represented by a set of possibilities. The approach to spatial reasoning proposed here is carried out in three steps. First, a transformation is carried out on the disjunctive set of possible relationships to ...

Considerable research has been done in order to schedule tasks to a multiple processing systems. Some of the computation time of these tasks may, however, be imprecise due to the nature of the problem. In this paper, an imprecise task graph is used to model the problem where each node represents a task associated with its computation time. An algorithm, called rotation scheduling, is extended t...

In this paper, we try to shed some light on the relationship between imprecision in spatial reasoning systems and its impact on the complexity of the reasoning algorithms. Intuitively, reasoning about spatial descriptions should be easier if less precision is required. However, we claim that in general the introduction of imprecision does not improve the efficiency of the algorithms but rather ...