The Web has become the most important information source for most of us. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee for the correctness of information on the Web. Moreover, different websites often provide conflicting information on a subject. Several truth discovery methods have been proposed for various scenarios, and they have been successfully applied in diverse application domains. In this paper...

After every influenza pandemic (including the Russian of the 1890s and the Spanish influenza of 1918–1919), learned commentaries have reflected on the clinical presentation of the disease, noting that the great majority of cases were very mild, so mild that they corresponded much more to the symptoms of an upper respiratory tract infection than to an influenza-like illness with fever and prostr...

Hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation. The general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave. In our study of climate change and emissions reductions, we took advantage of the increasing bulk of evidence from psychology and economics that addresses the effects of making promi...

Probabilistic logic and uncertain logic, as two branches of the multi-valued logic, have been proposed for dealing with knowledge with random factors and with human uncertainty, respectively. As a generalization, this paper proposes an uncertain random logic to deal with complex knowledge containing random factors and human uncertainty simultaneously, and derives a formula to calculate the trut...

There exist almost as many superpixel segmentation algorithms as applications they can be used for. So far, the choice of the right superpixel algorithm for the task at hand is based on their ability to resemble human-made ground truth segmentations (besides runtime and availability). We investigate the equally important question of how stable the segmentations are under image changes as they a...

Marr proposed that human vision constructs "a true description of what is there". He argued that to understand human vision one must discover the features of the world it recovers and the constraints it uses in the process. Bayesian decision theory (BDT) is used in modem vision research as a probabilistic framework for understanding human vision along the lines laid out by Marr. Marr's contribu...

Evaluation plays an important rôle in the advancement of any field. In computer vision, unsupervised segmentation algorithms, although of great interest, often suffer from lack of a well-defined goal and/or explicit ground truth data, thus rendering evaluation difficult. This paper presents a novel method for evaluating such algorithms using a database for which ground truth data is not explici...