The no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and release times is a typical NP-hard problem. This paper proposes an enhanced differential evolution algorithm with several fast evaluating strategies, namely, DE_FES, to minimize the total weighted tardiness objective for the NFSP with SSTs and RTs. In the proposed DE_FES, the DE-based search is adopted to perform global search for obtaining the promising regions or solutions in solution space, and a fast local search combined with three presented strategies is designed (...) to execute exploitation from these obtained regions. Test results and comparisons with two effective meta-heuristics show the effectiveness and robustness of DE_FES. (shrink)

Recent anthropological analyses of Chinese attitudes towards privacy fail to pay adequate attention to more ordinary, but more widely shared ideas of privacy – ideas that, moreover, have changed dramatically since the 1980s as China has become more and more open to Western countries, cultures, and their network and computing technologies. I begin by reviewing these changes, in part to show how contemporary notions of privacy in China constitute a dialectical synthesis of both traditional Chinese emphases on the importance of (...) the family and the state and more Western emphases on individual rights, including the right to privacy. This same synthesis can be seen in contemporary Chinese law and scholarship regarding privacy. A review of recent work in philosophical ethics demonstrates that information ethics in China is in its very early stages. In this work, privacy is justified as an instrumental good, rather than an intrinsic good. I argue by way of conclusion that privacy protections will continue to expand in China, in part under the pressures of globalization, increasing trade with and exposure to Western societies, and the increasing demands for Western-style individual privacy by young people. Even so, I argue that these emerging conceptions of privacy will remain distinctively Chinese – i.e., they will retain a basic consistency with traditional Chinese values and approaches. (shrink)

Epistemic logic has grown from its philosophical beginnings to find diverse applications in computer science, and as a means of reasoning about the knowledge and belief of agents. This book provides a broad introduction to the subject, along with many exercises and their solutions. The authors begin by presenting the necessary apparatus from mathematics and logic, including Kripke semantics and the well-known modal logics K, T, S4 and S5. Then they turn to applications in the context of distributed systems and (...) artificial intelligence. These include the notions of common knowledge, distributed knowledge, explicit and implicit belief, the interplays between knowledge and time, and knowledge and action, as well as a graded (or numerical) variant of the epistemic operators. The authors also discuss extensively the problem of logical omniscience. They cover Halpern & Moses' theory of honest formulas, and they make a digression into the realm of nonmonotonic reasoning and preferential entailment. They discuss Moore's autoepistemic logic, together with Levesque's related logic of "all I know". Furthermore, they show how one can base default and counterfactual reasoning on epistemic logic. Graduate students in philosophy or in computer science, especially those with an interest in AI, will find this book useful. (shrink)

Guided by the theories of system theory, synergetic theory, and other disciplines and based on fuzzy data mining algorithm, this article constructs a three-tier social security fund cloud audit platform. Firstly, the article systematically expounds the current situation of social security fund and social security fund audit, such as the technical basis of cloud computing and data mining. Combined with the actual work, the necessity and feasibility of building a cloud audit platform for social security funds are analyzed. This article (...) focuses on the construction of the cloud audit platform for social security funds. The general idea of using fuzzy data mining algorithm to build the social security fund audit cloud platform is to compress the knowledge contained in a large number of data into the weights between nodes and optimize the weights through the learning of the neural network system. Through the optimization function, the information contained in the neural network is stored in a few weights as far as possible. The main information is further highlighted by network clipping and removing weights that have little impact on the output. (shrink)