Tony Abou-Assaleh

Friday, October 23, witnessed the most anticipated programming competition in Atlantic Canada. Teams from Atlantic Canadian universities gathered at Dalhousie University in a show-off of programming and problem-solving skills. Each team consisted of 3 participants, mostly undergraduate computer science students. The teams were given 5 hours to tackle 6 problems. The problem complexity ranged from easy, suitable for second year undergraduate students in computer science, to more complex ones that even graduates would find challenging. The algorithmic solutions to the problems ranged from basic searching and sorting, to dynamic programming, to geometry.

17 minutes into the contest, the SMU Huskies, led by my colleague Chris Adams, solved their first problem. Withing the hour, a few more teams solved their first problem, but by that time SMU Huskies had already solved their second problem. They were on the roll.

At the end of the competition, the Huskies had solved 4 out of 6 problems, qualifying to compete at the ACM ICPC Northeast North America Programming Contest in Fredericton, NB, next Saturday.

The final results were announced at the APICS conference today:

1. #4 smu_huskies 4 problems 456 minutes
   Saint Mary’s University, CS Huskies
   Chris Adams, Jonathan Kenney, Lucas Mannell
2. #14 mounta_thought, 2 problems, 126 minutes
   Mount Allison University, Deep Thought
   Andrew Edmunds, Jason Rhinelander, Marc St. Onge
3. #19 dal_gold, 2 problems, 137 minutes
   Dalhousie University, Dalhousie Gold
   John Doucette, Ross Story, Brian Wolff
4. #10 unbf_blacks, 2 problems, 174 minutes
   University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, UNB Blacks
   Bradley Aune, Cody Harris, Ian Bishop
5. #20 upei_sl, 2 problems, 332 minutes
   University of Prince Edward Island, UPEI Skull Lightning
   Nick MacAulay, Peter Workman, Stanley DeBoer
6. #16 acadia_red, 2 problems, 339 minutes
   Acadia University, Acadia Red
   Alex Sanford, Matthew Penney, Ryan Wooden

Congratulations to Chris and SMU for a well-deserved victory, and better luck for the other teams next year.

The churches in Milano are just fascinating. I spent many hours during my trip in Milan going from one historic church to another. And although this started because there wasn’t much else to do, I kept going because I enjoyed it so much. I visited a total of 5 churches, each with a unique style, history, Christian artifacts, and wall paintings.

1. The first was Duomo, Milan’s most known treasure. Duomo is a huge church fully covered in engraved marble. All these statues and figures and patterns were all so detailed, so perfect, and so breathtaking. in the centre of the church, high above it, stands a golden statue of Virgin Mary.
2. Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio had the oldest of the Christian artifacts, dating back to early Christianity and was built by St. Ambrose in the 4th century. Here I discovered that Victor is actually the name of a saint.
3. The most memorable elements of Santa Maria presso San Satiro were the hundreds of paintings of saints and angles painted on the ceiling of the church. The church, as many others, is kept dark. Therefore, to the painting are hard to see by the naked eye (having them on the ceiling doesn’t help either) but can be viewed with the help of a camera that is able to capture more light that the human eye.
4. Santa Maria delle Grazie is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the church were Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper, although the building housing the painting is no longer considered part of the church.
5. Basilica of San Simpliciano captured my senses with all the art it houses, from paintings by famous and less famous artists, to stained-glass windows. The art comes from a wide range of periods, the earliest dating back to the 4th century.

Probabilistic Relaxed Unification Formalism and Applications in Automated Question-Answering Systems

Reasoning about natural language requires robustness in the face of uncertainty about the validity of the information contained in the text. Many natural language processing formalism rely on classical unification, which assumes that the knowledge base is complete and accurate. However, this seldom applies to the real world; text from the Web may contain incorrect, incomplete, or contradictory information. We introduce probabilistic relaxed unification as an alternative approach where the assumptions of classical unification are relaxed. Relaxed unification replaces the binary success or failure outcome of classical unification with a real number quantifying the correctness of the result. Our formalism is realized in the implementation of a modular question-answering system prototype. Our approach is empirically validated through a series of cases drawn from real world questions and data collection. The validation cases substantiate that our system provides satisfactory results on the chosen dataset within the system limitations. This book should be of interest to academics and practitioners interested in reasoning under uncertainty and automated question-answering systems.

I was recently invited by VDM Verlag to publish my PhD dissertation as monograph. The way it works is that the author does all the work for preparing the manuscript, there is no editorial proof-reading or any type of content or formatting assistance. On the other hand, the publisher handles all the distribution and printing at no cost to the author. It’s a good deal if you’re looking for a low-risk (no cost to you) low-return publishing opportunity. The author receives some royalties, but they’re generally insignificant.

One significant difference between the book and the dissertation is the addition of an index. Learning about writing an index was both pleasant and frustrating, and it is my hope that the effort it took will prove of use to the reader.

The book is 156 page and available from Amazon at $84.00 USD. ISBN: 978-3639171402

If you’re interested in publishing your manuscript through VDM Verlag, let me know and I will make the introduction. Disclaimer: I get a free book for every referral that leads to a publication.