Due to the proliferation of online auctions, there is an increasing need to monitor and bid in multiple auctions in order to procure the best deal for the desired good. To this end, this paper reports on the development of a heuristic decision making framework that an autonomous agent can exploit to tackle the problem of bidding across multiple auctions with varying start and end times and with varying protocols (including English, Dutch and Vickrey). The framework is flexible, configurable, and enables the agent to adopt varying tactics and strategies that attempt to ensure that the desired item is delivered in a manner consistent with the user's preferences. Given this large space of possibilities, we employ a genetic algorithm to search (offline) for effective strategies in common classes of environment. The strategies that emerge from this evolution are then codified into the agent's reasoning behaviour so that it can select the most appropriate strategy to employ in its prevailing circumstances. The proposed framework has been implemented in a simulated marketplace environment and its effectiveness has been empirically demonstrated.

Stock market is a promising financial investment that can generate great wealth. However, the volatile nature of the stock market makes it a very high risk investment. Thus, a lot of researchers have contributed their efforts to forecast the stock market pricing and average movement. Researchers have used various methods in computer science and economics in their quests to gain a piece of this volatile information and make great fortune out of the stock market investment. This paper investigates various techniques for the stock market prediction using artificial neural network (ANN). The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the applications of ANN in stock market prediction in order to determine what can be done in the future.

A Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is part of the process in Text Mining and it is a very useful process for information extraction. This NER tool can be used to assist user in identifying and detecting entities such as person, location or organization. However, different languages may have different morphologies and thus require different NER processes. For instance, an English NER process cannot be applied in processing Malay articles due to the different morphology used in different languages. This paper proposes a Rule-Based Named-Entity Recognition algorithm for Malay articles. The proposed Malay NER is designed based on a Malay part-of-speech (POS) tagging features and contextual features that had been implemented to handle Malay articles. Based on the POS results, proper names will be identified or detected as the possible candidates for annotation. Besides that, there are some symbols and conjunctions that will also be considered in the process of identifying named-entity for Malay articles. Several manually constructed dictionaries will be used to handle three named-entities; Person, Location and Organizations. The experimental results show a reasonable output of 89.47% for the F-Measure value. The proposed Malay NER algorithm can be further improved by having more complete dictionaries and refined rules to be used in order to identify the correct Malay entities system

This paper describes a rule-based sentiment analysis algorithm for polarity classification of financial news articles. The system utilizes a prior polarity lexicon to classify the financial news articles into positive or negative. Sentiment composition rules are used to determine the polarity of each sentence in the news article, while the Positivity/Negativity ratio (P/N ratio) is used to calculate the sentiment values of the overall content of each news article. The performance of the Sentiment Analyser was evaluated using a dataset of manually annotated financial news articles collected from various online financial newspapers. The result was encouraging as our Sentiment Analyser obtained an overall F-Score of 75.6% for both positive and negative classifications.

This paper describes the performance of four crossover operators used in evolving the required controllers in a video game. The crossover operators used in this research are the two-point crossover, the uniform crossover, the N-point crossover, and the single-point crossover. The performance of these crossover methods were tested using Infinite Mario Bros game. This video game was chosen due to the dynamicity and complexity of the game. This paper also presents a newly designed nondeterministic based Finite State Machine (FSM) method. The Mario character uses the proposed FSM as its strategy in the game. The proposed FSM is then optimized using a modified Genetic Algorithm (GA). The results showed that the required controllers were generated successfully using the proposed method. The results also showed that the N-point crossover performed well compared to the uniform crossover, the two-point crossover and the single-point crossover methods.