Human attitudes of objection, protest, and rebellion have undeniable potential to bring about social benefits, from social justice to healthy balance in relationships. At times, they can even be argued to be ethically obligatory. Conversely, AI rebellion is largely seen as a dangerous, destructive prospect. With the increase of interest in collaborative human/AI environments in which synthetic agents play social roles or, at least, exhibit behavior with social and ethical implications, we believe that AI rebellion could have benefits similar to those of its counterpart in humans. We introduce a framework meant to help categorize and design Rebel Agents, discuss their social and ethical implications, and assess their potential benefits and the risks they may pose. We also present AI rebellion scenarios in two considerably different contexts (military unmanned vehicles and computational social creativity) that exemplify components of the framework.

This paper focuses on modeling ride requests and their variations over location and time, based on analyzing extensive real-world data from a  ride-sharing service. We introduce a graph model that captures the spatial and temporal variability of ride requests and the potentials for ride pooling. We discover these ride request graphs exhibit a well known property called  "densification power law" often found in real graphs modelling human behaviors. We show the pattern of ride requests and the potential of ride pooling for a city can be characterized by the densification factor of the ride request graphs. Previous works have shown that it is possible to automatically generate synthetic versions of these graphs that exhibit a given densification factor. We present an algorithm for automatic generation of synthetic ride request graphs that match quite well the densification factor of ride request graphs from actual ride request data.

A kidney exchange is a centrally-administered barter market where patients swap their willing yet incompatible donors. Modern kidney exchanges use 2-cycles, 3-cycles, and chains initiated by non-directed donors (altruists who are willing to give a kidney to anyone) as the means for swapping. We propose significant generalizations to kidney exchange. We allow more than one donor to donate in exchange for their desired patient receiving a kidney. We also allow for the possibility of a donor willing to donate if any of a number of patients receive kidneys. Furthermore, we combine these notions and generalize them.The generalization is to exchange among organ clubs, where a club is willing to donate organs outside the club if and only if the club receives organs from outside the club according to given specifications. Forms of organ clubs already exist — under an arrangement where one gets to be in the club as a potential recipient if one is willing to donate one's organs to the club upon death. Our approach can be used as an inter-club exchange mechanism that increases systemwide good (and can also be applied to live donation). In this paper we introduce these ideas, present the notion of operation frames that can be used to sequence the operations across batches, and present integer programming formulations for the market clearing problems for these new types of organ exchanges.

In this work, we consider the weekly home health care scheduling problem with time windows, continuity of care, workload fairness, and inter-visit temporal dependency, and service/travel time uncertainties. We formulate the problem as a chance constrained mathematical model. We further apply Lagrangian relaxation, exploit the separable structure of the problem, and handle the uncertainties by employing a sampling-based strategy. Experiments have been conducted on a real-world dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches.

Information visualization is the study of interactive visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition. Most existing visualization techniques are not suited to explore and understand datasets from heterogeneous and complex sources. Assuming that agent-based models properly represent the complexity of a real system, we propose to use an approach based on the definition of an agent-based model to facilitate visual representation of simulation outputs and complex data. These concepts have been implemented in the GAMA modeling and simulation platform, in which we developed a 3D immersive environment offering the user different points of view and ways to interact. We implemented models chosen for their properties to support a linear progression in terms of complexity to test their flexibility, modularity, and adaptability. Finally, we demonstrate through the particular case of data visualization, how our approach allows us, in real time, to represent, clarify, or even discover dynamics and how that progress in terms of visualization can contribute, in turn, to improve the modeling of complex systems.

This short note proposes the study of ancient games as a new frontier for game AI research. This aspect of games research has been largely neglected so far from an AI perspective, but could benefit significantly from the application of modern computational techniques.

This paper presents a demonstration of how AI can be useful in the game design and development process of a modern board game. By using an artificial intelligence algorithm to play a substantial amount of matches of the Ticket to Ride board game and collecting data, we can analyze several features of the gameplay as well as of the game board. Results revealed loopholes in the game's rules and pointed towards trends in how the game is played. We are then led to the conclusion that large scale simulation utilizing artificial intelligence can offer valuable information regarding modern board games and their designs that would ordinarily be prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to discover manually.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown incredible performance in learning various tasks to the human level. However, unlike human perception, current DRL models connect the entire low-level sensory input to the state-action values rather than exploiting the relationship between and among entities that constitute the sensory input. Because of this difference, DRL needs vast amount of experience samples to learn. In this paper, we propose a Multi-focus Attention Network (MANet) which mimics human ability to spatially abstract the low-level sensory input into multiple entities and attend to them simultaneously. The proposed method first divides the low-level input into several segments which we refer to as partial states. After this segmentation, parallel attention layers attend to the partial states relevant to solving the task. Our model estimates state-action values using these attended partial states. In our experiments, MANet attains highest scores with significantly less experience samples. Additionally, the model shows higher performance compared to the Deep Q-network and the single attention model as benchmarks. Furthermore, we extend our model to attentive communication model for performing multi-agent cooperative tasks. In multi-agent cooperative task experiments, our model shows 20% faster learning than existing state-of-the-art model.

Symmetry-breaking is a technique for efficiently solving SAT instances that contain high degrees of symmetry among the variables of the instance. When satisfiability problems are represented as a relational schema, symmetries between objects in the domain can be detected directly from evidence, that is, variables known to have a particular setting prior to solving. These symmetries between domain objects are called term symmetries. In this work, we present two novel extensions to the technique of term equivalent symmetry breaking which allow the detection and exploitation of conditional or hidden symmetries, those relationships between domain objects that are obscured until the instance is partially solved. We give promising preliminary experimental results for this technique, and discuss how the techniques could be extended for use in probabilistic domains.

When acting, agents may deviate from the optimal plan, either because they are not perfect optimizers or because they interleave multiple unrelated tasks. In this paper, we detect such deviations by analyzing a set of observations and a monitored goal to determine if an observed agent's actions contribute towards achieving the goal. We address this problem without pre-defined static plan libraries, and instead use a planning domain definition to represent the problem and the expected agent behavior. At the core of our approach, we exploit domain-independent heuristics for estimating the goal distance, incorporating the concept of landmarks (actions which all plans must undertake if they are to achieve the goal). We evaluate the resulting approach empirically using several known planning domains, and demonstrate that our approach effectively detects such deviations.