The general public shows great potential for utilizing scientific research. For example, a singer discovered her ectopic pregnancy by looking up clinical case reports. However, an exorbitant paywall impedes the public’s access to scientific literature. Our case study on a social network demonstrates a growing need for non-open access publications, especially for biomedical literature. The challenge is that non-open access papers are protected by copyright licenses that bar free distribution. In this paper, we propose a technical framework that leverages the doctrine of "idea-expression dichotomy" to bring ideas across paywalls. Idea-expression dichotomy prevents copyright holders from monopolizing ideas, theories, facts, and concepts. Therefore facts may pass through paywalls unencumbered by copyright license restrictions. Existing fact extraction methods (such as information extraction) require either large training sets or domain knowledge, which is intractable for the diverse biomedical scope spanning from clinical findings to genomics. We therefore develop a rule-based system to represent and extract facts. Social networkers and academics validated the effectiveness of our approach. 7 out of 9 users rated the paper’s information from the facts to be above average (≥6/10). Only 7% of the extracted facts were rated misleading.

We present a framework that enables online planning for robotic systems in dynamic environments. The PLANrm framework presented in this work utilizes the theory of robustness and monitoring of Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) specifications to inspect and modify available plans to both avoid obstacles and satisfy specifications in a dynamic environment. The use of MTL allows the practitioner to set complex event and timing based specifications that need to be satisfied in the execution of the plan. The monitoring algorithm inspects the possible paths in a bounded window and selects and adjusts a path to satisfy the specifications. In this paper, we present initial results on the framework and an extended summary of the algorithmic results. The approach is illustrated using a running example of a car-like model with a number of MTL specifications.

This paper describes Hy-CIRCA, an architecture for verified, correct-by-construction planning and execution for hy- brid systems, including non-linear continuous dynamics. Hy-CIRCA addresses the high computational complexity of such systems by first planning at an abstract level, and then progressively refining the original plan. Hy-CIRCA is an extension of our Playbook approach, which aims to make it easy for users to exert supervisory control over multiple autonomous systems by “calling a play.” The Playbook approach is implemented by combining (1) a human-machine interface for commanding and monitoring the autonomous systems; (2) a hierarchical planner for translating commands into executable plans; and (3) a smart executive to manage plan execution by coordinating the control systems of the individual autonomous agents, tracking plan execution, and triggering replanning when necessary. Hy-CIRCA integrates the dReal non-linear SMT solver, with enhanced versions of the SHOP2 HTN planner and the CIRCA Controller Synthesis Module (CSM). Hy-CIRCA’s planning process has 5 steps: (1) Using SHOP2, compute an approximate mission plan. While computing this plan, compute a hybrid automaton model of the plan, featuring more expressive continuous dynamics. (2) Using dReal, solve this hybrid model, establishing the correctness of the plan, and computing values for its continuous parameters. To execute the plan, (3) extract from the plan specifications for closed-loop, hard real-time supervisory controllers for the agents that must execute the plan. (4) Based upon these specifications, use the CIRCA CSM to plan the controllers. To ensure correct execution, (5) verify the CSM-generated controllers with dReal.

Hybrid planning with nonlinear continuous change is a significant challenge for existing planners. Prior works limit their scope to linear change or base their formalisms in model checking frameworkswith inherent limitations. We address nonlinear PDDL+ planning with anew encoding in first order logic over real valued functions. Our planner, PluReal, translates PDDL+ to this logical encoding and applies the dReal Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to construct plans. Unlike prior work that uses dReal in the hybrid system model checking tradition, PluReal is based in the planning as satisfiability (SAT) heritage. Adopting the SAT approach helps lift several unnatural restrictions that are imposed by the translation through hybrid systems and leads to improved scalability even without SMT solver variable selection heuristics.

The hospital readmission rate of patients within 30 days after discharge is broadly accepted as a healthcare quality measure and cost driver in the United States. The ability to estimate hospitalization costs alongside 30 day risk-stratification for such readmissions provides additional benefit for accountable care, now a global issue and foundation for the U.S.~government mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Recent data mining efforts either predict healthcare costs or risk of hospital readmission, but not both. In this paper we present a dual predictive modeling effort that utilizes healthcare data to predict the risk and cost of any hospital readmission (``all-cause''). For this purpose, we explore machine learning algorithms to do accurate predictions of healthcare costs and risk of 30-day readmission.Results on risk prediction for ``all-cause'' readmission compared to the standardized readmission tool (LACE) are promising, and the proposed techniques for cost prediction consistently outperform baseline models and demonstrate substantially lower mean absolute error (MAE).

Multiple concurrent physiological streams generated by various medical devices play important roles in patient condition assessment. However, these physiological streams needto be analyzed together and output in real-time for preciseand timely controlling and management, which poses a non-trivial challenge to existing methods. This paper presents ourresearch on real-time assessing based on this kind of data.To address this problem, we first extract sketches from original data with the help of adaptive sampling and wave splittingalgorithm, then define scalable operators on sketches and propose MUNCA (MUlti-dimensional Nearest Center Analysis)to combine these multiple concurrent data together for anal-ysis. Experiments on real data demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Constrained sampling and counting are two fundamental problems in artificial intelligence with a diverse range of applications, spanning probabilistic reasoning and planning to constrained-random verification. While the theory of these problems was thoroughly investigated in the 1980s, prior work either did not scale to industrial size instances or gave up correctness guarantees to achieve scalability. Recently, we proposed a novel approach that combines universal hashing and SAT solving and scales to formulas with hundreds of thousands of variables without giving up correctness guarantees. This paper provides an overview of the key ingredients of the approach and discusses challenges that need to be overcome to handle larger real-world instances.

Model counting and weighted model counting are key problems in artificial intelligence. Marginal inference can be reduced to model counting in many statistical-relational systems, such as Markov Logic. One common approach used by model counters is splitting a theory into disjoint subtheories, performing model counting on the subtheories, and then caching the result. If an identical subtheory is encountered again in the search, the cached result is used, greatly reducing runtime. In this work we introduce a way to cache symmetric subtheories compactly, which could potentially decrease required cache size, increase cache hits, and decrease runtime of solving.

2QBF is a special case of general quantified Boolean formulae (QBF). It is limited to just two quantification levels, i.e., to a form forall-exists. Despite this limitation it applies to a wide range of applications, e.g., to artificial intelligence, graph theory, synthesis, etc.. Recent research showed that CEGAR-based methods give a performance boost to QBF solving (e.g, compared to QDPLL). Conjunctive normal form (CNF) is a commonly accepted representation for both SAT and QBF problems; however, it does not reflect the circuit structure that might be present in the problem. Existing attempts of extracting this structure from CNF and using it in 2QBF context do not show advantages over CNF based 2QBF solvers. In this work we introduce a new workflow for 2QBF, containing a new semantic circuit extraction algorithm and a CEGAR-based 2QBF solver that uses circuit structure and is improved by a so-called "cofactor sharing'' heuristics. We evaluate the proposed methodology on a range of benchmarks and show the practicality of the new approach.

With the efforts of moving to sustainable and reliable energy supply, electricity markets are undergoing far-reaching changes. Due to the high-cost of failure in the real-world, it is important to test new market structures in simulation. This is the focus of the Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC), which proposes autonomous electricity broker agents as a means for stabilizing the electricity grid. This paper focuses on the question: how should an autonomous electricity broker agent act in competitive electricity markets to maximize its profit. We formalize the complete electricity trading problem as a continuous, high-dimensional Markov Decision Process (MDP), which is computationally intractable to solve. Our formalization provides a guideline for approximating the MDP's solution, and for extending existing solutions. We show that a previously champion broker can be viewed as approximating the solution using a lookahead policy. We present TacTex15, which improves upon this previous approximation and achieves state-of-the-art performance in competitions and controlled experiments. Using thousands of experiments against 2015 finalist brokers, we analyze TacTex15's performance and the reasons for its success. We find that lookahead policies can be effective, but their performance can be sensitive to errors in the transition function prediction, specifically demand-prediction.