This paper presents a new system which provides services to elderly and persons suffering from motor or cognitive impair-ments in a smart home (SH). SH are alternative solutions in order to keep elderly and impaired persons as long as possible at their homes to allow them to live with more comfort. SH are dynamically evolving environments, thus the provided services by this system are context aware and customizable for every user. These services can be accessed by users through an application installed on a mobile device. The sys-tem uses a multi agent system (MAS) to have a dynamic and adaptive response to environmental change. Experiments are carried out in order to validate the chosen solutions.

Online social communities are becoming increasingly popular platforms for people to share information, seek emotional support, and maintain accountability for losing weight. Studying the discourse in these communities can offer insights on how users benefit from using these applications. This paper presents an analysis of language and discourse patterns in forum posts by users who lose weight and keep it off versus users with fluctuating weight dynamics. In contrast to prior studies, we have access to the weekly self-reported check-in weights of users along with their forum posts. This paper also presents a study on how goal-oriented forums are different from general online forums in terms of language markers. Our results reveal dierences about how the types of posts made by users vary along with their weight-loss patterns. These insights are closely related to the power dynamics of social interactions and can enable better design ofweight-loss applications thereby contributing to a healthy society.

In many situations, agents are required to use a set of strategies (behaviors) and switch among them during the course of an interaction. This work focuses on the problem of recognizing the strategy used by an agent within a small number of interactions. We propose using a Bayesian framework to address this problem. Bayesian policy reuse (BPR) has been empirically shown to be efficient at correctly detecting the best policy to use from a library in sequential decision tasks. In this paper we extend BPR to adversarial settings, in particular, to opponents that switch from one stationary strategy to another. Our proposed extension enables learning new models in an online fashion when the learning agent detects that the current policies are not performing optimally. Experiments presented in repeated games show that our approach is capable of efficiently detecting opponent strategies and reacting quickly to behavior switches, thereby yielding better performance than state-of-the-art approaches in terms of average rewards.

Scientific articles are not born equal. Some generate an entire discipline while others make relatively fewer contributions. When reviewing scientific literatures, it would be useful to identify those important articles and understand how they influence others. In this paper, we introduce J-Index, a quantitative metric modeling topic-level academic influence. J-Index is calculated based on the novelty of each article as well as its contributions to the articles where it is cited. We devise a generative model named Reference Topic Model (RefTM) which jointly utilizes the textual content and citation information in scientific literatures. We show how to learn RefTM to discover both the novelty of each paper and the strength of each citation. Experiments on a collection of more than 420,000 research papers demonstrate that RefTM outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of topic coherence as well as prediction performance, and validate J-Index's effectiveness of capturing topic-level academic influence in scientific literatures.

The problem of designing recommender systems for scholarly article citations has been actively researched with more than 200 publications appearing in the last two decades. In spite of this, no definitive results are available about what approaches work best. Arguably the most important reason for this lack of consensus is the dearth of standardised test collections and evaluation protocols, such as those provided by TREC-like forums. CiteSeerX, a "scholarly big dataset" has recently become available. However, this collection provides only the raw material that is yet to be moulded into Cranfield style test collections. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of test collections used in earlier work, and describe how we used CiteSeerX to design a test collection with a well-defined evaluation protocol. The collection consists of over 600,000 research papers and over 2,500 queries. We report some preliminary experimental results using this collection, which are indicative of the performance of elementary content-based techniques. These experiments also made us aware of some shortcomings of CiteSeerX itself.

The development of new scientific concepts today is an outcome of the accumulated knowledge built over time. Every scientific domain requires understanding of the trends of the dependencies between its subdomains. Analyses of trends to capture such dependencies using conventional document modeling techniques is a challenging task due to two reasons: (1) conventional vector-space modeling based representation of documents does not realize the history of the content, and (2) neither feature-level nor document-level causality is provided with any digital library metadata or citation network. In this paper, we propose an intuitive temporal representation of a scientific article that encodes inherent historic characteristics of the content. This intuitive representation of each document is then leveraged to discover causal relationships between scientific articles. In addition, we provide a mechanism to explore the lineage of each document in terms of other previously published documents, which illustrates how the theme of the document under analysis evolved over time. Empirical studies reported in the paper show that the proposed technique identifies meaningful causal relationships and discovers meaningful lineage in the scientific literature that could not be discovered through the citation network of the articles.

Retrieval systems for scholarly literature offer the ability for the scientific community to search, explore and download scholarly articles across various scientific disciplines. Mostly used by the experts in the particular field, these systems contain user community logs including information on user specific downloaded articles. In this paper we present a novel approach for automatically evaluating document similarity models in large collections of scholarly publications. Unlike typical evaluation settings that use test collections consisting of query documents and human annotated relevance judgments, we use download logs to automatically generate pseudo-relevant set of similar document pairs. More specifically we show that consecutively downloaded document pairs, extracted from a scholarly information retrieval (IR) system, could be utilized as a test collection for evaluating document similarity models. Another novel aspect of our approach lies in the method that we employ for evaluating the performance of the model by comparing the distribution of consecutively downloaded document pairs and random document pairs in log space. Across two families of similarity models, that represent documents in the term vector and topic spaces, we show that our evaluation approach achieves very high correlation with traditional performance metrics such as Mean Average Precision (MAP), while being more efficient to compute.

Planning in hybrid systems is important for dealing with real world applications. PDDL+ supports this representation of domains with mixed discrete and continuous dynamics, and supports events and processes modeling exogenous change. Motivated by numerous SAT-based planning approaches, we propose an approach to PDDL+ planning through SMT, describing an SMT encoding that captures all the features of the PDDL+ problem as published by Fox and Long (2006). The encoding can be applied on domains with nonlinear continuous change. We apply this encoding in a simple planning algorithm, demonstrating excellent results on a set of benchmark problems.

In this paper, we present an open-source emotion tracker and its innovative applications. Our tracker, EmoGram, tracks emotion changes for a sequence of textual units. It is versatile in terms of the textual unit (tweets, sentences in discourse, etc.) and also what constitutes the time sequence (timestamps of tweets, discourse nature of text, etc.). We demonstrate the utility of our system through our applications: a sequence of commentaries in cricket matches, a sequence of dialogues in a play, and a sequence of tweets related to the Maggi controversy in India in 2015. That one system can be used for these applications is the merit of EmoGram.

Relation extraction, which learns semantic relations of concept pairs from text, is an approach for mining commonsense knowledge. This paper investigates an approach for relation extraction, which helps expand a commonsense knowledge base with little labor work. We proposed a framework that learns new pairs from Chinese corpora by adopting concept pairs in Chinese commonsense knowledge base as seeds. Multiple instance learning is utilized as the learning algorithm for predicting relation for unseen pairs. The performance of our system could be improved by learning multiple iterations. The results in each iteration are manually evaluated and processed to next iteration as seeds. Our experiments extracted new pairs for relations “AtLocation”, “CapableOf”, and “HasProperty”. This study showed that new pairs could be extracted from text without huge humans work.