Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most popular tools for data analytics. PCA operates on data point vectors supported on features, and outputs orthogonal directions (i.e., principal components) that maximize the explained variance. A limitation of PCA is that -- in many cases of interest -- the extracted principal components (PCs) are dense. However, in applications such as text analysis, or gene expression analytics, having only a few nonzero features per extracted PC, offers significantly higher interpretabilty. For example, in text analysis where PCs are supported on words, if they consist of only a few of them, then these words can be used to detect frequently occurring topics. Sparse PCA addresses the issue of interpretability directly by enforcing a sparsity constraint on the extracted PCs.

Given a similarity graph between items, correlation clustering (CC) groups similar items together and dissimilar ones apart. One of the most popular CC algorithms is KwikCluster: an algorithm that serially clusters neighborhoods of vertices, and obtains a 3-approximation ratio. Unfortunately, KwikCluster in practice requires a large number of clustering rounds, a potential bottleneck for large graphs. We present C4 and ClusterWild!, two algorithms for parallel correlation clustering that run in a polylogarithmic number of rounds and achieve nearly linear speedups, provably. C4 uses concurrency control to enforce serializability of a parallel clustering process, and guarantees a 3-approximation ratio. ClusterWild! is a coordination free algorithm that abandons consistency for the benefit of better scaling; this leads to a provably small loss in the 3-approximation ratio. We provide extensive experimental results for both algorithms, where we outperform the state of the art, both in terms of clustering accuracy and running time. We show that our algorithms can cluster billion-edge graphs in under 5 seconds on 32 cores, while achieving a 15x speedup.

We describe two nonconventional algorithms for linear regression, called GAME and CLASH. The salient characteristics of these approaches is that they exploit the convex $\ell_1$-ball and non-convex $\ell_0$-sparsity constraints jointly in sparse recovery. To establish the theoretical approximation guarantees of GAME and CLASH, we cover an interesting range of topics from game theory, convex and combinatorial optimization. We illustrate that these approaches lead to improved theoretical guarantees and empirical performance beyond convex and non-convex solvers alone.

This page includes forthcoming AAAI sponsored conferences, conferences presented by AAAI Affiliates, and conferences held in cooperation with AAAI. AI Magazine also maintains a calendar listing that includes nonaffiliated conferences at www.aaai.org/Magazine/calendar.php. LPNMR 2015 will be held 27-30 September, 2015, in Third AAAI Conference on Human International Joint Conference on Lexington, Kentucky USA Computation and Crowdsourcing. HCOMP 2015 will be held November be held July 25-August 1, 2015 in 8-11 in San Diego, California. The AAAI Fall Twenty-Ninth International Florida be held 21-23 February, 2016, in Symposium Series will be held November AI Research Society Conference.

The aim of the Angry Birds AI competition (AIBIRDS) is to build intelligent agents that can play new Angry Birds levels better than the best human players. This is surprisingly difficult for AI as it requires similar capabilities to what intelligent systems need for successfully interacting with the physical world, one of the grand challenges of AI. As such the competition offers a simplified and controlled environment for developing and testing the necessary AI technologies, a seamless integration of computer vision, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, reasoning under uncertainty, planning, and heuristic search, among others. Over the past three years there have been significant improvements, but we are still a long way from reaching the ultimate aim and, thus, there are great opportunities for participants in this competition.

However, what often matters for experience is the user's place A semantic model of user-centered places, the Platys ontology enables the mapping Research in context-aware computing (Schilit, Adams, of positions to places. In the model, places and and Want 1994) aims to enable computing systems that activities can be represented at different levels of acquire and maintain context data and use it to adapt granularity using subsumption hierarchies. It originated with Weiser's vision of to determine a user's place at any given time. Place ubiquitous computing (Weiser 1999) where human recognition has been addressed with standard activities are enhanced with devices that are all around machine-learning classifiers as well as a semisupervised but unnoticeable to the user and that provide services expectation-maximization algorithm. The that adapt to the circumstances in which they are used. Location is an 1994; Schilit et al. 1993) are early works in contextaware essential part of place and therefore place recognition computing and dealt with tracking a user's location relies on location sensing. Since frequent location and using it to provide better services or sharing it sensing by a mobile device depletes power, we have with others.

The last 10 years have seen the development of novel architectures and technologies for domainfocused, task-specific systems that know many things, such as who (identities, profile, history) they are with (social context) and in what role (responsibility, security, privacy); when and where (event, time, place); why (goals, shared or personal); how are they doing it (methods, applications); and using what resources (device, services, access, and ownership). Smart spaces and devices will increasingly use such contextual knowledge to help users move seamlessly between devices and applications, without having to explicitly carry, transfer, and exchange activity context. Such systems will qualitatively shift our lives both at work and play and significantly change our interactions both with our physical and virtual worlds. This dream of seamlessly interacting with our virtual environment has a long history as can be seen in Apple Inc.'s Knowledge Navigator 1987 concept video. However, the combination of dramatic progress in low-power mobile computing devices and sensors, with advances in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction (HCI) in the last decade, have provided the kind of platforms and algorithms that are enabling context-aware virtual personal assistants that plan activities and recognize intent. This has lead to an increase in work designed to bring these ideas into real world application and address the final technical hurdles that will make such systems a reality.

Conflict-Based Search (CBS) and its enhancements, Meta-Agent CBS and bypassing conflicts are amongst the strongest newly introduced algorithms for Multi-Agent Path Finding. This paper introduces two new improvements to CBS and incorporates them into a coherent, improved version of CBS, namely ICBS. Experimental results show that each of these improvements further reduces the runtime over the existing CBS-based approaches. When all improvements are combined, an even larger improvement is achieved, producing state-of-the art results for a number of domains.

The investigation and development of new methods from diverse perspectives to shed light on portfolio choice problems has never stagnated in financial research. Recently, multi-armed bandits have drawn intensive attention in various machine learning applications in online settings. The tradeoff between exploration and exploitation to maximize rewards in bandit algorithms naturally establishes a connection to portfolio choice problems. In this paper, we present a bandit algorithm for conducting online portfolio choices by effectually exploiting correlations among multiple arms. Through constructing orthogonal portfolios from multiple assets and integrating with the upper confidence bound bandit framework, we derive the optimal portfolio strategy that represents the combination of passive and active investments according to a risk-adjusted reward function. Compared with oft-quoted trading strategies in finance and machine learning fields across representative real-world market datasets, the proposed algorithm demonstrates superiority in both risk-adjusted return and cumulative wealth.

The task of machine condition monitoring is to detect machine failures at an early stage such that maintenance can be carried out in a timely manner. Most existing techniques are supervised approaches: they require user annotated training data to learn normal and faulty behaviors of a machine. However, such supervision can be difficult to acquire. In contrast, unsupervised methods don't need much human involvement, however, they face another challenge: how to model the generative (observation) process of sensor signals. We propose an unsupervised approach based on segmental hidden Markov models. Our method has a unifying observation model integrating three pieces of information that are complementary to each other. First, we model the signal as an explicit function over time, which describes its possible non-stationary trending patterns. Second, the stationary part of the signal is fit by an autoregressive model. Third, we introduce contextual information to break down the signal complexity such that the signal is modeled separately under different conditions. The advantages of the proposed model are demonstrated by tests on gas turbine, truck and honeybee datasets.