Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually. However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ? typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance; specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine.

The Graphplan algorithm for generating optimal make-span plans containing parallel sets of actions remains one of the most effective ways to generate such plans. However, despite enhancements on a range of fronts, the approach is currently dominated in terms of speed, by state space planners that employ distance-based heuristics to quickly generate serial plans. We report on a family of strategies that employ available memory to construct a search trace so as to learn from various aspects of Graphplan's iterative search episodes in order to expedite search in subsequent episodes. The planning approaches can be partitioned into two classes according to the type and extent of search experience captured in the trace. The planners using the more aggressive tracing method are able to avoid much of Graphplan's redundant search effort, while planners in the second class trade off this aspect in favor of a much higher degree of freedom than Graphplan in traversing the space of'states' generated during regression search on the planning graph. The tactic favored by the second approach, exploiting the search trace to transform the depth-first, IDA* nature of Graphplan's search into an iterative state space view, is shown to be the more powerful. We demonstrate that distance-based, state space heuristics can be adapted to informed traversal of the search trace used by the second class of planners and develop an augmentation targeted specifically at planning graph search. Guided by such a heuristic, the step-optimal version of the planner in this class clearly dominates even a highly enhanced version of Graphplan. By adopting beam search on the search trace we then show that virtually optimal parallel plans can be generated at speeds quite competitive with a modern heuristic state space planner.

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a ubiquitous problem in computational biology. Although it is NP-hard to find an optimal solution for an arbitrary number of sequences, due to the importance of this problem researchers are trying to push the limits of exact algorithms further. Since MSA can be cast as a classical path finding problem, it is attracting a growing number of AI researchers interested in heuristic search algorithms as a challenge with actual practical relevance. In this paper, we first review two previous, complementary lines of research. Based on Hirschberg's algorithm, Dynamic Programming needs O(kN^(k-1)) space to store both the search frontier and the nodes needed to reconstruct the solution path, for k sequences of length N. Best first search, on the other hand, has the advantage of bounding the search space that has to be explored using a heuristic. However, it is necessary to maintain all explored nodes up to the final solution in order to prevent the search from re-expanding them at higher cost. Earlier approaches to reduce the Closed list are either incompatible with pruning methods for the Open list, or must retain at least the boundary of the Closed list. In this article, we present an algorithm that attempts at combining the respective advantages; like A* it uses a heuristic for pruning the search space, but reduces both the maximum Open and Closed size to O(kN^(k-1)), as in Dynamic Programming. The underlying idea is to conduct a series of searches with successively increasing upper bounds, but using the DP ordering as the key for the Open priority queue. With a suitable choice of thresholds, in practice, a running time below four times that of A* can be expected. In our experiments we show that our algorithm outperforms one of the currently most successful algorithms for optimal multiple sequence alignments, Partial Expansion A*, both in time and memory. Moreover, we apply a refined heuristic based on optimal alignments not only of pairs of sequences, but of larger subsets. This idea is not new; however, to make it practically relevant we show that it is equally important to bound the heuristic computation appropriately, or the overhead can obliterate any possible gain. Furthermore, we discuss a number of improvements in time and space efficiency with regard to practical implementations. Our algorithm, used in conjunction with higher-dimensional heuristics, is able to calculate for the first time the optimal alignment for almost all of the problems in Reference 1 of the benchmark database BAliBASE.

Variable elimination is a general technique for constraint processing. It is often discarded because of its high space complexity. However, it can be extremely useful when combined with other techniques. In this paper we study the applicability of variable elimination to the challenging problem of finding still-lifes. We illustrate several alternatives: variable elimination as a stand-alone algorithm, interleaved with search, and as a source of good quality lower bounds. We show that these techniques are the best known option both theoretically and empirically. In our experiments we have been able to solve the n 20 instance, which is far beyond reach with alternative approaches.

Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Email: patrick.hung@uoit.ca (MDAI 2005).

In this paper we concentrate on the resolution of the lexical ambiguity that arises when a given word has several different meanings. This specific task is commonly referred to as word sense disambiguation (WSD). The task of WSD consists of assigning the correct sense to words using an electronic dictionary as the source of word definitions. We present two WSD methods based on two main methodological approaches in this research area: a knowledge-based method and a corpus-based method. Our hypothesis is that word-sense disambiguation requires several knowledge sources in order to solve the semantic ambiguity of the words. These sources can be of different kinds--- for example, syntagmatic, paradigmatic or statistical information. Our approach combines various sources of knowledge, through combinations of the two WSD methods mentioned above. Mainly, the paper concentrates on how to combine these methods and sources of information in order to achieve good results in the disambiguation. Finally, this paper presents a comprehensive study and experimental work on evaluation of the methods and their combinations.

There has been increased interest in devising learning techniques that combine unlabeled data with labeled data - i.e. semi-supervised learning. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been performed across various techniques and different types and amounts of labeled and unlabeled data. Moreover, most of the published work on semi-supervised learning techniques assumes that the labeled and unlabeled data come from the same distribution. It is possible for the labeling process to be associated with a selection bias such that the distributions of data points in the labeled and unlabeled sets are different. Not correcting for such bias can result in biased function approximation with potentially poor performance. In this paper, we present an empirical study of various semi-supervised learning techniques on a variety of datasets. We attempt to answer various questions such as the effect of independence or relevance amongst features, the effect of the size of the labeled and unlabeled sets and the effect of noise. We also investigate the impact of sample-selection bias on the semi -supervised learning techniques under study and implement a bivariate probit technique particularly designed to correct for such bias.

In this paper, we construct and investigate a hierarchy of spatio-temporal formalisms that result from various combinations of propositional spatial and temporal logics such as the propositional temporal logic PTL, the spatial logics RCC-8, BRCC-8, S4u and their fragments. The obtained results give a clear picture of the trade-off between expressiveness and `computational realisability' within the hierarchy. We demonstrate how different combining principles as well as spatial and temporal primitives can produce NP-, PSPACE-, EXPSPACE-, 2EXPSPACE-complete, and even undecidable spatio-temporal logics out of components that are at most NP- or PSPACE-complete.

Value iteration is a popular algorithm for finding near optimal policies for POMDPs. It is inefficient due to the need to account for the entire belief space, which necessitates the solution of large numbers of linear programs. In this paper, we study value iteration restricted to belief subsets. We show that, together with properly chosen belief subsets, restricted value iteration yields near-optimal policies and we give a condition for determining whether a given belief subset would bring about savings in space and time. We also apply restricted value iteration to two interesting classes of POMDPs, namely informative POMDPs and near-discernible POMDPs.

Standard value function approaches to finding policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are generally considered to be intractable for large models. The intractability of these algorithms is to a large extent a consequence of computing an exact, optimal policy over the entire belief space. However, in real-world POMDP problems, computing the optimal policy for the full belief space is often unnecessary for good control even for problems with complicated policy classes. The beliefs experienced by the controller often lie near a structured, low-dimensional subspace embedded in the high-dimensional belief space. Finding a good approximation to the optimal value function for only this subspace can be much easier than computing the full value function. We introduce a new method for solving large-scale POMDPs by reducing the dimensionality of the belief space. We use Exponential family Principal Components Analysis (Collins, Dasgupta & Schapire, 2002) to represent sparse, high-dimensional belief spaces using small sets of learned features of the belief state. We then plan only in terms of the low-dimensional belief features. By planning in this low-dimensional space, we can find policies for POMDP models that are orders of magnitude larger than models that can be handled by conventional techniques. We demonstrate the use of this algorithm on a synthetic problem and on mobile robot navigation tasks.