Mining frequent itemset using bit-vector representation approach is very efficient for dense type datasets, but highly inefficient for sparse datasets due to lack of any efficient bit-vector projection technique. In this paper we present a novel efficient bit-vector projection technique, for sparse and dense datasets. To check the efficiency of our bit-vector projection technique, we present a new frequent itemset mining algorithm Ramp (Real Algorithm for Mining Patterns) build upon our bit-vector projection technique. The performance of the Ramp is compared with the current best (all, maximal and closed) frequent itemset mining algorithms on benchmark datasets. Different experimental results on sparse and dense datasets show that mining frequent itemset using Ramp is faster than the current best algorithms, which show the effectiveness of our bit-vector projection idea. We also present a new local maximal frequent itemsets propagation and maximal itemset superset checking approach FastLMFI, build upon our PBR bit-vector projection technique. Our different computational experiments suggest that itemset maximality checking using FastLMFI is fast and efficient than a previous will known progressive focusing approach.

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful. Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems.

An intent expression system using eye robots is proposed for a mascot robot system from a viewpoint of humatronics. The eye robot aims at providing a basic interface method for an information terminal robot system. To achieve better understanding of the displayed information, the importance and the degree of certainty of the information should be communicated along with the main content. The proposed intent expression system aims at conveying this additional information using the eye robot system. Eye motions are represented as the states in a pleasure-arousal space model. Changes in the model state are calculated by fuzzy inference according to the importance and degree of certainty of the displayed information. These changes influence the arousal-sleep coordinates in the space that corresponds to levels of liveliness during communication. The eye robot provides a basic interface for the mascot robot system that is easy to be understood as an information terminal for home environments in a humatronics society.

We propose an efficient algorithm for sparse signal reconstruction problems. The proposed algorithm is an augmented Lagrangian method based on the dual sparse reconstruction problem. It is efficient when the number of unknown variables is much larger than the number of observations because of the dual formulation. Moreover, the primal variable is explicitly updated and the sparsity in the solution is exploited. Numerical comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms shows that the proposed algorithm is favorable when the design matrix is poorly conditioned or dense and very large.

General RL algorithms like Q-learning [17], SARSA and TD(λ) [15] have been proved to converge to the globally optimal solution (under certain assumptions) [1][17]. They are very flexible, because they do not require a model of the environment, and have been shown to be effective in solving a variety of RL tasks. This flexibility, however, comes at a certain cost: these RL algorithms require extremely long training to cope with large state space problems. Many different approaches have been proposed for speeding up the RL process. One possible technique is to use function approximation [8], in order to reduce the effect of the "curse of dimensionality".

Adequate representation of natural language semantics requires access to vast amounts of common sense and domain-specific world knowledge. Prior work in the field was based on purely statistical techniques that did not make use of background knowledge, on limited lexicographic knowledge bases such as WordNet, or on huge manual efforts such as the CYC project. Here we propose a novel method, called Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), for fine-grained semantic interpretation of unrestricted natural language texts. Our method represents meaning in a high-dimensional space of concepts derived from Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in existence. We explicitly represent the meaning of any text in terms of Wikipedia-based concepts. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on text categorization and on computing the degree of semantic relatedness between fragments of natural language text. Using ESA results in significant improvements over the previous state of the art in both tasks. Importantly, due to the use of natural concepts, the ESA model is easy to explain to human users.

In a significant minority of cases, certain pronouns, especially the pronoun it, can be used without referring to any specific entity. This phenomenon of pleonastic pronoun usage poses serious problems for systems aiming at even a shallow understanding of natural language texts. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to identify such uses of it: the extrapositional cases are identified using a series of queries against the web, and the cleft cases are identified using a simple set of syntactic rules. The system is evaluated with four sets of news articles containing 679 extrapositional cases as well as 78 cleft constructs. The identification results are comparable to those obtained by human efforts.

A technique for speeding up reinforcement learning algorithms by using time manipulation is proposed. It is applicable to failure-avoidance control problems running in a computer simulation. Turning the time of the simulation backwards on failure events is shown to speed up the learning by 260% and improve the state space exploration by 12% on the cart-pole balancing task, compared to the conventional Q-learning and Actor-Critic algorithms.

This year's conferences were held in Perhaps one of the true litmus tests of any conference is the caliber of the invited speakers. Sensibility: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion and research manager at Microsoft Research) The distinguished Robert S. Englemore Mining, and the Computational who gave his AAAI presidential Memorial Award Lecture was delivered Treatment of Subjective Language"), address, "Artificial Intelligence in the by Kenneth Ford (Florida Institute while Seth C. Goldstein (Carnegie Open World." Mel lon University) discussed revolutionary Chris Urmson (Carnegie Mellon In his lecture, "Toward Cognitive work in self-reconfiguring programmable University), a leading member of the Prostheses," Ford discussed human-centered matter composed of ensembles of submillimeter robots in his DARPA Urban Grand Challenge winning computing to amplify talk, "Realizing Claytronics: A Challenge team, described the race and winning human cognition and perception. Instead of the learning for network analysis in ("From Images to Scenes: Using popular competition, which has his talk, "Making Sense of Complex Lots of Data to Infer Geometric, Photometric, pushed the envelope of mobile robotics Networks." David Haussler (University and Semantic Scene Properties since its inception, this year was of California, Santa Cruz) traced the from a Single Image"), and Lillian host to a Robot Workshop and Exhibition.

Calendar of all the AAAI sponsored conferences, conferences presented by AAAI Affiliates, and conferences held in cooperation with AAAI to be held in 2009.