The Angry Birds AI Competition (aibirds.org) has been held annually since 2012 in conjunction with some of the major AI conferences, most recently with IJCAI 2015. The goal of the competition is to build AI agents that can play new Angry Birds levels as good as or better than the best human players. Successful agents should be able to quickly analyze new levels and to predict physical consequences of possible actions in order to select actions that solve a given level with a high score. Agents have no access to the game internal physics, but only receive screenshots of the live game. In this paper we describe why this problem is a challenge for AI, and why it is an important step towards building AI that can successfully interact with the real world. We also summarise some highlights of past competitions, including a new competition track we introduced recently.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm with roots in logic programming, knowledge representation, and non-monotonic reasoning. The ASP competition series aims at assessing and promoting the evolution of ASP systems and applications. Its growing range of challenging application-oriented benchmarks inspires and showcases continuous advancements of the state of the art in ASP.

In this paper, we describe ROOT13, a supervised system for the classification of hypernyms, co-hyponyms and random words. The system relies on a Random Forest algorithm and 13 unsupervised corpus-based features. We evaluate it with a 10-fold cross validation on 9,600 pairs, equally distributed among the three classes and involving several Parts-Of-Speech (i.e. adjectives, nouns and verbs). When all the classes are present, ROOT13 achieves an F1 score of 88.3%, against a baseline of 57.6% (vector cosine). When the classification is binary, ROOT13 achieves the following results: hypernyms-co-hyponyms (93.4% vs. 60.2%), hypernyms-random (92.3% vs. 65.5%) and co-hyponyms-random (97.3% vs. 81.5%). Our results are competitive with state-of-the-art models.

Hedonic games are a well-studied model of coalition formation, in which selfish agents are partitioned into disjoint sets, and agents care about the make-up of the coalition they end up in. The computational problem of finding a stable outcome tends to be computationally intractable, even after severely restricting the types of preferences that agents are allowed to report. We investigate a structural way of achieving tractability, by requiring that agents' preferences interact in a well-behaved manner. Precisely, we show that stable outcomes can be found in linear time for hedonic games that satisfy a notion of bounded treewidth and bounded degree.

Different formulations are proposed, distinguishing The notion of popular matching was introduced by (Gardenfors between one-sided matching (Garg et al. 2010) and twosided 1975), but this notion has its roots in the 18th century matching, e.g. the stable marriage (SM) problem (Gale and the notion of a Condorcet winner.

Rational verification is concerned with establishing whether a given temporal logic formula φ is satisfied in some or all equilibrium computations of a multi-agent system – that is, whether the system will exhibit the behaviour φ under the assumption that agents within the system act rationally in pursuit of their preferences. After motivating and introducing the framework of rational verification, we present formal models through which rational verification can be studied, and survey the complexity of key decision problems. We give an overview of a prototype software tool for rational verification, and conclude with a discussion and related work.

A key acceptability criterion for artificial agents will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems designed to influence humans via communication) constitute a highly sensitive topic because of their intrinsically social nature. Still, ethical studies in this area are rare and tend to focus on the output of the required action; instead, this work focuses on the acceptability of persuasive acts themselves.Building systems able to persuade while being ethically acceptable requires that they be capable of intervening flexibly and of taking decisions about which specific persuasive strategy to use. We show how, exploiting a behavioral approach, based on human assessment of moral dilemmas, we obtain results that will lead to more ethically appropriate systems. Experiments we have conducted address the type of persuader, the strategies adopted and the circumstances. Dimensions surfaced that can characterize the interpersonal differences concerning moral acceptability of machine performed persuasion, usable for strategy adaptation. We also show that the prevailing preconceived negative attitude toward persuasion by a machine is not predictive of actual moral acceptability judgement when subjects are confronted with specific cases.

The future will see autonomous machines acting in the same environment as humans, in areas as diverse as driving, assistive technology, and health care. Think of self-driving cars, companion robots, and medical diagnosis support systems. We also believe that humans and machines will often need to work together and agree on common decisions. Thus hybrid collective decision making systems will be in great need. In this scenario, both machines and collective decision making systems should follow some form of moral values and ethical principles (appropriate to where they will act but always aligned to humans'), as well as safety constraints. In fact, humans would accept and trust more machines that behave as ethically as other humans in the same environment. Also, these principles would make it easier for machines to determine their actions and explain their behavior in terms understandable by humans. Moreover, often machines and humans will need to make decisions together, either through consensus or by reaching a compromise. This would be facilitated by shared moral values and ethical principles.

Profound knowledge about Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become increasingly important for careers in science and engineering. Therefore an innovative educational project teaching fundamental concepts of AI at high school level will be presented in this paper. We developed an AI-course covering major topics (problem solving, search, planning, graphs, datastructures, automata, agent systems, machine learning) which comprises both theoretical and hands-on components. A pilot project was conducted and empirically evaluated. Results of the evaluation show that the participating pupils have become familiar with those concepts and the various topics addressed. Results and lessons learned from this project form the basis for further projects in different schools which intend to integrate AI in future secondary science education.

We have designed an open and modular course for data science and big data analytics using a workflow paradigm that allows students to easily experience big data through a sophisticated yet easy to use instrument that is an intelligent workflow system. A key aspect of this work is the use of semantic workflows to capture and reuse end-to-end analytic methods that experts would use to analyze big data, and the use of an intelligent workflow system to elaborate the workflow and manage its execution and resulting datasets. Through the exposure of big data analytics in a workflow framework, students will be able to get first-hand experiences with a breadth of big data topics, including multi-step data analytic and statistical methods, software reuse and composition, parallel distributed programming, high-end computing. In addition, students learn about a range of topics in AI, including semantic representations and ontologies, machine learning, natural language processing, and image analysis.