The paper develops a formal model for interpreting vague languages based on a variant of "supervaluation" semantics. Two modes of semantic variability are modelled, corresponding to different aspects of vagueness: one mode arises where there can be multiple definitions of a term; and the other relates to the threshold of applicability of a vague term with respect to the magnitude of relevant observable values. The truth of a proposition depends on both the possible world and the "precisification" with respect to which it is evaluated. Structures representing possible worlds and precisifications are both specified in terms of primitive functions representing observable measurements, so that the semantics is grounded upon an underlying theory of physical reality. On the basis of this semantics, the acceptability of a proposition to an agent is characterised in terms of a combination of agent's beliefs about the world and their attitude to admissible interpretations of vague predicates.

We formalize actions and change in a housekeeping domain with multiple cleaning robots, and commonsense knowledge about this domain, in the action language C+. Geometric reasoning is lifted to high-level representation by embedding motion planning in the domain description using external predicates. With such a formalization of the domain, a plan can be computed using the causal reasoner CCalc for each robot to tidy some part of the house. We introduce a planning and monitoring algorithm for safe execution of these plans, so that it can recover from plan failures due to collision with movable objects whose presence and location are not known in advance or due to heavy objects that cannot be lifted alone. We illustrate the applicability of this algorithm with a simulation of a housekeeping domain.

A recent direction within belief revision theory is to develop a theory of belief change for the Horn knowledge representation framework. We consider questions related to the complexity aspects of previous work, leading to questions about Horn envelopes (or Horn LUB’s), introduced earlier in the context of knowledge compilation. A characterization is obtained of the remainders of a Horn be- lief set with respect to a consequence to be contracted, as the Horn envelopes of the belief set and an elementary conjunction corresponding to a truth assignment satisfying a certain body building formula. This gives an efficient algorithm to generate all remainders, each represented by a truth assignment. On the negative side, examples are given of Horn belief sets and consequences where Horn formulas representing the result of most contraction operators, based either on remainders or on weak remainders, must have exponential size.

List of organizers of the Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning AAAI symposium.

This work introduces Human-Agent Transfer (HAT), an algorithm that combines transfer learning, learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning to achieve rapid learning and high performance in complex domains. Using experiments in a simulated robot soccer domain, we show that human demonstrations transferred into a baseline policy for an agent and refined using reinforcement learning significantly improve both learning time and policy performance. Our evaluation compares three algorithmic approaches to incorporating demonstration rule summaries into transfer learning, and studies the impact of demonstration quality and quantity. Our results show that all three transfer methods lead to statistically significant improvement in performance over learning without demonstration.

The collaboration between a human and a robot is here understood as a learning process mediated by the instructor prompt behaviours and the apprentice collecting information from them to learn a plan. The instructor wears the Gaze Machine, a wearable device gathering and conveying visual and audio input from the instructor while executing a task. The robot, on the other hand, is eager to learn both the best sequence of actions, their timing and how they interlace. The cross relation among actions is specified both in terms of time intervals for their execution, and in terms of location in space to cope with the instruction interaction with people and objects in the scene. We outline this process: how to transform the rich information delivered by the Gaze Machine into a plan. Specifically, how to obtain a map of the instructor positions and his gaze position, via visual slam and gaze fixations; further, how to obtain an action map from the running commentaries and the topological maps and, finally, how to obtain a temporal net of the relevant actions that have been extracted. The learned structure is then managed by the flexible time paradigm of flexible planning in the Situation Calculus for execution monitoring and plan generation.

Processing high-density clinical signal data (data from biomedical sensors deployed in the clinical environment) is resource intensive and time consuming. We propose a novel approach to storing and processing clinical signal data based on the Apache HBase distributed column-store and the MapReduce programming paradigm with an integrated web-based data visualization layer. An integrated solution negates the need to marshal data into and out of the storage system while also easily parallelizing the computation, a problem that is becoming more and more important due to increasing numbers of sensors and resulting data. We estimate upwards of 50TB of clinical signal data for a 200-bed medical center within the next 5 years. Consequently, efficient processing of clinical signal data is a vital step towards multivariate analysis of the signal data in order to develop better ways of describing a patient’s clinical status.

Applications range from the detection of potential all times t 1,...T (m 1)τ. We refer to such a sequence problems (such as an elderly person who has fallen down as a model of the system. Note that these models are in their home) to general monitoring of disease progression nonparametric. Theoretically, under some smoothness assumptions (e.g. in Parkinson's disease), or simply tracking the amount (Takens, 1981), if m is big enough, and τ is not of exercise and physical activity that a person gets. Ideally, a multiple of the period of the system, such a model captures such activities should be monitored as precisely as possible, all the relevant dynamics. However, real data is noisy, but using cheap or easily available devices, and in a way that so nonparametric models of the same activity can have high does not interfere with daily life.

Our research is directed towards agile supply chains enabling enterprises to quickly respond to individual customer demand. From this perspective, agility encompasses three dimensions of adaptivity: space, time, and economy. Supply chain agility can be achieved by exploiting the most fundamental resource of any enterprise: knowledge. Studying supply chains, we regard all their tiers, participants, and potential relationships, as the search space for fulfilling individual customer demand. We study supply chains from a knowledge-based coordination perspective and regard logistics as the guiding conceptualization. The contribution of this research is a logistics knowledge infrastructure. We report about applying parts of this infrastructure to coordination problems in three selected case studies.

Detecting and characterizing emerging topics of discussion and consumer trends through analysis of Internet data is of great interest to businesses. This paper considers the problem of monitoring the Web to spot emerging memes – distinctive phrases which act as “tracers” for topics – as a means of early detection of new topics and trends. We present a novel methodology for predicting which memes will propagate widely, appearing in hundreds or thousands of blog posts, and which will not, thereby enabling discovery of significant topics. We begin by identifying measurables which should be predictive of meme success. Interestingly, these metrics are not those traditionally used for such prediction but instead are subtle measures of meme dynamics. These metrics form the basis for learning a classifier which predicts, for a given meme, whether or not it will propagate widely. The utility of the prediction methodology is demonstrated through analysis of a sample of 200 memes which emerged online during the second half of 2008.