Europe
A New General Method to Generate Random Modal Formulae for Testing Decision Procedures
Patel-Schneider, P. F., Sebastiani, R.
The recent emergence of heavily-optimized modal decision procedures has highlighted the key role of empirical testing in this domain. Unfortunately, the introduction of extensive empirical tests for modal logics is recent, and so far none of the proposed test generators is very satisfactory. To cope with this fact, we present a new random generation method that provides benefits over previous methods for generating empirical tests. It fixes and much generalizes one of the best-known methods, the random CNF_[]m test, allowing for generating a much wider variety of problems, covering in principle the whole input space. Our new method produces much more suitable test sets for the current generation of modal decision procedures. We analyze the features of the new method by means of an extensive collection of empirical tests.
Structure and Complexity in Planning with Unary Operators
Unary operator domains -- i.e., domains in which operators have a single effect -- arise naturally in many control problems. In its most general form, the problem of STRIPS planning in unary operator domains is known to be as hard as the general STRIPS planning problem -- both are PSPACE-complete. However, unary operator domains induce a natural structure, called the domain's causal graph. This graph relates between the preconditions and effect of each domain operator. Causal graphs were exploited by Williams and Nayak in order to analyze plan generation for one of the controllers in NASA's Deep-Space One spacecraft. There, they utilized the fact that when this graph is acyclic, a serialization ordering over any subgoal can be obtained quickly. In this paper we conduct a comprehensive study of the relationship between the structure of a domain's causal graph and the complexity of planning in this domain. On the positive side, we show that a non-trivial polynomial time plan generation algorithm exists for domains whose causal graph induces a polytree with a constant bound on its node indegree. On the negative side, we show that even plan existence is hard when the graph is a directed-path singly connected DAG. More generally, we show that the number of paths in the causal graph is closely related to the complexity of planning in the associated domain. Finally we relate our results to the question of complexity of planning with serializable subgoals.
AAAI News
We hope by sending a message to majordomo@aaai.org AAAI regular members in the body of the message: subscribe can view and browse tables of aaai-members. Acapulco is the largest and most AAAI events and deadlines. They may also view, print, at www.aaai.org/AITopics/aitopics. stunning beaches, exuberant natural and/or download excerpts of reasonable html. Participation in this Registration information for the America, since its functional, modern experimental program is included in Eighteenth International Joint Conference infrastructure has had very little impact your normal AAAI membership dues.
In Memoriam: Charles Rosen, Norman Nielsen, and Saul Amarel
Hart, Peter E., Nilsson, Nils J., Perrault, Ray, Mitchell, Tom, Kulikowski, Casimir A., Leake, David B.
In the span of a few months, the AI community lost four important figures. The fall of 2002 marked the passing of Ray Reiter, for whom a memorial article by Jack Minker appears in this issue. As the issue was going to press, AI lost Saul Amarel, Norm Nielsen, and Charles Rosen. This section of AI Magazine commemorates these friends, leaders, and AI pioneers. We thank Tom Mitchell and Casimir Kulikowski for their memorial to Saul Amarel, Ray Perrault for his remembrance of Norm Nielsen, and Peter Hart and Nils Nilsson for their tribute to Charles Rosen. The AI community mourns our lost colleagues and gratefully remembers their contributions, which meant so much to so many and to the advancement of artificial intelligence as a whole.
AAAI-2002 Fall Symposium Series
Ohsawa, Yukio, McBurney, Peter, Parsons, Simon, Miller, Christopher A., Schultz, Alan, Scholtz, Jean, Goodrich, Michael, Eugene Santos, Jr., Bell, Benjamin, Charles L. Isbell, Jr., Littman, Michael L.
However, even if you become aware of the value of a chance event, for example, with a new behavior of a customer in the market you are selling in, it is still hard to persuade your colleagues to make actions in response to the rare event. "Interesting keywords arose, such as "You had a symposium on the creation The Symposium on Etiquette for Human-Computer "So was it a conference on knowledge Work began its meeting--with discovery inviting philosophers?" The first invited talk In this symposium, we had 17 papers, Jeanne Comeau, an author, speaker, gave us deep insight into customer 2 invited lectures, and 14 other and teacher on etiquette and the director networks in the market, and the last speakers. Six countries (Japan, United of the Etiquette School of panel extended to management, persuasion, States, United Kingdom, Germany, Boston. Comeau taught us a great communication, and trust, Portugal, and the Czech Republic) deal about etiquette's history and and so on.
The 2002 Trading Agent Competition: An Overview of Agent Strategies
In TAC-00, agent designs were primarily centered around designing algorithms a tripod are sometimes bundled with the camera to solve an NPcomplete optimization and sometimes auctioned separately. However, by the second year, it for the next generation of trading agents, became common knowledge that this problem autonomous bidding in simultaneous auctions was tractable for the TAC travel game parameters. During the second year, agent designs focused Simultaneous auctions, which characterize on estimating clearing prices, and some internet sites such as eBay.com, Agent design in and substitutable goods are on offer. Complementary TAC-02, however, cannot be described so succinctly.
In Memoriam: Raymond Reiter
Raymond Reiter, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and winner of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1993 Outstanding Research Scientist Award, died September 16, 2002, after a year-long struggle with cancer. Reiter, known throughout the world as "Ray," made foundational contributions to artifi- cial intelligence, knowledge representation and databases, and theorem proving.
Interactive Execution Monitoring of Agent Teams
Wilkins, D. E., Lee, T. J., Berry, P.
There is an increasing need for automated support for humans monitoring the activity of distributed teams of cooperating agents, both human and machine. We characterize the domain-independent challenges posed by this problem, and describe how properties of domains influence the challenges and their solutions. We will concentrate on dynamic, data-rich domains where humans are ultimately responsible for team behavior. Thus, the automated aid should interactively support effective and timely decision making by the human. We present a domain-independent categorization of the types of alerts a plan-based monitoring system might issue to a user, where each type generally requires different monitoring techniques. We describe a monitoring framework for integrating many domain-specific and task-specific monitoring techniques and then using the concept of value of an alert to avoid operator overload. We use this framework to describe an execution monitoring approach we have used to implement Execution Assistants (EAs) in two different dynamic, data-rich, real-world domains to assist a human in monitoring team behavior. One domain (Army small unit operations) has hundreds of mobile, geographically distributed agents, a combination of humans, robots, and vehicles. The other domain (teams of unmanned ground and air vehicles) has a handful of cooperating robots. Both domains involve unpredictable adversaries in the vicinity. Our approach customizes monitoring behavior for each specific task, plan, and situation, as well as for user preferences. Our EAs alert the human controller when reported events threaten plan execution or physically threaten team members. Alerts were generated in a timely manner without inundating the user with too many alerts (less than 10 percent of alerts are unwanted, as judged by domain experts).
Wrapper Maintenance: A Machine Learning Approach
Lerman, K., Minton, S. N., Knoblock, C. A.
The proliferation of online information sources has led to an increased use of wrappers for extracting data from Web sources. While most of the previous research has focused on quick and efficient generation of wrappers, the development of tools for wrapper maintenance has received less attention. This is an important research problem because Web sources often change in ways that prevent the wrappers from extracting data correctly. We present an efficient algorithm that learns structural information about data from positive examples alone. We describe how this information can be used for two wrapper maintenance applications: wrapper verification and reinduction. The wrapper verification system detects when a wrapper is not extracting correct data, usually because the Web source has changed its format. The reinduction algorithm automatically recovers from changes in the Web source by identifying data on Web pages so that a new wrapper may be generated for this source. To validate our approach, we monitored 27 wrappers over a period of a year. The verification algorithm correctly discovered 35 of the 37 wrapper changes, and made 16 mistakes, resulting in precision of 0.73 and recall of 0.95. We validated the reinduction algorithm on ten Web sources. We were able to successfully reinduce the wrappers, obtaining precision and recall values of 0.90 and 0.80 on the data extraction task.