A Florida couple is behind bars for allegedly using an online dating app to lure a 16-year-old girl to their home, brutally torturing and murdering her before dismembering her remains. The body of Miranda Corsette was discarded in a dumpster days after she was reported missing on Feb. 24, according to the St. Petersburg Police Department. Authorities allege that Steven Gress, 35, used the online dating app Grindr to lure Corsette to his house, located approximately 20 miles southwest of Tampa, on Feb. 14. "After meeting him the first time, [Corsette] went home and then the next day she returned to [Gress'] home," police said. Miranda Corsette smiles in an undated photograph shared by the St. Petersburg Police Department. Corsette was allegedly murdered by a man she had met on a dating app, Steven Gress, and his domestic partner, Michelle Brandes.

We propose that symbols are first and foremost external communication tools used between intelligent agents that allow knowledge to be transferred in a more efficient and effective manner than having to experience the world directly. But, they are also used internally within an agent through a form of self-communication to help formulate, describe and justify subsymbolic patterns of neural activity that truly implement thinking. Symbols, and our languages that make use of them, not only allow us to explain our thinking to others and ourselves, but also provide beneficial constraints (inductive bias) on learning about the world. In this paper we present relevant insights from neuroscience and cognitive science, about how the human brain represents symbols and the concepts they refer to, and how today's artificial neural networks can do the same. We then present a novel neuro-symbolic hypothesis and a plausible architecture for intelligent agents that combines subsymbolic representations for symbols and concepts for learning and reasoning. Our hypothesis and associated architecture imply that symbols will remain critical to the future of intelligent systems NOT because they are the fundamental building blocks of thought, but because they are characterizations of subsymbolic processes that constitute thought.

This paper presents a Runtime Verification (RV) approach for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) using the JaCaMo framework. Our objective is to bring a layer of security to the MAS. This layer is capable of controlling events during the execution of the system without needing a specific implementation in the behaviour of each agent to recognise the events. MAS have been used in the context of hybrid intelligence. This use requires communication between software agents and human beings. In some cases, communication takes place via natural language dialogues. However, this kind of communication brings us to a concern related to controlling the flow of dialogue so that agents can prevent any change in the topic of discussion that could impair their reasoning. We demonstrate the implementation of a monitor that aims to control this dialogue flow in a MAS that communicates with the user through natural language to aid decision-making in hospital bed allocation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved superhuman performance in board games such as Go, chess, and Othello (Reversi). In other words, AI has become too strong an opponent for human players in such games. In this context, it is difficult for a human player to enjoy playing the games with the AI. To keep human players entertained and immersed in a game, the AI is required to dynamically balance its skill with that of the human player. To address this issue, we propose AlphaDDA, an AlphaZero-based AI with dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). AlphaDDA consists of a deep neural network (DNN) and a Monte Carlo tree search, as in AlphaZero. AlphaDDA estimates the value of the game state from only the board state using the DNN and changes its skill according to the value. AlphaDDA can adjust its skill using only the state of a game without any prior knowledge regarding an opponent. In this study, AlphaDDA plays Connect4, Othello, and 6x6 Othello, which is Othello using a 6x6 size board, with other AI agents. The other AI agents are AlphaZero, Monte Carlo tree search, the minimax algorithm, and a random player. This study shows that AlphaDDA can balance its skill with that of the other AI agents, except for a random player. The DDA ability of AlphaDDA is derived from an accurate estimation of the value from the state of a game. We believe that the AlphaDDA approach can be used for any game in which the DNN can estimate the value from the state.

Social reviews have dominated the web and become a plausible source of product information. People and businesses use such information for decision-making. Businesses also make use of social information to spread fake information using a single user, groups of users, or a bot trained to generate fraudulent content. Many studies proposed approaches based on user behaviors and review text to address the challenges of fraud detection. To provide an exhaustive literature review, social fraud detection is reviewed using a framework that considers three key components: the review itself, the user who carries out the review, and the item being reviewed. As features are extracted for the component representation, a feature-wise review is provided based on behavioral, text-based features and their combination. With this framework, a comprehensive overview of approaches is presented including supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning. The supervised approaches for fraud detection are introduced and categorized into two sub-categories; classical, and deep learning. The lack of labeled datasets is explained and potential solutions are suggested. To help new researchers in the area develop a better understanding, a topic analysis and an overview of future directions is provided in each step of the proposed systematic framework.

Neither he nor Autopilot noticed that the road was ending and the Model S drove past a stop sign and a flashing red light. The car smashed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a 22-year-old college student, Naibel Benavides. One of a growing number of fatal accidents involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, McGee's case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: He got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal accidents have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars. "I was driving and dropped my phone," McGee told an officer who responded to the accident, according to a recording from a police body camera.

This paper presents our research on leveraging social media Big Data and AI to support hurricane disaster emergency response. The current practice of hurricane emergency response for rescue highly relies on emergency call centres. The more recent Hurricane Harvey event reveals the limitations of the current systems. We use Hurricane Harvey and the associated Houston flooding as the motivating scenario to conduct research and develop a prototype as a proof-of-concept of using an intelligent agent as a complementary role to support emergency centres in hurricane emergency response. This intelligent agent is used to collect real-time streaming tweets during a natural disaster event, to identify tweets requesting rescue, to extract key information such as address and associated geocode, and to visualize the extracted information in an interactive map in decision supports. Our experiment shows promising outcomes and the potential application of the research in support of hurricane emergency response.

Malware classification is a difficult problem, to which machine learning methods have been applied for decades. Yet progress has often been slow, in part due to a number of unique difficulties with the task that occur through all stages of the developing a machine learning system: data collection, labeling, feature creation and selection, model selection, and evaluation. In this survey we will review a number of the current methods and challenges related to malware classification, including data collection, feature extraction, and model construction, and evaluation. Our discussion will include thoughts on the constraints that must be considered for machine learning based solutions in this domain, and yet to be tackled problems for which machine learning could also provide a solution. This survey aims to be useful both to cybersecurity practitioners who wish to learn more about how machine learning can be applied to the malware problem, and to give data scientists the necessary background into the challenges in this uniquely complicated space.

Navigating a career constitutes one of life’s most enduring challenges, particularly within a unique organization like the US Navy. While the Navy has numerous resources for guidance, accessing and identifying key information sources across the many existing platforms can be challenging for sailors (e.g., determining the appropriate program or point of contact, developing an accurate understanding of the process, and even recognizing the need for planning itself). Focusing on intermediate goals, evaluations, education, certifications, and training is quite demanding, even before considering their cumulative long-term implications. These are on top of generic personal issues, such as financial difficulties and homesickness when at sea for prolonged periods. We present the preliminary construction of a conversational intelligent agent designed to provide a user-friendly, adaptive environment that recognizes user input pertinent to these issues and provides guidance to appropriate resources within the Navy. User input from “counseling sessions” is linked, using advanced natural language processing techniques, to our framework of Navy training and education standards, promotion protocols, and organizational structure, producing feedback on resources and recommendations sensitive to user history and stated career goals. The proposed innovative technology monitors sailors’ career progress, proactively triggering sessions before major career milestones or when performance drops below Navy expectations, by using a mixed-initiative design. System-triggered sessions involve positive feedback and informative dialogues (using existing Navy career guidance protocols). The intelligent agent also offers counseling for personal problems, triggering targeted dialogues designed to gather more information, offer tailored suggestions, and provide referrals to appropriate resources or to a human counselor when in-depth counseling is warranted. This software, currently in alpha testing, has the potential to serve as a centralized information hub, engaging and encouraging sailors to take ownership of their career paths in the most efficient way possible, benefiting both individuals and the Navy as a whole.

We study invariant local expansion operators for conflict-free and admissible sets in Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs). Such operators are directly applied on AFs, and are invariant with respect to a chosen "semantics" (that is w.r.t. each of the conflict free/admissible set of arguments). Accordingly, we derive a definition of robustness for AFs in terms of the number of times such operators can be applied without producing any change in the chosen semantics.