This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This representation often allows an exponential reduction in the representation size of structured MDPs, but the complexity of exact solution algorithms for such MDPs can grow exponentially in the representation size. In this paper, we present two approximate solution algorithms that exploit structure in factored MDPs. Both use an approximate value function represented as a linear combination of basis functions, where each basis function involves only a small subset of the domain variables. A key contribution of this paper is that it shows how the basic operations of both algorithms can be performed efficiently in closed form, by exploiting both additive and context-specific structure in a factored MDP. A central element of our algorithms is a novel linear program decomposition technique, analogous to variable elimination in Bayesian networks, which reduces an exponentially large LP to a provably equivalent, polynomial-sized one. One algorithm uses approximate linear programming, and the second approximate dynamic programming. Our dynamic programming algorithm is novel in that it uses an approximation based on max-norm, a technique that more directly minimizes the terms that appear in error bounds for approximate MDP algorithms. We provide experimental results on problems with over 10^40 states, demonstrating a promising indication of the scalability of our approach, and compare our algorithm to an existing state-of-the-art approach, showing, in some problems, exponential gains in computation time.

July 7, 2003 culture…with this view that technology order to build a better kindergartner, we (www.thewesterlysun.com). "The Westerly eventually will destroy us,' said Dan don't seem as fazed by the idea of reprogramming Public Library and The Westerly Hospital Sandin, director of the Electronic Visual-ourselves into something beyond are cosponsoring a video and discussion Are keep in mind that (1) the mere mention of July 15: Robotics. Matrix Reloaded likely won't be the last reflect the overall tenor of the article; (3) although by developing artificial intelligence Steven good last forever; and (4) the AI in the News Tin Woman might really be so bad after Levy. "There's a archived--can be found by going to scary lesson in these contests between the www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/current.html. "Set in the not-too-distant species, one that gets smarter and more independent'Socrates was against it computer would ever beat a human chess Networking Technologies for the Information because he thought people would become champion. 'Neural implants for Parkinson's and computers get smarter, is it (disease) didn't exist four years ago. Pick an answer: *I think it is have computers powerful enough to emulate (www.wired.com). If you're the human brain, that was considered potentially rabid robots and other supposedly like 46 percent of the people who were very speculative. Now if you talk to sentient technology is exactly what asked this question at Blockbuster's Web mainstream experts, they say of course motivated ArtBots' organizers to host the site, you'll respond, 'It could happen.' If there will be three-dimensional molecular show, which brought together 23 robots you're worrying that this puts you in the circuits in about a decade.'"

Despite its original intended use, which was very different, WORDNET is used more and more today as an ontology, where the hyponym relation between word senses is interpreted as a subsumption relation between concepts. In this article, we discuss the general problems related to the semantic interpretation of WORDNET taxonomy in light of rigorous ontological principles inspired by the philosophical tradition. Then we introduce the DOLCE upper-level ontology, which is inspired by such principles but with a clear orientation toward language and cognition. We report the results of an experimental effort to align WORDNET's upper level with DOLCE. We suggest that such alignment could lead to an "ontologically sweetened" WORDNET, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2003 Spring Symposium Series, Monday through Wednesday, 24-26 March 2003, at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia were Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management, Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks to High- Level Functions, Foundations and Applications of Spatiotemporal Reasoning (FASTR), Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments, Intelligent Multimedia Knowledge Management, Logical Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning, Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue, and New Directions in Question-Answering Motivation.

WEBODE is a scalable workbench for ontological engineering that eases the design, development, and management of ontologies and includes middleware services to aid in the integration of ontologies into real-world applications. WEBODE presents a framework to integrate new ontology-based tools and services, where developers only worry about the new logic they want to provide on top of the knowledge stored in their ontologies.

In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (ecommerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for real-world use. In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapping of ontologies and taxonomies to reference ontologies to preserve semantics. Along the way, we discuss what typically constitutes an ontology architecture. We situate the discussion in the domain of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. By its very nature, B2B e-commerce must try to interlink buyers and sellers from multiple companies with disparate product-description terminologies and meanings, thus serving as a paradigmatic case for the use of ontologies to support corporate applications.

The PROCESS SPECIFICATION language (PSL) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems, such as scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, work flow, and business-process reengineering. We give an overview of the theories within the PSL ontology, discuss some of the design principles for the ontology, and finish with examples of process specifications that are based on the ontology.

The article introduces the reader to a large interdisciplinary research project whose goal is to use AI to gain new insight into a complex artistic phenomenon. We study fundamental principles of expressive music performance by measuring performance aspects in large numbers of recordings by highly skilled musicians (concert pianists) and analyzing the data with state-of-the-art methods from areas such as machine learning, data mining, and data visualization. The article first introduces the general research questions that guide the project and then summarizes some of the most important results achieved to date, with an emphasis on the most recent and still rather speculative work. A broad view of the discovery process is given, from data acquisition through data visualization to inductive model building and pattern discovery, and it turns out that AI plays an important role in all stages of such an ambitious enterprise. Our current results show that it is possible for machines to make novel and interesting discoveries even in a domain such as music and that even if we might never find the "Horowitz Factor," AI can give us completely new insights into complex artistic behavior.

For the last two decades, configuration systems relying on AI techniques have successfully been applied in industrial environments. These systems support the configuration of complex products and services in shorter time with fewer errors and, therefore, reduce the costs of a mass-customization business model. The European Union-funded project entitled CUSTOMER-ADAPTIVE WEB INTERFACE FOR THE CONFIGURATION OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES WITH MULTIPLE SUPPLIERS (CAWICOMS) aims at the next generation of web-based configuration applications that cope with two challenges of today's open, networked economy: (1) the support for heterogeneous user groups in an open-market environment and (2) the integration of configurable subproducts provided by specialized suppliers. This article describes the CAWICOMS WORKBENCH for the development of configuration services, offering personalized user interaction as well as distributed configuration of products and services in a supply chain. The developed tools and techniques rely on a harmonized knowledge representation and knowledge-acquisition mechanism, open XMLbased protocols, and advanced personalization and distributed reasoning techniques. We exploited the workbench based on the real-world business scenario of distributed configuration of services in the domain of information processing-based virtual private networks.

(ICKEDS 2004). GECAD--Knowledge Engineering and ICINCO Secretariat Decision Support Research Group Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setubal Rua Dr. Antonio Bernardino Almeida / Campus do IPS