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Intelligent Integration of Information and Services on the Web

AI Magazine

The evolution of the World Wide Web from a repository of HTML data to a source of varied distributed services creates exciting opportunities for offering complex, integrated services over the web. The syntactic problems of such integration are being addressed by the advent of the web services stack of standards.1 However, the promise of service integration will not be delivered unless services can be integrated semantically as well. The 2002 AAAI workshop entitled "Intelligent Service Integration" examined this new challenge for the AI community.


Consciousness Constrained

AI Magazine

To them that had had, more would be given (Lodge 1986, p. 172). "Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in the flattery of one's peers." There we met Morris That book was made by Mr. Mark I read these lines as a new truth." I haven't even gotten my Who is talking floor, and stepped out on to his regular on the British version of the here? More importantly, whom balcony to inhale the air, scented Discovery Channel), and womanizer should I believe? Messenger, as his wife Twain" disguised as Huck?


Applying Perceptually Driven Cognitive Mapping to Virtual Urban Environments

AI Magazine

This article describes a method for building a cognitive map of a virtual urban environment. Our routines enable virtual humans to map their environment using a realistic model of perception. We based our implementation on a computational framework proposed by Yeap and Jefferies (1999) for representing a local environment as a structure called an absolute space representation (ASR). Their algorithms compute and update ASRs from a 2-1/2-dimensional (2-1/2D) sketch of the local environment and then connect the ASRs together to form a raw cognitive map.1 Our work extends the framework developed by Yeap and Jefferies in three important ways. First, we implemented the framework in a virtual training environment, the mission rehearsal exercise (Swartout et al. 2001). Second, we developed a method for acquiring a 2- 1/2D sketch in a virtual world, a step omitted from their framework but that is essential for computing an ASR. Third, we extended the ASR algorithm to map regions that are partially visible through exits of the local space. Together, the implementation of the ASR algorithm, along with our extensions, will be useful in a wide variety of applications involving virtual humans and agents who need to perceive and reason about spatial concepts in urban environments.


Staff Scheduling for Inbound Call and Customer Contact Centers

AI Magazine

The staff scheduling problem is a critical problem in the call center (or, more generally, customer contact center) industry. This article describes DIRECTOR, a staff scheduling system for contact centers. DIRECTOR is a constraint-based system that uses AI search techniques to generate schedules that satisfy and optimize a wide range of constraints and service-quality metrics. DIRECTOR has successfully been deployed at more than 800 contact centers, with significant measurable benefits, some of which are documented in case studies included in this article.


The AAAI-02 and IAAI-02 Conferences

AI Magazine

The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-02) and the Fourteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI- 02) were positively received by those who attended. This report provides a few snapshots of the vast and varied content of the 2002 conferences. Proceedings of AAAI-02 and IAAI-02 are available from AAAI Press (www.- aaaipress.org).


Report on the First International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP)

AI Magazine

Henry Lieberman surveyed successful techniques for programming by example, an approach where end users teach procedures to computers by demonstrating a sequence of actions on concrete examples as they how to accomplish it. This new conference series domain-independent inference practical exercises and illustrated promotes multidisciplinary research structures and reusable domain-specific the concepts with applications, including on tools and methodologies for efficiently ontologies. A related workshop of its knowledge content for communities. He received his Ph.D. in 1. portal.acm.org. For any inquiries, please email info@kcap.org.


In Memory of Ray Reiter (1939-2002)

AI Magazine

He leaves a legacy of groundbreaking, deep insights that have changed the course of AI. "Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is." The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer's desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician's insistence on precision. Ray the adventurer was always eager to try new ideas and directions. He was not afraid to enter murky areas, and he always left them better illuminated. He introduced terms to the AI community such as default logic, closed-world assumption, and cognitive robotics; he opened avenues of theoretical research with new resolution proof methods and logics for nonmonotonic reasoning, diagnosis, and action; and he was the prime mover in the Cognitive Robotics initiative that has led to a whole new program of research.


AAAI News

AI Magazine

February 10: IJCAI-03 Electronic After the conference, an expense report Mark your calendars now for IJCAI-poster submission deadline will be required to account for the 03! The Eighteenth International February 12: IJCAI-03 Hard-copy funds awarded.


AAAI 2002 Workshops

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) presented the AAAI-02 Workshop Program on Sunday and Monday, 28-29 July 2002 at the Shaw Convention Center in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The AAAI-02 workshop program included 18 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. The workshops were Agent-Based Technologies for B2B Electronic-Commerce; Automation as a Caregiver: The Role of Intelligent Technology in Elder Care; Autonomy, Delegation, and Control: From Interagent to Groups; Coalition Formation in Dynamic Multiagent Environments; Cognitive Robotics; Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents; Intelligent Service Integration; Intelligent Situation-Aware Media and Presentations; Meaning Negotiation; Multiagent Modeling and Simulation of Economic Systems; Ontologies and the Semantic Web; Planning with and for Multiagent Systems; Preferences in AI and CP: Symbolic Approaches; Probabilistic Approaches in Search; Real-Time Decision Support and Diagnosis Systems; Semantic Web Meets Language Resources; and Spatial and Temporal Reasoning.


Computational Vulnerability Analysis for Information Survivability

AI Magazine

The infrastructure of modern society is controlled by software systems. These systems are vulnerable to attacks; several such attacks, launched by "recreation hackers," have already led to severe disruption. However, a concerted and planned attack whose goal is to reap harm could lead to catastrophic results (for example, by disabling the computers that control the electrical power grid for a sustained period of time). The survivability of such information systems in the face of attacks is therefore an area of extreme importance to society. This article is set in the context of self-adaptive survivable systems: software that judges the trustworthiness of the computational resources in its environment and that chooses how to achieve its goals in light of this trust model. Each self-adaptive survivable system detects and diagnoses compromises of its resources, taking whatever actions are necessary to recover from attack. In addition, a long-term monitoring system collects evidence from intrusion detectors, firewalls, and all the selfadaptive components, building a composite trust model used by each component. Self-adaptive survivable systems contain models of their intended behavior; models of the required computational resources; models of the ways in which these resources can be compromised; and finally, models of the ways in which a system can be attacked and how such attacks can lead to compromises of the computational resources. In this article, I focus on computational vulnerability analysis: a system that, given a description of a computational environment, deduces all the attacks that are possible. In particular, its goal is to develop multistage attack models in which the compromise of one resource is used to facilitate the compromise of other, more valuable resources. Although the ultimate aim is to use these models online as part of a self-adaptive system, there are other offline uses as well that we are deploying first to help system administrators assess the vulnerabilities of their computing environment.