The Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit organization focused on organizing the annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) and, more generally, on promoting research in pursuit of advances in knowledge representation, learning and reasoning under uncertainty. The next UAI conference is the 33rd conference, UAI-2017 in Sydney, Australia. Join our Facebook group or add yourself to the UAI Mailing list to keep updated on announcements and relevant AI news. Principles and applications developed within the UAI community have been at the forefront of research in Artificial Intelligence. The UAI community and annual meeting have been primary sources of advances in graphical models for representing and reasoning with uncertainty.

Published by The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California. This proceedings is available in book format. Please Note: Abstracts are linked to individual titles, and will appear in a separate browser window. Full-text versions of the papers are linked to the abstract text. Access to full text may be restricted to AAAI members.

ACCESS: a computer vision art project (ACCESS) - This project uses computer vision to track users and control a robotic spotlight. Users online can view two webcams and the tracking information. Behavioral model of active visual perception and invariant recognition (BMV) (Rostov State U) Content-Based Image Retrieval: Interactive Learning and Search - This demo has a supervised learning capability to fine tune search queries. Corner Detection in Curves - Five algorithms for corner detection in planar curves are described and presented for online comparison. Test images are provided, including defects in textiles.

Willow Garage, the now-disbanded Silicon Valley robotics incubator, unleashed some of the most impactful robot technologies of the past half-decade. Today, this formidable legacy lives on, in great part, through a host of Willow spin-offs that remain at the forefront of robotics. This article is not about them. It's about a Willow Garage project that was, at one point, on the verge of being spun out of the incubator, but is now all but forgotten. The project, called Heaphy, recognized that robots were still too limited in what they could do autonomously, and that instead of improving artificial intelligence, an alternative would be relying on more human intelligence.

I really need him back on the blog. We first wrote about Roombots three years ago, and back then the researchers at the EPFL Biorobotics Lab, led by Professor Auke Ijspeert, were just getting started with their self-assembling robotic furniture. Now the researchers have some real robots to show off. As Ijspeert himself puts it, this is a "crazy project" to create adaptive furniture that can change shape and functionality and even move around. His group has built robotic modules that can attach to one another and use onboard motors to change their shape.

Published in the June 2000 issue of Computers and Society.

When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer. Brooks s lips are sealed, as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it s going to set a whole new direction in the field. Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

Brooks, R.A, "Kunstliche Intelligenz und Roboter-Entwicklung (translation: Artificial Intelligence and Robot Development"), Proceedings of the Heinz Nixdorf Museum Paderborn Podium- Computer Gehirn: Was kann der Mensch? Was Konnen die Computer?, Ferdinand Shoningh Press, October, 2001, pp. Brooks, R.A. and Charles Rosenberg, "L –A Common Lisp for Embedded Systems", Association of Lisp Users Meeting and Workshop LUV'95, August, 1995. Brooks, R. A., "Challenges for Complete Creature Architectures", First International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Paris, France, September 1990, pp. 434–443. Mataric, M. J. and R. A. Brooks, "Learning a Distributed Map Representation Based on Navigation Behaviors", Japan–USA Symposium on Flexible Automation, Kyoto, Japan, July 1990, pp. 499–506.

For the last decade, scientists have deployed increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine habitats and species. In general, such robots are effective at carrying out low-level tasks, specifically assigned to them by human engineers -- a tedious and time-consuming process for the engineers. When deploying autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan. Now a new programming approach developed by MIT engineers gives robots more "cognitive" capabilities, enabling humans to specify high-level goals, while a robot performs high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals. For example, an engineer may give a robot a list of goal locations to explore, along with any time constraints, as well as physical directions, such as staying a certain distance above the seafloor.

This week a team featuring multiple Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers took home the grand prize in an international competition centered on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Members of CSAIL's Marine Robotics Group joined forces with more than 20 other researchers from MIT and Olin College as one of 15 teams competing in the Maritime RobotX Challenge, which took place Oct. 20-26 in Marina Bay, Singapore. Each research group spent the past year developing sensors, computers, and software for the "WAM-V," a self-driving propeller-motored boat that resembles an oversized jet-ski. For the competition, teams traversed a special course to complete tasks that demonstrated motion-planning, control, and autonomy, including avoidance and detection of obstacles, identifying targets, and searching underwater for acoustic sources. MIT-Olin outperformed other universities from Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States, earning the $24,000 grand prize -- and a not-insignificant amount of international respect.