Oceania
AI@NICTA
Barnes, Nick (NICTA) | Baumgartner, Peter (NICTA) | Caetano, Tiberio (NICTA) | Durrant-Whyte, Hugh (NICTA) | Klein, Gerwin (NICTA) | Sanderson, Penelope (University of Queensland) | Sattar, Abdul (Griffith University) | Stuckey, Peter (The University of Melbourne) | Thiebaux, Sylvie (The Australian National University) | Hentenryck, Pascal Van (University of Melbourne) | Walsh, Toby (NICTA)
NICTA is Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Centre of Excellence. It is the largest organization in Australia dedicated to ICT research. While it has close links with local universities, it is in fact an independent but not-for-profit company in the business of doing research, commercializing that research and training PhD students to do that research. Much of the work taking place at NICTA involves various topics in artificial intelligence. In this article, we survey some of the AI work being undertaken at NICTA.
Autonomy in Music-Generating Systems
Bown, Oliver Roland (University of Sydney) | Martin, Aengus (University of Sydney)
The word autonomy is often used in the discussion of software-based music-generating systems. Whilst the term conveys a very clear concept โ the sense of self-determination of a system โ attempts to formalise autonomy are at an early stage, and the term is subject to a range of interpretations when practically applied. We consider how the evaluation of music-generating systems will be enhanced by a clearer understanding of autonomy and its application to music. We discuss existing definitions and approaches to quantifying autonomy and consider, through a series of examples, the information that is required in order to make precise formal judgements about autonomy, and the identification of relevant levels at which the principle of autonomy applies in music. We conclude that automated measures can supplement human evaluation of autonomy, but that (a) automated measures must be supported by sound reasoning about the features and timescales used in the measurement, and (b) they are improved by a having knowledge of the internal working of the system, rather than taking a black box approach. We consider multi-dimensional representations of system behaviour that may capture a richer sense of the notion of autonomy. Finally, we propose an approach to automatically probing music systems as a means of determining an autonomy `portrait'.
Applying Learning by Observation and Case-Based Reasoning to Improve Commercial RTS Game AI
Robertson, Glen (The University of Auckland)
The high degree of difficulty leads academic Despite increasing academic interest in video game Artificial researchers to create complex AI agents which attempt Intelligence (AI) over the past decade, and a rapidly to deal with the challenges but require large amounts changing games industry which often competes on new technology of development effort. The simpler commercial game agents (Laird and VanLent 2001), AI in video games has not are unable to adapt to situations unforeseen by their developers, improved as much as graphics, sound, animation or gameplay making them monotonous or easily exploitable (Mehta et al. 2009; Tozour 2002). Adoption of academic by human players (Baumgarten, Colton, and Morris 2009; research in AI is slow, likely because the industry Tozour 2002).
Relative Expressiveness of Defeasible Logics
We address the relative expressiveness of defeasible logics in the framework DL. Relative expressiveness is formulated as the ability to simulate the reasoning of one logic within another logic. We show that such simulations must be modular, in the sense that they also work if applied only to part of a theory, in order to achieve a useful notion of relative expressiveness. We present simulations showing that logics in DL with and without the capability of team defeat are equally expressive. We also show that logics that handle ambiguity differently -- ambiguity blocking versus ambiguity propagating -- have distinct expressiveness, with neither able to simulate the other under a different formulation of expressiveness.
Probabilities on Sentences in an Expressive Logic
Hutter, Marcus, Lloyd, John W., Ng, Kee Siong, Uther, William T. B.
Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive languages like higher-order logic are ideally suited for representing and reasoning about structured knowledge. Uncertain knowledge can be modeled by using graded probabilities rather than binary truth-values. The main technical problem studied in this paper is the following: Given a set of sentences, each having some probability of being true, what probability should be ascribed to other (query) sentences? A natural wish-list, among others, is that the probability distribution (i) is consistent with the knowledge base, (ii) allows for a consistent inference procedure and in particular (iii) reduces to deductive logic in the limit of probabilities being 0 and 1, (iv) allows (Bayesian) inductive reasoning and (v) learning in the limit and in particular (vi) allows confirmation of universally quantified hypotheses/sentences. We translate this wish-list into technical requirements for a prior probability and show that probabilities satisfying all our criteria exist. We also give explicit constructions and several general characterizations of probabilities that satisfy some or all of the criteria and various (counter) examples. We also derive necessary and sufficient conditions for extending beliefs about finitely many sentences to suitable probabilities over all sentences, and in particular least dogmatic or least biased ones. We conclude with a brief outlook on how the developed theory might be used and approximated in autonomous reasoning agents. Our theory is a step towards a globally consistent and empirically satisfactory unification of probability and logic.
Explaining Time-Table-Edge-Finding Propagation for the Cumulative Resource Constraint
Schutt, Andreas, Feydy, Thibaut, Stuckey, Peter J.
Cumulative resource constraints can model scarce resources in scheduling problems or a dimension in packing and cutting problems. In order to efficiently solve such problems with a constraint programming solver, it is important to have strong and fast propagators for cumulative resource constraints. One such propagator is the recently developed time-table-edge-finding propagator, which considers the current resource profile during the edge-finding propagation. Recently, lazy clause generation solvers, i.e. constraint programming solvers incorporating nogood learning, have proved to be excellent at solving scheduling and cutting problems. For such solvers, concise and accurate explanations of the reasons for propagation are essential for strong nogood learning. In this paper, we develop the first explaining version of time-table-edge-finding propagation and show preliminary results on resource-constrained project scheduling problems from various standard benchmark suites. On the standard benchmark suite PSPLib, we were able to close one open instance and to improve the lower bound of about 60% of the remaining open instances. Moreover, 6 of those instances were closed.
Document Clustering Evaluation: Divergence from a Random Baseline
De Vries, Christopher M., Geva, Shlomo, Trotman, Andrew
Divergence from a random baseline is a technique for the evaluation of document clustering. It ensures cluster quality measures are performing work that prevents ineffective clusterings from giving high scores to clusterings that provide no useful result. These concepts are defined and analysed using intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to the evaluation of document cluster quality. This includes the classical clusters to categories approach and a novel approach that uses ad hoc information retrieval. The divergence from a random baseline approach is able to differentiate ineffective clusterings encountered in the INEX XML Mining track. It also appears to perform a normalisation similar to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) measure but it can be applied to any measure of cluster quality. When it is applied to the intrinsic measure of distortion as measured by RMSE, subtraction from a random baseline provides a clear optimum that is not apparent otherwise. This approach can be applied to any clustering evaluation. This paper describes its use in the context of document clustering evaluation.
Performance Tuning Of J48 Algorithm For Prediction Of Soil Fertility
Data mining involves the systematic analysis of large data sets, and data mining in agricultural soil datasets is exciting and modern research area. The productive capacity of a soil depends on soil fertility. Achieving and maintaining appropriate levels of soil fertility, is of utmost importance if agricultural land is to remain capable of nourishing crop production. In this research, Steps for building a predictive model of soil fertility have been explained. This paper aims at predicting soil fertility class using decision tree algorithms in data mining . Further, it focuses on performance tuning of J48 decision tree algorithm with the help of meta-techniques such as attribute selection and boosting.
Oracle inequalities for computationally adaptive model selection
Agarwal, Alekh, Bartlett, Peter L., Duchi, John C.
We analyze general model selection procedures using penalized empirical loss minimization under computational constraints. While classical model selection approaches do not consider computational aspects of performing model selection, we argue that any practical model selection procedure must not only trade off estimation and approximation error, but also the computational effort required to compute empirical minimizers for different function classes. We provide a framework for analyzing such problems, and we give algorithms for model selection under a computational budget. These algorithms satisfy oracle inequalities that show that the risk of the selected model is not much worse than if we had devoted all of our omputational budget to the optimal function class.