Sequential planning portfolios are very powerful in exploiting the complementary strength of different automated planners. The main challenge of a portfolio planner is to define which base planners to run, to assign the running time for each planner and to decide in what order they should be carried out to optimize a planning metric. Portfolio configurations are usually derived empirically from training benchmarks and remain fixed for an evaluation phase. In this work, we create a per-instance configurable portfolio, which is able to adapt itself to every planning task. The proposed system pre-selects a group of candidate planners using a Pareto-dominance filtering approach and then it decides which planners to include and the time assigned according to predictive models. These models estimate whether a base planner will be able to solve the given problem and, if so, how long it will take. We define different portfolio strategies to combine the knowledge generated by the models. The experimental evaluation shows that the resulting portfolios provide an improvement when compared with non-informed strategies. One of the proposed portfolios was the winner of the Sequential Satisficing Track of the International Planning Competition held in 2014.

Knowledge bases in the form of ontologies are receiving increasing attention as they allow to clearly represent both the available knowledge, which includes the knowledge in itself and the constraints imposed to it by the domain or the users. In particular, Datalog± ontologies are attractive because of their property of decidability and the possibility of dealing with the massive amounts of data in real world environments; however, as it is the case with many other ontological languages, their application in collaborative environments often lead to inconsistency related issues. In this paper we introduce the notion of incoherence regarding Datalog± ontologies, in terms of satisfiability of sets of constraints, and show how under specific conditions incoherence leads to inconsistent Datalog± ontologies. The main contribution of this work is a novel approach to restore both consistency and coherence in Datalog± ontologies. The proposed approach is based on kernel contraction and restoration is performed by the application of incision functions that select formulas to delete. Nevertheless, instead of working over minimal incoherent/inconsistent sets encountered in the ontologies, our operators produce incisions over non-minimal structures called clusters. We present a construction for consolidation operators, along with the properties expected to be satisfied by them. Finally, we establish the relation between the construction and the properties by means of a representation theorem. Although this proposal is presented for Datalog± ontologies consolidation, these operators can be applied to other types of ontological languages, such as Description Logics, making them apt to be used in collaborative environments like the Semantic Web.

Equipped with a state-of-the-art thermal camera, the drone crisscrossed the field, scanning it for cool, soggy patches where a gopher may have chewed through the buried drip irrigation line and caused a leak. In the drought-prone West, where every drop of water counts, California farmers are in a constant search for ways to efficiently use the increasingly scarce resource. Pictured above, Danny Royer, vice president of technology at Bowles Farming Co., prepares to pilot a drone over a tomato field near Los Banos, Calif. Farmers say leak-detecting drones can help save massive amounts of water. The video camera is paired up with a smartphone or computer tablet, which is used to control the drone.

As the world's foremost event covering the practical implications of AI for enterprise organizations and solutions, more than 600 business CxOs are attending alongside AI start-up innovators, media and acclaimed researchers. The AI Summit's elite content program offers exclusive insights into the future world of AI-empowered businesses. Inbenta Chief Operating Officer and previous CTO, Ferran Saurina, will join a leading panel session highlighting customer engagement solutions that serve as entry points for any business. "AI is happening in most, if not all industries; and the number one consumer applications is through chatbots. Savvy companies aren't asking if their business needs a bot, but how they should be integrated. September 28th at 5:25 pm - 6:10 pm Panel Debate: What does a business leader need to know when choosing a partner for AI? A number of leading organizations spanning finance, law, healthcare, manufacturing, transport, energy, education and many more are looking to implement the technologies or have already started. The conference programs include exclusive announcements on AI Projects from American Airlines, Capital One, UBER, General Electric, Wells Fargo, Navistar, BMS, Johnson & Johnson and many more. "AI is being implemented by leading organizations in a broad range of industries and we are very excited to host Inbenta, alongside key industry names that include Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM Watson, Microsoft, Tata and Accenture,'' underlines Daniel Pitchford, Commercial Director, The AI Summit.

Technological revolutions have long animated economic history. The concept of "creative destruction"--in which technological advancement destroys certain sectors of the economy while giving rise to new ones--has roots in some of the earliest economic thought.1 This process hinges on the idea that machines serve to supplement human labor, primarily labor dedicated to repetitive physical and cognitive tasks. At the moment, machines can solve intensive well-defined tasks but for the most part cannot be expected to define problems nor identify and traverse particularly complex systems without human oversight. Robots: A Retrospective The most primitive economies are essentially brawn-based. Human labor is largely priced by the ability to perform physical tasks associated with farming and building. A number of studies (e.g., Thomas and Strauss, 1997) show how in modern-day less-developed economies, men make more than woman as a function of body mass and thus perceived brawn, and that men with more brawn made more than those with less.

Tesla makes the world's best electric cars - but they're not content to rest on their laurels. The company just launched a powerful new battery that makes the Model S the fastest production car you can actually buy. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy has beat Uber to the punch by launching the world's first fleet of self-driving taxis in Singapore. The MIT Climate CoLab awarded honors to a new elevated Caterpillar Train that soars over traffic jams. And in Europe, Paris is planning to go completely car-free for an entire day this September, and we spotted an awesome pedal-powered school bus on the streets of the Netherlands.

Famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who is credited as the author of the famous war strategy guidebook Art of War had said; "know thy self, know thy enemy. Those words were from the 5th century BC. The'art of war' in the 21st century is drastically different. So much so that Christopher Coker, professor at the London School of Economics and author of Warrior Geeks in a 2013 piece declared that technology, in fact, is now making man the weakest link in warfare. India is also now looking to get into the world of advanced drone warfare. New Delhi has shown renewed interest in buying some of the top US-made drones currently proving their worth for the American military around the world.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Lionfish have voracious appetites that are upsetting coral reef ecosystems from Rhode Island to Venezuela. But a new nonprofit company has an unusual plan to restore balance to those environments before it's too late. In the latest edition of our online series "ScienceScope," science producer Nsikan Akpan has the scoop. NSIKAN AKPAN: The lionfish is an invasive species. In its native home of the Indo-Pacific, the lionfish is a fierce, unrelenting predator.

Weather Underground makes weather forecasts based on 8,000 public and 192,000 privately constructed weather stations across 195 countries. The company is adding 400 new stations across Asia, South America, and Africa, and it'll be integrating all of them with IBM's Watson language-learning AI (the one that played Jeopardy! So what exactly does this mean? It is creating a global weather forecast system tied into a number of worldwide businesses, and with that, a hope to outmaneuver one of the most costly, damaging variables in global industry--weather. When IBM bought The Weather Company/WU last October it immediately announced its intention to merge WU's 200,000 weather stations with Watson through the Internet of Things.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.