Computational philosophy is the use of mechanized computational techniques to unearth philosophical insights that are either difficult or impossible to find using traditional philosophical methods. Computational metaphysics is computational philosophy with a focus on metaphysics. In this paper, we (a) develop results in modal metaphysics whose discovery was computer assisted, and (b) conclude that these results work not only to the obvious benefit of philosophy but also, less obviously, to the benefit of computer science, since the new computational techniques that led to these results may be more broadly applicable within computer science. The paper includes a description of our background methodology and how it evolved, and a discussion of our new results.

In this paper, a biologically-inspired adaptive intelligent secondary controller is developed for microgrids to tackle system dynamics uncertainties, faults, and/or disturbances. The developed adaptive biologically-inspired controller adopts a novel computational model of emotional learning in mammalian limbic system. The learning capability of the proposed biologically-inspired intelligent controller makes it a promising approach to deal with the power system non-linear and volatile dynamics without increasing the controller complexity, and maintain the voltage and frequency stabilities by using an efficient reference tracking mechanism. The performance of the proposed intelligent secondary controller is validated in terms of the voltage and frequency absolute errors in the simulated microgrid. Simulation results highlight the efficiency and robustness of the proposed intelligent controller under the fault conditions and different system uncertainties compared to other benchmark controllers.

In the last year, new models and methods for pretraining and transfer learning have driven striking performance improvements across a range of language understanding tasks. The GLUE benchmark, introduced one year ago, offers a single-number metric that summarizes progress on a diverse set of such tasks, but performance on the benchmark has recently come close to the level of non-expert humans, suggesting limited headroom for further research. This paper recaps lessons learned from the GLUE benchmark and presents SuperGLUE, a new benchmark styled after GLUE with a new set of more difficult language understanding tasks, improved resources, and a new public leaderboard. SuperGLUE will be available soon at super.gluebenchmark.com.

In this work, we explore human-robot collaborative planning using the \emph{functional object-oriented network} (FOON), a graphical knowledge representation for manipulations that can be performed by domestic robots. The knowledge retrieval procedure, used for acquiring the necessary steps (as a task tree) to solve a given problem, is modified to account for weights that reflect the difficulty of performing motions in a universal FOON. These weights are given as success rates, which describe the likelihood of a robot successfully completing the action(s) on its own. However, certain manipulations may be too difficult for it to perform on its own based on its own physical limitations. To make it easier for the robot, a human can assist to the minimal extent needed to perform the activity to completion by identifying those actions with low success rates for the human to do. From our experiments, it is shown that tasks can be executed successfully with the aid of the assistant. Our results show that the best task tree can be found with the adequate chance of success in completing three activities while minimizing the effort needed from the human assistant.

Personalized recommendation algorithms learn a user's preference for an item by measuring a distance/similarity between them. However, some of the existing recommendation models (e.g., matrix factorization) assume a linear relationship between the user and item. This approach limits the capacity of recommender systems, since the interactions between users and items in real-world applications are much more complex than the linear relationship. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we design and propose a deep learning framework called Signed Distance-based Deep Memory Recommender, which captures non-linear relationships between users and items explicitly and implicitly, and work well in both general recommendation task and shopping basket-based recommendation task. Through an extensive empirical study on six real-world datasets in the two recommendation tasks, our proposed approach achieved significant improvement over ten state-of-the-art recommendation models.

Value-function approximation methods that operate in batch mode have foundational importance to reinforcement learning (RL). Finite sample guarantees for these methods often crucially rely on two types of assumptions: (1) mild distribution shift, and (2) representation conditions that are stronger than realizability. However, the necessity ("why do we need them?") and the naturalness ("when do they hold?") of such assumptions have largely eluded the literature. In this paper, we revisit these assumptions and provide theoretical results towards answering the above questions, and make steps towards a deeper understanding of value-function approximation.

Understanding human's language requires complex world knowledge. However, existing large-scale knowledge graphs mainly focus on knowledge about entities while ignoring knowledge about activities, states, or events, which are used to describe how entities or things act in the real world. To fill this gap, we develop ASER (activities, states, events, and their relations), a large-scale eventuality knowledge graph extracted from more than 11-billion-token unstructured textual data. ASER contains 15 relation types belonging to five categories, 194-million unique eventualities, and 64-million unique edges among them. Both human and extrinsic evaluations demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of ASER.

Behavior and motion planning play an important role in automated driving. Traditionally, behavior planners instruct local motion planners with predefined behaviors. Due to the high scene complexity in urban environments, unpredictable situations may occur in which behavior planners fail to match predefined behavior templates. Recently, general-purpose planners have been introduced, combining behavior and local motion planning. These general-purpose planners allow behavior-aware motion planning given a single reward function. However, two challenges arise: First, this function has to map a complex feature space into rewards. Second, the reward function has to be manually tuned by an expert. Manually tuning this reward function becomes a tedious task. In this paper, we propose an approach that relies on human driving demonstrations to automatically tune reward functions. This study offers important insights into the driving style optimization of general-purpose planners with maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning. We evaluate our approach based on the expected value difference between learned and demonstrated policies. Furthermore, we compare the similarity of human driven trajectories with optimal policies of our planner under learned and expert-tuned reward functions. Our experiments show that we are able to learn reward functions exceeding the level of manual expert tuning without prior domain knowledge.

United, Delta and American Airlines are taking steps to cover cameras on seat backs after the practice sparked a privacy backlash. Many consumers were outraged when they learned of the controversial cameras embedded within the entertainment systems of plane seats. It even sparked an inquiry from two US senators who demanded to know what the cameras were being used for and if they were recording unsuspecting passengers. Delta, United and American Airlines are covering the cameras on seat backs after recent criticisms around privacy. Now, the airlines say they intend to cover up the cameras in response to recent criticism.

Daimler is no longer going to sell its eye-catching small Smart Fortwo electric cars in North America. The company told TechCrunch that the 2019 model will be the last to be available in the United States and Canada, just two years after deciding to stop selling the gas-powered version of the vehicles in the region. Daimler plans to instead focus on launching its Smart line in China. Existing Fortwo owners will still be able to get their cars serviced by Smart or at authorized Mercedes-Benz dealerships. Production of the Fortwo in North America is expected to come to an end in June, but the Smart brand will continue on elsewhere.