The APC's focus is on one core -- but extremely important -- area of robotic competency: manipulating objects in the world. The competition scenario was a Kivalike warehouse in which the robot had 20 minutes to pick items off a shelf and put them into a plastic tote. The 12 bins on the shelf were stocked with 25 products that posed a range of perception or manipulation challenges. Each bin had one target item. A robot received a base score of 10 points for successfully picking the target item, with bonus points for cluttered bins or difficult items.

When human experts build qualitative or quantitative models of complex systems, they use the function of the system as a guideline to decide what to model and how to model it, yet they do not often encode this functional knowledge directly. If qualitative and quantitative models contained this functional knowledge, our reasoning systems might use it as a heuristic or as a filter during the course of quantitative and qualitative simulation. Matthew Klenk (PARC) delivered a separate talk related to massive-scale model-based reasoning, describing the challenge of choosing initial conditions for simulation. Throughout the technical presentations on advances in qualitative simulation, we discussed the practicality of automatically transforming quantitative and qualitative models during the course of reasoning.

Recent years have seen significant technical progress on robot planning, enabling robots to compute actions and motions to accomplish challenging tasks involving driving, flying, walking, or manipulating objects. However, robots that have been commercially deployed in the real world typically have no or minimal planning capability. These robots are often manually programmed, teleoperated, or programmed to follow simple rules. Although these robots are highly successful in their respective niches, a lack of planning capabilities limits the range of tasks for which currently deployed robots can be used. In this article, we highlight key conclusions from a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation in October 2013 that summarize opportunities and key challenges in robot planning and include challenge problems identified in the workshop that can help guide future research towards making robot planning more deployable in the real world.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2015 Fall Symposium Series, on Thursday through Saturday, November 12-14, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the six symposia were as follows: AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Embedded Machine Learning, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents. This article contains the reports from four of the symposia.

Civil unrest events (protests, strikes, and “occupy” events) are common occurrences in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. The study of civil unrest is a key topic for political scientists as it helps capture an important mechanism by which citizenry express themselves. In countries where civil unrest is lawful, qualitative analysis has revealed that more than 75 percent of the protests are planned, organized, or announced in advance; therefore detecting references to future planned events in relevant news and social media is a direct way to develop a protest forecasting system. We report on a system for doing that in this article. It uses a combination of keyphrase learning to identify what to look for, probabilistic soft logic to reason about location occurrences in extracted results, and time normalization to resolve future time mentions. We illustrate the application of our system to 10 countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Results demonstrate our successes in capturing significant societal unrest in these countries with an average lead time of 4.08 days. We also study the selective superiorities of news media versus social media (Twitter, Facebook) to identify relevant trade-offs.

The infrastructure and tools necessary for large-scale data analytics, formerly the exclusive purview of experts, are increasingly available. Whereas a knowledgeable data-miner or domain expert can rightly be expected to exercise caution when required (for example, around fallacious conclusions supposedly supported by the data), the nonexpert may benefit from some judicious assistance. This article describes an end-to-end learning framework that allows a novice to create models from data easily by helping structure the model building process and capturing extended aspects of domain knowledge. By treating the whole modeling process interactively and exploiting high-level knowledge in the form of an ontology, the framework is able to aid the user in a number of ways, including in helping to avoid pitfalls such as data dredging. Prudence must be exercised to avoid these hazards as certain conclusions may only be supported if, for example, there is extra knowledge which gives reason to trust a narrower set of hypotheses. This article adopts the solution of using higher-level knowledge to allow this sort of domain knowledge to be used automatically, selecting relevant input attributes, and thence constraining the hypothesis space. We describe how the framework automatically exploits structured knowledge in an ontology to identify relevant concepts, and how a data extraction component can make use of online data sources to find measurements of those concepts so that their relevance can be evaluated. To validate our approach, models of four different problem domains were built using our implementation of the framework. Prediction error on unseen examples of these models show that our framework, making use of the ontology, helps to improve model generalization.

Now, 70 issues and 17 years later, I am still deeply grateful for the opportunity to contribute to AAAI and to the AI community through the editorship. It has been a privilege to guide the magazine's coverage and a treat to have the first look at exciting articles as they arrive. It has been an honor and pleasure to work with all those individuals -- worldwide -- whose efforts have made, and continue to make the magazine a success. It has been a joy to edit this magazine. However, now that my administrative role at Indiana University has grown, I realize that the time has come for me to pass the torch and allow new leadership to build on the magazine's many strengths.

The 2015 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 6 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, 13 emerging applications describing works in progress, and three papers in a new category for challenge problems. In the first article, Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission, John Bresina describes a deployed application of current planning technology in the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). Bresina presents an approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity-planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, the LADEE activity scheduling system (LASS). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft's orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution. In our second article, Helping Novices Avoid the Hazards of Data: Leveraging Ontologies to Improve Model Generalization Automatically with Online Data Source, Sasin Janpuangtong and Dylan Shell describe an emerging application of an endto-end learning framework for large-scale data analytics that allows a novice to create models from data easily by helping structure the model-building process.

This article describes a challenging, real-world planning problem within the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). I present the approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, called LASS (LADEE Activity Scheduling System). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft’s orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution.

This paper presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are represented as classes. The words simultaneously update their class membership preferences according to the senses that neighboring words are likely to choose. We use distributional information to weigh the influence that each word has on the decisions of the others and semantic similarity information to measure the strength of compatibility among the choices. With this information we can formulate the word sense disambiguation problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and solve it using tools derived from game theory, maintaining the textual coherence. The model is based on two ideas: similar words should be assigned to similar classes and the meaning of a word does not depend on all the words in a text but just on some of them. The paper provides an in-depth motivation of the idea of modeling the word sense disambiguation problem in terms of game theory, which is illustrated by an example. The conclusion presents an extensive analysis on the combination of similarity measures to use in the framework and a comparison with state-of-the-art systems. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms and can be applied to different tasks and in different scenarios.