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ICAIL 2013: The Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
Verheij, Bart (University of Groningen) | Francesconi, Enrico (Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques - ITTIG-CNR) | Gardner, Anne (Independent research professional)
In order to emphasize the importance of implemented systems for the field, we also called for system demonstrations; 7 were accepted for the conference, 1 of them associated with a research abstract and 6 of them described in a demonstration extended abstract. At this edition of ICAIL, the Donald H. Berman best student paper award was won by Tran Thi Oanh (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; JAIST) for the paper entitled "Reference Resolution in Legal Texts" that she wrote with Minh Le Nguyen and Akira Shimazu. Traditionally, ICAIL hosts a lively and varied program of tutorials and workshops. At this conference, there were tutorials covering an introduction to artificial intelligence and law, web ontology and data design, LegalRuleML, and textual information extraction. There were workshops on argumentation, coherence, open and smart data, evidence, e-discovery, e-justice, and network analysis. Also, the international workshop series, Computational Models of Natural Argument, joined ICAIL for its 13th edition (CMNA XIII). The conference was held under the auspices of the Senate of the Italian Republic with as hosting institution the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council of Italy), central unit in Rome. Both AAAI and ACM SIGART were in cooperation. Conference officials were Bart Verheij (program chair), Enrico Francesconi (conference chair), and Anne Gardner (secretary/treasurer).
Reports on the 2013 AAAI Fall Symposium Series
Burns, Gully (Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California) | Gil, Yolanda (Information Sciences Institute and Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California) | Liu, Yan (University of Southern California) | Villanueva-Rosales, Natalia (University of Texas at El Paso) | Risi, Sebastian (University of Copenhagen) | Lehman, Joel (University of Texas at Austin) | Clune, Jeff (University of Wyoming) | Lebiere, Christian (Carnegie Mellon University) | Rosenbloom, Paul S. (University of Southern California) | Harmelen, Frank van (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) | Hendler, James A. (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | Hitzler, Pascal (Wright State University) | Janowic, Krzysztof (University of California, Santa Barbara) | Swarup, Samarth (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Rinke Hoekstra (VU University from transferring and adapting semantic web Amsterdam) presented linked open data tools technologies to the big data quest. Finally, in the Social to discover connections within established scientific Networks and Social Contagion symposium, a data sets. Louiqa Rashid (University of Maryland) community of researchers explored topics such as social presented work on similarity metrics linking together contagion, game theory, network modeling, network-based drugs, genes, and diseases. Kyle Ambert (Intel) presented inference, human data elicitation, and Finna, a text-mining system to identify passages web analytics. Highlights of the symposia are contained of interest containing descriptions of neuronal in this report.
Workshops Held at the First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing: A Report
Josephy, Tatiana (CrowdFlower) | Lease, Matt (University of Texas at Austin) | Paritosh, Praveen (Google) | Krause, Markus (Leibniz University) | Georgescu, Mihai (Leibniz University) | Tjalve, Michael (Microsoft) | Braga, Daniela (VoiceBox Technologies)
The aim of the Disco: Human and Machine Learning in Games workshop was to extend upon the focus of two past workshops and explore the intersection of entertainment, learning and human computation. The goal of the workshop was to examine both human learning and machine learning in games and human computation. Human computation methods let machines learn from humans where games can provide humans the opportunity to learn. The workshop was thus devoted to I learn, in Latin disco, for machines and humans alike. The First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing Was Held in the Southern California Desert Community of Palm Springs.
Report on the Thirty-Fifth Annual Cognitive Science Conference
Belardinelli, Anna (University of Tübingen) | Butz, Martin V. (University of Tübingen)
COGSCI2013, the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society and the first to take place in Germany, was held from the 31st of July to the 3rd of August. Cognitive scientists with varied backgrounds gathered in Berlin to report and discuss on expanding lines of research, spanning multiple fields but striving in one direction: to understand cognition with all its properties and peculiarities. A rich program featuring keynotes, symposia, workshops and tutorials, along regular oral and poster sessions, offered the attendees a vivid and exciting overview of where the discipline is going while serving as a fertile forum of interdisciplinary discussion and exchange. This report attempts to point out why this should matter to artificial intelligence as a whole.
Workshops Held at the Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE): A Report
Liapis, Antonios (Technical University of Copenhagen) | Cook, Michael (Goldsmiths College London) | Smith, Adam M. (University of Washington) | Smith, Gillian (Northeastern University) | Zook, Alexander (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Si, Mei (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | Cavazza, Marc (Teesside University) | Pasquier, Philippe (Simon Fraser University)
The workshop was accompanied by an evening Games are unique in that their components event, DAGGER, which drew together local game developers (from the rules and goals of the game to the appearance and academic research projects. Acting both of avatars and their dialogue) must encompass as an exhibition and as an informal gathering, the both functional and aesthetic prerequisites. Artificial DAGGER event allowed attendees to interact directly intelligence usually focuses on the functional quality with a wide variety of game types and technologies, of such game components, for example, ensuring as well as with their developers. As events such that an avatar can traverse a level in minimal time or as DAGGER help bridge the gap between theoretical that AI can win over any human in a strategy game. The papers avatar, or level would appeal to a particular player. of the workshop were published as AAAI Technical The Workshop on AI and Game Aesthetics provided Report WS-13-19.
The MiniZinc Challenge 2008–2013
Stuckey, Peter J. (National ICT Australia and the University of Melbourne) | Feydy, Thibaut (National ICT Australia and the University of Melbourne) | Schutt, Andreas (National ICT Australia and the University of Melbourne) | Tack, Guido (National ICT Australia and Monash University) | Fischer, Julien (Opturion)
MiniZinc is a solver agnostic modeling language for defining and solver combinatorial satisfaction and optimization problems. MiniZinc provides a solver independent modeling language which is now supported by constraint programming solvers, mixed integer programming solvers, SAT and SAT modulo theory solvers, and hybrid solvers. Since 2008 we have run the MiniZinc challenge every year, which compares and contrasts the different strengths of different solvers and solving technologies on a set of MiniZinc models. Here we report on what we have learnt from running the competition for 6 years.
Sequential Decision Making in Computational Sustainability via Adaptive Submodularity
Krause, Andreas (ETH Zurich) | Golovin, Daniel (Google) | Converse, Sarah (USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center)
Many problems in computational sustainability require making a sequence of decisions in complex, uncertain environments. Such problems are generally notoriously difficult. In this article, we review the recently discovered notion of adaptive submodularity, an intuitive diminishing returns condition that generalizes the classical notion of submodular set functions to sequential decision problems. Problems exhibiting the adaptive submodularity property can be efficiently and provably near-optimally solved using simple myopic policies. We illustrate this concept in several case studies of interest in computational sustainability: First, we demonstrate how it can be used to efficiently plan for resolving uncertainty in adaptive management scenarios. Secondly, we show how it applies to dynamic conservation planning for protecting endangered species, a case study carried out in collaboration with the US Geological Survey and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Diagnostic Competitions
Feldman, Alexander (General Diagnostics) | Kleer, Johan de (Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)) | Kurtoglu, Tolga (Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)) | Narasimhan, Sriram (University of California, Santa Cruz) | Poll, Scott (NASA Ames Research Center) | Garcia, David (Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)) | Kuhn, Lukas (Zenhavior) | Gemund, Arjan J. C. van (Delft University of Technology)
Therefore, diagnostic algorithms must reason backwards from symptoms to causes. For example, determining that a dead battery is the cause of your car not starting in the morning (and not the wiring or the ignition switch). The domains of diagnostic algorithms includes analog and digital circuits, software systems, thermal systems, biological systems, and physical mechanisms. The same classes of diagnostic algorithms can apply in all domains. Diagnostic algorithms make observations, often in real time, of a system being diagnosed.
Crowdsourcing Meets Ecology: Hemisphere-Wide Spatiotemporal Species Distribution Models
Fink, Daniel (Cornell University) | Damoulas, Theodoros (New York University) | Bruns, Nicholas E. (Cornell University) | Sorte , Frank A. La (Cornell University) | Hochachka , Wesley M. (Cornell University) | Gomes, Carla P. (Cornell University) | Kelling, Steve (Cornell University)
Ecological systems are inherently complex. The processes that affect the distributions of animals and plants operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, presenting a unique challenge for the development and coordination of effective conservation strategies, particularly for wide-ranging species. In order to study ecological systems across scales, data must be collected at fine resolutions across broad spatial and temporal extents. Crowdsourcing has emerged as an efficient way to gather these data by engaging large numbers of people to record observations. However, data gathered by crowdsourced projects are often biased due to the opportunistic approach of data collection. In this article, we propose a general class of models called AdaSTEM, (for adaptive spatio-temporal exploratory models), that are designed to meet these challenges by adapting to multiple scales while exploiting variation in data density common with crowdsourced data. To illustrate the use of AdaSTEM, we produce intra-seasonal distribution estimates of long-distance migrations across the Western Hemisphere using data from eBird, a citizen science project that utilizes volunteers to collect observations of birds. Subsequently, model diagnostics are used to quantify and visualize the scale and quality of distribution estimates. This analysis shows how AdaSTEM can automatically adapt to complex spatiotemporal processes across a range of scales, thus providing essential information for full-life cycle conservation planning of broadly distributed species, communities, and ecosystems.
Computational Sustainability
Eaton, Eric (University of Pennsylvania) | Gomes, Carla P. (Cornell University) | Williams, Brian (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Computational sustainability problems, which exist in dynamic environments with high amounts of uncertainty, provide a variety of unique challenges to artificial intelligence research and the opportunity for significant impact upon our collective future. This editorial provides an overview of artificial intelligence for computational sustainability, and introduces this special issue of AI Magazine.