The recent explosive growth of smart phones and social media creates a unique opportunity to view events from various unique perspectives. Unfortunately, this relatively new form of communication lacks the structural integrity, accuracy, and reduced noise of other forms of communication. Nevertheless, social media increasingly plays a vita role in the observation of societal actions before, during, and after significant events. In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy making landfall on the northeastern coasts of the United States demonstrated this role. This work provides a preliminary view into how social media could be used to monitor and gauge community resilience to such natural disasters. We observe, evaluate, and visualize how Twitter data evolves over time before, during, and after a natural disaster such as Hurricane Sandy and what opportunities there may be to leverage social media for situational awareness and emergency response.

Games have played a prominent role as a test-bed for advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence ever since its foundation over half a century ago, resulting in highly specialized world-class game-playing systems being developed for various games. The establishment of the International General Game Playing Competition in 2005, however, resulted in a renewed interest in more general problem solving approaches to game playing. In general game playing (GGP) the goal is to create game-playing systems that autonomously learn how to skillfully play a wide variety of games, given only the descriptions of the game rules. In this paper we review the history of the competition, discuss progress made so far, and list outstanding research challenges.

Now entering its eighth year, the Annual Computer Poker Competition (ACPC) is the premier event within the field of computer poker. With both academic and nonacademic competitors from around the world, the competition provides an open and international venue for benchmarking computer poker agents. We describe the competition’s origins and evolution, current events, and winning techniques.

Participation will be open to active no later than Friday, June 19, 2013 finally, two years as immediate Past participants as well as other interested (5:00 PM local hotel time (PDT)).

Publications that have influenced the growth of artificial intelligence are often difficult to obtain.  We first collected titles of several thousand publications from many well-known sources and then selected about 1850 titles considered to be especially influential.  We have identified, and in a few cases created, online versions of about half of these “classics in AI.”  Searchable text of the documents enables additional analysis of trends and influences.  Integration into the rest of the AITopics information portal contextualizes the classic publications.

This paper provides a broad overview of the situation in Parallel SAT Solving. A set of challenges to researchers is presented which, we believe, must be met to ensure the practical applicability of Parallel SAT Solvers in the future. All these challenges are described informally, but put into perspective with related research results, and a (subjective) grading of difficulty for each of them is provided.

We will see more and more applications of AI on the mobile devices. This special issue of AI Magazine is devoted to some exemplary works of AI on mobile devices. We include four works that range from mobile activity recognition and air-quality detection to machine translation and image compression. These works were chosen from a variety of sources, including the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2011 Special Track on Integrated and Embedded AI Systems, held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011.

Since people spend a majority of their time indoors, indoor air quality (IAQ) can have a significant impact on human health, safety, productivity, and comfort. Due to the diversity and dynamics of people's indoor activities, it is important to monitor IAQ for each individual. Most existing air quality sensing systems are stationary or focus on outdoor air quality. In contrast, we propose MAQS, a user-centric mobile sensing system for IAQ monitoring. MAQS users carry portable, indoor location tracking and IAQ sensing devices that provide personalized IAQ information in real time. To improve accuracy and energy efficiency, MAQS incorporates three novel techniques: (1) an accurate temporal n-gram augmented Bayesian room localization method that requires few Wi-Fi fingerprints; (2) an air exchange rate based IAQ sensing method, which measures general IAQ using only CO$_2$ sensors; and (3) a zone-based proximity detection method for collaborative sensing, which saves energy and enables data sharing among users. MAQS has been deployed and evaluated via a real-world user study. This evaluation demonstrates that MAQS supports accurate personalized IAQ monitoring and quantitative analysis with high energy efficiency. We also found that study participants frequently experienced poor IAQ.

In this article, we investigate the possibility of cross-language communication using a synergy of words and pictures on mobile devices. Communicating with only pictures is in itself a very powerful strategy, but is limited in expressiveness. On the other hand, words can express everything you could wish to say, but they are cumbersome to work with on mobile devices, and need to be translated in order for their meaning to be understood. Automatic translations can contain errors that pervert the communication process, and this may undermine the users’ confidence when expressing themselves across language barriers. Our idea is to create a user interface for cross-language communication that uses pictures as the primary mode of input, and words to express the detailed meaning. This interface creates a visual process of communication that occurs on two heterogeneous channels that can support each other. We implemented this user interface as application on the Apple iPad tablet, and performed a set of experiments to determine its usefulness as a translation aid for travellers.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a ubiquitous tool used in many data analysis, machine learning and information retrieval applications. It is used for obtaining a lower dimensional representation of a high dimensional signal that still captures as much as possible of the original signal. Such a low dimensional representation can be useful for reducing storage and computational costs, as complexity control in learning systems, or to aid in visualization.