A large number of transients visit big cities on any given day and they visit crowded areas and come in contact with many people. However, epidemiological studies have not paid much attention to the role of this subpopulation in disease spread. In the present work, we extend a synthetic population model of Washington DC metro area to include leisure and business travelers. This approach involves combining Census data, activity surveys, and geospatial data to build a detailed minute-by-minute simulation of population interaction. We simulate a flu-like disease outbreak both with and without the transient population to evaluate the effect of the transients on outbreak size and peak day in terms of number of residents infected. Results show that there are significantly more infections when transients are considered. We also evaluate interventions like closing big museums and encouraging use of hand sanitizers at those musuems. Surprisingly closing musuems does not result in a significant difference in the epidemic. However, we find that if the use of hand sanitizer reduces the infectivity and suceptibility to 80% or 60% of the original values, it is as effective as closing museums for a few days or entirely eliminating the effect of transients. If infectivity and susceptibility are reduced to 40% or 20%, it reduces the number of resident infections over the period of 120 days by 10% and 13%.

In this paper, we present an optimized version of the previously developed Block Modularity algorithm (Anthony,2009). The original algorithm was a fast, greedy method that effectively discovered a structured clustering in linked data and scaled very well with the number of nodes and edges. The optimized version is scalable in terms of the model complexity; the technique can now be used effectively to discover thousands of clusters in data sets with hundreds of thousands (and possibly more) nodes and edges. The optimization leads to an improvement of the runtime per iteration from cubic to quadratic with a small increase in the constant factor. The algorithm compares favorably with Karrer and Newman's Degree-Corrected Block Model (DCBM) in both runtime and quality of results.

Learning new motor tasks autonomously from interaction with a human being is an important goal for both robotics and machine learning. However, when moving beyond basic skills, most monolithic machine learning approaches fail to scale. In this paper, we take the task of learning table tennis as an example and present a new framework which allows a robot to learn cooperative table tennis from interaction with a human. Therefore, the robot first learns a set of elementary table tennis hitting movements from a human teacher by kinesthetic teach-in, which is compiled into a set of dynamical system motor primitives (DMPs). Subsequently, the system generalizes these movements to a wider range of situations using our mixture of motor primitives (MoMP) approach. The resulting policy enables the robot to select appropriate motor primitives as well as to generalize between them. Finally, the robot plays with a human table tennis partner and learns online to improve its behavior.

We present an approach for learning grounded language from mixed-initiative human-robot interaction. Prior work on learning from human instruction has concentrated on acquisition of task-execution knowledge from domain-specific language. In this work, we demonstrate acquisition of linguistic, semantic, perceptual, and procedural knowledge from mixed-initiative, natural language dialog. Our approach has been instantiated in a cognitive architecture, Soar, and has been deployed on a table-top robotic arm capable of picking up small objects. A preliminary analysis verifies the ability of the robot to acquire diverse knowledge from human-robot interaction.

Statistical models almost always yield predictions that are more accurate than those of human experts. However, humans are better at data acquisition and at recognizing atypical circumstances. We use prediction markets to combine predictions from groups of humans and artificial-intelligence agents and show that they are more robust than those from groups of humans or agents alone.

We study the computational complexity of optimal bribery and manipulation schemes for sports tournaments with uncertain information: cup; challenge or caterpillar; and round robin. Our results carry over to the equivalent voting rules: sequential pair-wise elections, cup, and Copeland, when the set of candidates is exactly the set of voters. This restriction creates new difficulties for most existing algorithms. The complexity of bribery and manipulation are well studied, almost always assuming deterministic information about votes and results. We assume that for candidates i and j the probability that i beats j and the costs of lowering each probability by fixed increments are known to the manipulators. We provide complexity analyses for cup, challenge, and round robin competitions ranging from polynomial time to np^pp. This shows that the introduction of uncertainty into the reasoning process drastically increases the complexity of bribery problems in some instances.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a technique of semantic interpretation of text on the sentence level. In this paper, we present a corpus that is labeled with semantic roles for biological transport events. The corpus was built using domain knowledge provided by ontologies. We also report on a word-chunking approach for identifying semantic roles of biomedical predicates describing transport events. We trained a first-order Conditional Random Fields (CRF) for chunking applications with the traditional role labeling features and also domain-specific features. The results show that the system performance varies between different roles and the performance was not improved for all roles by introducing domain specific features.

The ever-growing literature in biomedicine makes it virtually impossible for individuals to grasp all the information relevant to their interests. Since even experts' knowledge is likely to be incomplete, important associations among key biomedical concepts may remain unnoticed in the flood of information. Discovering those implicit, hidden knowledge is called hypothesis discovery. This paper reports our preliminary work on hypothesis discovery, which takes advantage of a syllogistic chain of relations extracted from existing knowledge (i.e., published literature). We consider such chains of relations as implicit patterns or rules to generate potential hypotheses. The generated hypotheses are then ranked according to their plausibility judged from the reliability of the rule which generated the hypothesis and the analogical resemblance between new and existing knowledge. We discuss the validity of the proposed approach on the entire Medline database.

In the current generation The main results issued from our first experiments (Legras of UV Systems, several ground operators operate a single et al. 2008; Coppin and Legras 2012) were that the swarm vehicle with limited autonomous capabilities, whereas, approach seemed to be robust and adapted for simple mission in the next generation of UV Systems, a ground operator of surveillance, but that the operators in charge of will have to supervise a system of several cooperating vehicles such a system were not ready to understand and dialog with performing a joint mission, i.e. a Multi-Agent System this new kind of system, so that the global performance of (MAS) (Johnson 2003; Coppin and Legras 2012). In order the system was potentially spoiled by human intervention.

Many cooperative control problems ranging from formation following, to rendezvous to flocking can be expressed as consensus problems. The ability of an operator to influence the development of consensus within a swarm therefore provides a basic test of the quality of human-swarm interaction (HSI). Two plausible approaches are : Direct- dictate a desired value to swarm members or Indirect- control or influence one or more swarm members relying on existing control laws to propagate that influence. Both approaches have been followed by HSI researchers. The Indirect case uses standard consensus methods where the operator exerts influence over a few robots and then the swarm reaches a consensus based on its intrinsic rules. The Direct method corresponds to flooding in which the operator directly sends the intention to a subset of the swarm and the command then propagates through the remainder of the swarm as a privileged message. In this paper we compare these two methods regarding their convergence time and properties in noisy and noiseless conditions with static and dynamic graphs. We have found that average consensus method (indirect control) converges much slower than flooding (direct) method but it has more noise tolerance in comparison with simple flooding algorithms. Also, we have found that the convergence time of the consensus method behaves erratically when the graph's connectivity (Fiedler value) is high.