In this paper, we investigate a novel application of online planning and scheduling:controlling an automated infeeder for a packaging line of foodand consumer packaged goods. In this system, products arrive continuously at high-speedfrom the end of the production line and need to be arranged into a specific configurationfor downstream primary and secondary packaging machines.In collaboration with a domain expert from the packaging industry,we developed an innovative design for a reconfigurable parallel infeed system usinga matrix of interchangeable smart belts. We also adapted our online model-basedPlantrol planner to this domain. Our planner can control various configurations ofthe new infeed system through simulation both in nominal planning and when runtimefailures occur. We are also building a small physical prototype to validate the newdesign and our software framework.

Redacting text documents has traditionally been a mostly manual activity, making it expensive and prone to disclosure risks. This paper describes a semi-automated system to ensure a specified level of privacy in text data sets. Recent work has attempted to quantify the likelihood of privacy breaches for text data. We build on these notions to provide a means of obstructing such breaches by framing it as a multi-class classification problem. Our system gives users fine-grained control over the level of privacy needed to obstruct sensitive concepts present in that data. Additionally, our system is designed to respect a user-defined utility metric on the data (such as disclosure of a particular concept), which our methods try to maximize while anonymizing. We describe our redaction framework, algorithms, as well as a prototype tool built in to Microsoft Word that allows enterprise users to redact documents before sharing them internally and obscure client specific information. In addition we show experimental evaluation using publicly available data sets that show the effectiveness of our approach against both automated attackers and human subjects.The results show that we are able to preserve the utility of a text corpus while reducing disclosure risk of the sensitive concept.

Human error is one of the most common causes of vulnerability in asecure system. However it is often overlooked when these systems aretested, partly because human tests are costly and very hard torepeat. We have developed a community of agents that test securesystems by running standard windows software while performingcollaborative group tasks, mimicking more realistic patterns ofcommunication and traffic, as well as human fatigue and errors. Thissystem is being deployed on a large cyber testing range. One keyattribute of humans is flexibility of response in order to achievetheir goals when unexpected events occur. Our agents use reactiveplanning within a BDI architecture to flexibly re-plan if needed.Since the agents are goal-oriented, we are able to measure the impactof cyber attacks on mission accomplishment, a more salient measure ofprotection than raw penetration. We show experimentally how the agentteams can be resilient under attacks that are partly successful, andalso how an organizational structure can lead to emergent propertiesof the traffic in the network.

In this paper we provide insight into the BodyMedia FIT® armband system — a wearable multi-sensor technology that achieves the goals of continuous physiological monitoring (especially energy expenditure estimation) and weight management using machine learning and data modeling methods. This system has been commercially available since 2001 and more than half a million users have used the system to track their physiological parameters and to achieve their individual health goals including weight-loss. We describe several challenges that arise in applying machine learning techniques to the health care domain and present various solutions utilized in the armband system. We demonstrate how machine learning and multi-sensor data fusion techniques are critical to the system’s succ

With the growth of online information, many people are challenged in finding and reading the information most important for their interests. From 2008-2010 we built an experimental personalized news system where readers can subscribe to organized channels of information that are curated by experts. AI technology was employed to radically reduce the work load of curators and to efficiently present information to readers. The system has gone through three implementation cycles and processed over 16 million news stories from about 12,000 RSS feeds on over 8000 topics organized by 160 curators for over 600 registered readers. This paper describes the approach, engineering and AI technology of the system.

Learning by demonstration technology has long held the promise to empower non-programmers to customize and extend software. We describe the deployment of a learning by demonstration capability to support user creation of automated procedures in a collaborative planning environment that is used widely by the U.S. Army. This technology, which has been in operational use since the summer of 2010, has helped to reduce user workloads by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. The technology has also provided the unexpected benefit of enabling standardization of products and processes. 

Most organizations have a wealth of knowledge about themselves available online, but little for a visitor to interact with on-site. At the MIT Media Lab, we have designed and deployed a novel intelligent signage system, the Glass Infrastructure (GI) that enables small groups of users to physically interact with this data and to discover the latent connections between people, projects, and ideas. The displays are built on an adaptive, unsupervised model of the organization developed using dimensionality reduction and common sense knowledge which automatically classifies and organizes the information. The GI is currently in daily use at the lab. We discuss the AI model’s development, the integration of AI into an HCI interface, and the use of the GI during the lab’s peak visitor periods. We show that the GI is used repeatedly by lab visitors and provides a window into the workings of the organization.

NewsFinder automates the steps involved in finding, selecting and publishing news stories that meet subjective judgments of relevance and interest to the Artificial Intelligence community. NewsFinder combines a broad search with AI-specific filters and incorporates a learning program whose judgment of interestingness of stories can be trained by feedback from readers. Since August, 2010, the program has been used to operate the AI in the News service that is part of the AAAI AITopics site.

The most prominent way to establish trust in online markets such as eBay are reputation systems that publish buyer feedback about a seller’s past behavior. These systems, however, critically rely on assumptions that are rarely met in realworld marketplaces: first, it is assumed that there are no reporting costs and no benefits from lying so that buyers honestly report their private experiences. Second, it is assumed that every seller is long-lived, i.e. will continue to trade on the marketplace indefinitely and, third, it is assumed that sellers cannot whitewash, i.e. create new accounts once an old one is ran down. In my thesis, I address all of these assumptions and design incentive-compatible trust mechanisms with minimal common knowledge requirements.

Robots with many sensors are capable of generating volumes of high-dimensional perceptual data. Making sense of this data and extracting useful knowledge from it is a difficult problem. For robots lacking proper models, trying to understand a stream of uninterpreted data is an especially acute problem. One critical step in linking raw uninterpreted perceptual data to cognition is dimensionality reduction. Current methods for reducing the dimension of data do not meet the demands of a robot situated in the world, and methods that use only perceptual data do not take full advantage of the interactive experience of an embodied robot agent. This work proposes a new scalable, incremental and active approach to dimensionality reduction suitable for extracting geometric knowledge from uninterpreted sensors and effectors. The proposed method uses distinctive state abstractions to organize early sensorimotor experience and sensorimotor embedding to incrementally learn accurate geometric representations based on experience. This approach is applied to the problem of learning the geometry of sensors, space, and objects. The result is evaluated using techniques from statistical shape analysis.