Since the inception of artificial intelligence, many have argued that abstraction, reformulation, and approximation (ARA) are central to human commonsense reasoning and problem solving and to the ability of computer systems to reason effectively in complex domains. The primary use of ARA techniques has been to overcome computational intractability by decreasing the combinatorial costs associated with searching large spaces. In addition, ARA techniques are useful for knowledge acquisition and explanation generation in complex domains. The International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA) series was established in 1994 and continued in 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2009 to provide a way for researchers to share results on ARA. The Ninth International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation was held July 17-18, 2011 at a renovated medieval castle in the Parador de Cardona hotel in Cardona, Catalonia, Spain, about 60 miles northwest of Barcelona.

This paper investigates spatiotemporal interpolation methods for the application of air pollution assessment. The air pollutant of interest in this paper is fine particulate matter PM2.5. The choice of the time scale is investigated when applying the shape function-based method. It is found that the measurement scale of the time dimension has an impact on the interpolation results. Based upon the comparison between the accuracies of interpolation results, the most effective time scale out of four experimental ones was selected for performing the PM2.5 interpolation. The paper also evaluates the population exposure to the ambient air pollution of PM2.5 at the county-level in the contiguous U.S. in 2009. The interpolated county-level PM2.5 has been linked to 2009 population data and the population with a risky PM2.5 exposure has been estimated. The risky PM2.5 exposure means the PM2.5 concentration exceeding the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The geographic distribution of the counties with a risky PM2.5 exposure is visualized. This work is essential to understanding the associations between ambient air pollution exposure and population health outcomes.

Skeptics tend not to be the first to jump on the next band- wagon. In quite a few areas of science, simulations and Com- plex Adaptive Systems (CAS) has been the bandwagon in question. This paper intends to reach out to the skeptics and convince them to hop-on; take over the controls and make the wagon do a U-turn and aim for the established scientific theories. The argument is that simulation techniques, such as Agent- Based Modelling (ABM), may possibly be epistemically problematic as one sets out to strongly corroborate theories concerned with our overly complex real world. However, us- ing the same techniques to explore the robustness of (or to falsify) existing abstract and idealised mathematical models will be to be epistemically uncomplicated. This allows us to study the effects of reintroduction of real-world traits, such as autonomy and heterogeneity that was previously sacrificed for mathematical tractability.

The Odd One Out test of intelligence consists of 3x3 matrix reasoning problems organized in 20 levels of difficulty. Addressing problems on this test appears to require integration of multiple cognitive abilities usually associated with creativity, including visual encoding, similarity assessment, pattern detection, and analogical transfer. We describe a novel fractal strategy for addressing visual analogy problems on the Odd One Out test. In our strategy, the relationship between images is encoded fractally, capturing important aspects of similarity as well as inherent self-similarity. The strategy starts with fractal representations encoded at a high level of resolution, but, if that is not sufficient to resolve ambiguity, it automatically adjusts itself to the right level of resolution for addressing a given problem. Similarly, the strategy starts with searching for fractally-derived similarity between simpler relationships, but, if that is not sufficient to resolve ambiguity, it automatically shifts to search for such similarity between higher-order relationships.  We present preliminary results and initial analysis from applying the fractal technique on nearly 3,000 problems from the Odd One Out test.

In order to collaborate with people in the real world, cognitive systems must be able to represent and reason about spatial regions in human environments. Consider the command "go to the front of the classroom". The spatial region mentioned (the front of the classroom) is not perceivable using geometry alone. Instead it is defined by its functional use, implied by nearby objects and their configuration. In this paper, we define such areas as context-dependent spatial regions and propose a method for a cognitive system to learn them incrementally by combining qualitative spatial representations, semantic labels, and analogy. Using data from a mobile robot, we generate a relational representation of semantically labeled objects and their configuration. Next, we show how the boundary of a context-dependent spatial region can be defined using anchor points. Finally, we demonstrate how an existing computational model of analogy can be used to transfer this region to a new situation.

Cognitive systems with human-level intelligence must dis­play a wide range of abilities, including reasoning about the beliefs of others, hypothetical and future situations, quanti­fiers, probabilities, and counterfactuals. While each of these deals in some way with reasoning about alternative states of reality, no single knowledge representation framework deals with them in a unified and scalable manner. As a conse­quence it is difficult to build cognitive systems for domains that require each of these abilities to be used together. To enable this integration we propose a representational framework based on synchronizing beliefs between worlds. Using this framework, each of these tasks can be reformu­lated into a reasoning problem involving worlds. This demonstrates that the notions of worlds and inheritance can bring significant parsimony and broad new abilities to knowledge representation.

We describe a cognitive model of a collaborative agent that can serve as the basis for automated systems that must collaborate with other agents, including humans, to solve problems. This model builds on standard approaches to cognitive architecture and intelligent agency, as well as formal models of speech acts, joint intention, and intention recognition. The model is nonetheless intended for practical use in the development of collaborative systems.

Our approach to mind-design derives from the view of language as a mirror of mind — a view compatible with the linguistic orientation of the Turing Test, and more concretely, with the remarkably tight coupling between linguistic structure and semantic entailment demonstrated by Richard Montague. Additional evidence for the power of this perspective comes from recent work in Natural Logic (NLog), in a sense a method of "reading off" certain obvious inferences directly from linguistic structure. Thus much of our past emphasis has been on developing a knowledge representation, Episodic Logic (EL), matching the expressivity of language, and inference machinery for this representation. More recently we have been striving to create broad bases of general world knowledge and lexical knowledge, while also adapting the latest version of our EPILOG inference engine to the kinds of obvious inferences that are the forte of NLog. At this point our knowledge collections range from sets of a few dozen core lexical axioms to millions of general "factoids" and quantified axioms derived from many of these, all expressed in EL. At the same time we have shown that EPILOG easily handles NLog-like inferences as well as ones beyond the scope of NLog.

The current study investigates the relationship between children’s curiosity and question asking ability. Generation of two types of questions was assessed: identification (yes/no questions asked to identify a target from an array) and understanding questions, asked to learn more about a topic. The latter was related to children’s curiosity, as was the ability to recognize the effectiveness of questions in solving a mystery. Training on asking identification questions was effective in improving children’s ability to ask that type of question, but did not transfer to the other task. Training on asking understanding questions was not successful. Children’s curiosity did not influence the effectiveness of the training.

Security operators are increasingly interested in solutions that can provide an automatic understanding of potentially crowded public environments. In this paper, an on-going research is presented, on building a complex system consists of three main components: human security operators carrying sensors, mobile robotic platforms carrying sensors and network of fixed sensors (i.e. cameras) installed in the environment. The main objectives of this research are: 1) to develop models and solutions for an intelligent integration of sensorial information coming from different sources, 2) to develop effective human-robot interaction methods in the paradigm multi-human vs. multi-robot, 3) to integrate all these components in a system that allows for robust and efficient coordination among robots, vision sensors and human guards, in order to enhance surveillance in crowded public environments.