Among the issues faced by an intelligent agent, central is that of reconciling the, often contradictory, pieces of knowledge — be those given, learned, or sensed — at its disposal. This problem, known as knowledge qualification, requires that pieces of knowledge deemed reliable in some context be given preference over the others. These preferences are typically viewed as encodings of reasoning patterns; so, the frame axiom can be encoded as a preference of persistence over spontaneous change. Qualification, then, results by the principled application of these preferences. We illustrate how this can be naturally done through argumentation, by uniformly treating object-level knowledge and reasoning patterns alike as arguments that can be defeated by other stronger ones. We formulate an argumentation framework for Reasoning about Actions and Change that gives a semantics for Action Theories that include a State Default Theory. Due to their explicit encoding as preferences, reasoning patterns can be adapted, when and if needed, by a domain designer to suit a specific application domain. Furthermore, the reasoning patterns can be defeated in lieu of stronger external evidence, allowing, for instance, the frame axiom to be overridden when unexpected sensory information suggests that spontaneous change may have broken persistence in a particular situation.

In this paper, we present an alternative to the Turing Test that has some conceptual and practical advantages. Like the original, it involves responding to typed English sentences, and English-speaking adults will have no difficulty with it. Unlike the original, the subject is not required to engage in a conversation and fool an interrogator into believing she is dealing with a person. Moreover, the test is arranged in such a way that having full access to a large corpus of English text might not help much. Finally, the interrogator or a third party will be able to decide unambiguously after a few minutes whether or not a subject has passed the test.

We present an approach to integrating rules and ontologies on the basis of the first-order stable model semantics proposed by Ferraris, Lee and Lifschitz. We show that some existing integration proposals can be uniformly reformulated in terms of the first-order stable model semantics. The reformulations are simpler than the original proposals in the sense that they do not refer to grounding.

The classic dualism offered in Descartes' The English language is rich with words and phrases with Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) views a person as meaning that is grounded in our commonsense theories of having both a physical body and a nonphysical mind.

We provide reformulations and generalizations of both the semantics of logic programs by Faber, Leone and Pfeifer and its extension to arbitrary propositional formulas by Truszczynski. Unlike the previous definitions, our generalizations refer neither to grounding nor to fixpoints, and apply to first-order formulas containing aggregate expressions. Similar to the first-order stable model semantics by Ferraris, Lee and Lifschitz, the reformulations presented here are based on syntactic transformations that are similar to circumscription. The reformulations provide useful insights into the FLP semantics and its relationship to circumscription and the first-order stable model semantics.

An intelligent system of the future should make its user feel comfortable, which is impossible without understanding context they coexist in. However, our past research did not treat language information as a part of the context a robot works in, and data about reasons why the user had made his decisions was not obtained. Therefore, we decided to utilize the Web as a knowledge source to discover context information that could suggest a robot's behavior when it acquires verbal information from its user or users. By comparing user utterances (blogs, Twitter or Facebook entries, not direct orders) with other people's written experiences (mostly blogs), a system can judge whether it is a situation in which the robot can perform or improve its performance. In this paper we introduce several methods that can be applied to a simple floor-cleaning robot. We describe basic experiments showing that text processing is helpful when dealing with multiple users who are not willing to give rich feedback. For example, we describe a method for finding usual reasons for cleaning on the Web by using Okapi BM25 to extract feature words from sentences retrieved by the query word "cleaning". Then, we introduce our ideas for dealing with conflicts of interest in multiuser environments and possible methods for avoiding such conflicts by achieving better situation understanding. Also, an emotion recognizer for guessing user needs and moods and a method to calculate situation naturalness are described.

Within the context of human/multi-robot teams, the "help me help you" paradigm offers different opportunities. A team of robots can help a human operator accomplish a goal, and a human operator can help a team of robots accomplish the same, or a different, goal. Two scenarios are examined here. First, a team of robots helps a human operator search a remote facility by recognizing objects of interest. Second, the human operator helps the robots improve their position (localization) information by providing quality control feedback.

Virtual and robotic agents must be able to understand "communicative acts" (utterances, gestures, controlled facial expressions etc.) if they are to interact and collaborate with humans. For researchers in AI, HCI, HRI and related fields, automatic comprehension of communicative acts has turned out to be a very tough nut to crack. Drawing on recent research from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, the paper argues that an insufficient conceptualization of "context" is at the heart of this problem, and that we should focus on very simple, non-linguistic communicative acts (pointing gestures etc.) in order to investigate how agents can comprehend communicative acts in realistic contexts. I propose a tripartite model of context which is informed by experimental research on how humans recognize objects (via "affordances"), causal relations among objects, and the collaborative activities of fellow-humans. The model is not a formal one, but detailed enough to help in the development of comprehension algorithms in future research.

While computers assist humans with tasks such as navigation that involve spatial aspects, agents that can interact in a meaningful way in this context are still in their infancy. One core issue is the mismatch in the representation of spatial information a computer-based system is likely to use, and the one a human is likely to use. Computers are better suited for quantitative schemes such as maps or diagrams that rely on measurable distances between entities. Humans frequently use higher-level, domain-specific conceptual representations such as buildings, rooms, or streets for orientation purposes. Combined with the person-centric world view that we often assume when we refer to spatial information, it is challenging for agents to convert statements using spatial references into assertions that match their own internal representation. In this paper, we discuss an approach that uses natural language processing and information extraction tool kits to identify entities and statements about their spatial relations. These extractions are then processed by a spatial reasoner to convert them from the human conceptual space into the quantitative space used by the computer-based agent.

Humans naturally use multiple modes of instruction while teaching one another. We would like our robots and artificial agents to be instructed in the same way, rather than programmed. In this paper, we review prior work on human instruction of autonomous agents and present observations from two exploratory pilot studies and the results of a full study investigating how multiple instruction modes are used by humans. We describe our Bootstrapped Learning User Interface, a prototype multiinstruction interface informed by our human-user studies.