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Intelligent Integration of Information and Services on the Web
The evolution of the World Wide Web from a repository of HTML data to a source of varied distributed services creates exciting opportunities for offering complex, integrated services over the web. The syntactic problems of such integration are being addressed by the advent of the web services stack of standards.1 However, the promise of service integration will not be delivered unless services can be integrated semantically as well. The 2002 AAAI workshop entitled "Intelligent Service Integration" examined this new challenge for the AI community.
The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium Series
Karlgren, Jussi, Kanerva, Pentti, Gamback, Bjorn, Forbus, Kenneth D., Tumer, Kagan, Stone, Peter, Goebel, Kai, Sukhatme, Gaurav S., Balch, Tucker, Fischer, Bernd, Smith, Doug, Harabagiu, Sanda, Chaudri, Vinay, Barley, Mike, Guesgen, Hans, Stahovich, Thomas, Davis, Randall, Landay, James
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding.
Report on the First International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP)
Gil, Yolanda, Musen, Mark, Shavlik, Jude
Henry Lieberman surveyed successful techniques for programming by example, an approach where end users teach procedures to computers by demonstrating a sequence of actions on concrete examples as they how to accomplish it. This new conference series domain-independent inference practical exercises and illustrated promotes multidisciplinary research structures and reusable domain-specific the concepts with applications, including on tools and methodologies for efficiently ontologies. A related workshop of its knowledge content for communities. He received his Ph.D. in 1. portal.acm.org. For any inquiries, please email info@kcap.org.
In Memory of Ray Reiter (1939-2002)
Pirri, Fiora, Hinton, Geoffrey, Levesque, Hector
He leaves a legacy of groundbreaking, deep insights that have changed the course of AI. "Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is." The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer's desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician's insistence on precision. Ray the adventurer was always eager to try new ideas and directions. He was not afraid to enter murky areas, and he always left them better illuminated. He introduced terms to the AI community such as default logic, closed-world assumption, and cognitive robotics; he opened avenues of theoretical research with new resolution proof methods and logics for nonmonotonic reasoning, diagnosis, and action; and he was the prime mover in the Cognitive Robotics initiative that has led to a whole new program of research.
The AAAI-02 and IAAI-02 Conferences
The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-02) and the Fourteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI- 02) were positively received by those who attended. This report provides a few snapshots of the vast and varied content of the 2002 conferences. Proceedings of AAAI-02 and IAAI-02 are available from AAAI Press (www.- aaaipress.org).
FLAIRS 2002 Conference Report
Sooriamurthi, Raja, Reichherzer, Thomas
ITFlorida will promote the common interests of its members by leveraging their collective talent and advocating on their behalf while formulating policy recommendations to state, federal, and local government. The percent of this year's papers had international semantic web were the most extensive talk included demonstrations of authors. Pat Hayes (UWF-IHMC) gave a Beach, Florida. "view from the trenches" of the ongoing from 14 to 16 May, was sponsored by University) drew an interesting analogy a broad spectrum of research areas. The special tracks presentation themes, which ranged "frictionless brains."
Applying Perceptually Driven Cognitive Mapping to Virtual Urban Environments
Randall W. Hill, Jr., Han, Changhee, Lent, Michael van
This article describes a method for building a cognitive map of a virtual urban environment. Our routines enable virtual humans to map their environment using a realistic model of perception. We based our implementation on a computational framework proposed by Yeap and Jefferies (1999) for representing a local environment as a structure called an absolute space representation (ASR). Their algorithms compute and update ASRs from a 2-1/2-dimensional (2-1/2D) sketch of the local environment and then connect the ASRs together to form a raw cognitive map.1 Our work extends the framework developed by Yeap and Jefferies in three important ways. First, we implemented the framework in a virtual training environment, the mission rehearsal exercise (Swartout et al. 2001). Second, we developed a method for acquiring a 2- 1/2D sketch in a virtual world, a step omitted from their framework but that is essential for computing an ASR. Third, we extended the ASR algorithm to map regions that are partially visible through exits of the local space. Together, the implementation of the ASR algorithm, along with our extensions, will be useful in a wide variety of applications involving virtual humans and agents who need to perceive and reason about spatial concepts in urban environments.
Staff Scheduling for Inbound Call and Customer Contact Centers
Fukunaga, Alex, Hamilton, Ed, Fama, Jason, Andre, David, Matan, Ofer, Nourbakhsh, Illah
The staff scheduling problem is a critical problem in the call center (or, more generally, customer contact center) industry. This article describes DIRECTOR, a staff scheduling system for contact centers. DIRECTOR is a constraint-based system that uses AI search techniques to generate schedules that satisfy and optimize a wide range of constraints and service-quality metrics. DIRECTOR has successfully been deployed at more than 800 contact centers, with significant measurable benefits, some of which are documented in case studies included in this article.
Training and Using Disciple Agents: A Case Study in the Military Center of Gravity Analysis Domain
Tecuci, Gheorghe, Boicu, Mihai, Marcu, Dorin, Stanescu, Bogdan, Boicu, Cristina, Comello, Jerome
This article presents the results of a multifaceted research and development effort that synergistically integrates AI research with military strategy research and practical deployment of agents into education. It describes recent advances in the DISCIPLE approach to agent development by subject-matter experts with limited assistance from knowledge engineers, the innovative application of DISCIPLE to the development of agents for the strategic center of gravity analysis, and the deployment and evaluation of these agents in several courses at the U.S. Army War College.
MiTAP for Biosecurity: A Case Study
Damianos, Laurie, Ponte, Jay, Wohlever, Steve, Reeder, Florence, Day, David, Wilson, George, Hirschman, Lynette
MITAP (MITRE text and audio processing) is a prototype system available for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and other global events. MITAP focuses on providing timely, multilingual, global information access to medical experts and individuals involved in humanitarian assistance and relief work. Multiple information sources in multiple languages are automatically captured, filtered, translated, summarized, and categorized by disease, region, information source, person, and organization. Critical information is automatically extracted and tagged to facilitate browsing, searching, and sorting. The system supports shared situational awareness through collaboration, allowing users to submit other articles for processing, annotate existing documents, post directly to the system, and flag messages for others to see. MITAP currently stores over 1 million articles and processes an additional 2,000 to 10,000 daily, delivering up-to-date information to dozens of regular users.