Instructional Material
NPCEditor: Creating Virtual Human Dialogue Using Information Retrieval Techniques
Leuski, Anton (Institute for Creative Technologies) | Traum, David (Institute for Creative Technologies)
See Leuski et al. (2006) and to the same question -- for example, "What Leuski and Traum (2008) for more details. is your name?" -- depending on who the interactor The final parameter is the classification threshold is looking at. NPCEditor's user interface allows the on the KL-divergence value: only answers that designer to define arbitrary annotation classes or score above the threshold value are returned from categories and specify which of these annotation the classifier. The threshold is determined by tuning categories should be used in classification.
AAAI News
Hamilton, Carol (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)
This prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding artificial intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental (Max Planck Institute for Biological Nectar, as well as poster presentations methods of computer science. Cybernetics), Karrie Karahalios (University by a select number of exceptional Thrun and Whittaker, whose teams of Illinois), Michael Kearns technical papers, short papers, student won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge (University of Pennsylvania), and Kurt abstracts, and doctoral consortium abstracts. A special Joint will feature talks on five award-winning in particular for high-impact IAAI-11/AAAI-11 Invited Talk by deployed AI applications and 14 contributions to the field of artificial David Ferrucci (IBM T. J. Watson Research emerging applications. The week is intelligence through innovation and Center) on "Building Watson: filled with a host of other programs, achievement in autonomous vehicle An Overview of DeepQA for the ...
Parameter Learning of Logic Programs for Symbolic-Statistical Modeling
We propose a logical/mathematical framework for statistical parameter learning of parameterized logic programs, i.e. definite clause programs containing probabilistic facts with a parameterized distribution. It extends the traditional least Herbrand model semantics in logic programming to distribution semantics, possible world semantics with a probability distribution which is unconditionally applicable to arbitrary logic programs including ones for HMMs, PCFGs and Bayesian networks. We also propose a new EM algorithm, the graphical EM algorithm, that runs for a class of parameterized logic programs representing sequential decision processes where each decision is exclusive and independent. It runs on a new data structure called support graphs describing the logical relationship between observations and their explanations, and learns parameters by computing inside and outside probability generalized for logic programs. The complexity analysis shows that when combined with OLDT search for all explanations for observations, the graphical EM algorithm, despite its generality, has the same time complexity as existing EM algorithms, i.e. the Baum-Welch algorithm for HMMs, the Inside-Outside algorithm for PCFGs, and the one for singly connected Bayesian networks that have been developed independently in each research field. Learning experiments with PCFGs using two corpora of moderate size indicate that the graphical EM algorithm can significantly outperform the Inside-Outside algorithm.
Aggregating Forecasts Using a Learned Bayesian Network
Mahoney, Suzanne Mitchell (Innovative Decisions, Inc.) | Comstock, Ethan (Innovative Decisions, Inc.) | deBlois, Bradley (Innovative Decisions, Inc.) | Darcy, Steven (Innovative Decisions, Inc.)
Under the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), Innovative Decisions, Inc. (IDI) constructed a Bayesian network to combine forecasts produced by a set of social science models. We used Bayesian network structure learning with political science variables to produce meaningful priors. We employed a naive Bayes structure to aggregate the forecasts. In both cases, IDI improved classification by intelligently discretizing continuous variables. The resulting network not only met performance criteria set by DARPA, but also out-performed each of the social science models across all types of forecasted events. We describe the construction of the aggregator as well as a set of experiments performed to explore the nature of the Bayesian EOI Aggregator's performance.
Translating Robotics Course Materials from Elite Research I Universities to Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Liang, Xuejun (Jackson State University)
Teaching an upper-level undergraduate robotics course at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) is challenging. The lack of suitable teaching materials is one of the biggest challenges, although there are many great masterpieces in developing robotics course materials, which are, however, generally developed for teaching students at elite Research I universities. This paper presents ideas and details in adopting and revising these course materials and creating upper-level undergraduate robotics course materials that are suitable for underrepresented students.
The ARTSI Alliance: Using Robotics and AI to Recruit African-Americans to Computer Science Research
Boonthum-Denecke, Chutima (Hampton University) | Touretzky, David S. (Carnegie Mellon University) | Jones, Elva J. (Winston-Salem State University) | Humphries, Thorna (Norfolk State University) | Caldwell, Rebecca (Winston-Salem State University)
The mission of the ARTSI (Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact) Alliance, a consortium of 19 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and 9 major research universities (R1s), is to enlarge the nation’s engineering and science talent pool by increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups who pursue advanced training in computer science. ARTSI is one of several alliances funded by the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing Program. ARTSI focuses specifically on institutions serving African Americans and uses robotics education to attract and engage students. In this paper we describe the activities comprising ARTSI, our vision of a robotics curriculum for CS undergraduates, and ways to integrate robotics modules into existing CS courses.
Special Track on Ontologies and Social Semantic Web for Intelligent Educational Systems
Dicheva, Darina (Winston-Salem State University) | Mizoguchi, Riichiro (University of Osaka) | Nkambou, Roger (University of Quebec at Montreal) | Pinkwart, Niels (Clausthal University of Technology)
This allows for supporting more adequate and accurate representations of learners, their learning goals, learning material and contexts of its use, as well as more efficient access and navigation through learning resources. The goal is to advance intelligent educational systems, so as to achieve improved e-learning efficiency, flexibility and adaptation for single users and communities of users (learners, instructors, courseware authors, and others). The special track follows the workshop series Ontologies and Semantic Web for e-Learning, which was conducted successfully from 2002-2009 at a number of different conferences. The goals of this track are to discuss the current state-of-the-art in using ontologies and semantic web technologies in e-learning applications; and to attract the interest of the related research communities to the problems in the educational social semantic web and serve as an international platform for knowledge exchange and cooperation between researchers. This special track will be of interest to researchers interested in using ontologies, semantic web and social semantic web technologies in web-based educational systems, distributed hypermedia and open hypermedia systems, as well as in web intelligence and semantic web and social semantic web engineering.
Automated Scenario Adaptation in Support of Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Niehaus, James Michael (Charles River Analytics, Inc.) | Li, Boyang (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Riedl, Mark (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Learners may develop expertise by experiencing numerous different but relevant situations. Computer games and virtual simulations can facilitate these training opportunities, however, because of the relative difficulty in authoring new scenarios, the increasing need for new and different scenarios becomes a bottleneck in the learning process. Furthermore, a one-size-fits-all scenario may not address all of the abilities, needs, or goals of a particular learner. To address these issues we present a novel technique, Automated Scenario Adaptation, to automatically “rewrite” narrative scenario content to suit individual learners’ needs and abilities and to incorporate recent changes from real world learning needs. Scenario adaptation acts as problem generation for intelligent tutoring systems, producing greater learning opportunities that facilitate engagement and continued learner involvement.
A Cognitive Tutoring Agent with Automatic Reasoning Capabilities
Faghihi, Usef (University of Memphis) | Fournier-Viger, Philippe (National Cheng Kung University) | Nkambou, Roger (Université)
In this paper, we show how to make a cognitive tutoring agent capable of precise causal reasoning by integrating constraints with data mining algorithms. Putting constraints on recorded interactions between the agent and learners during learning activities allows data mining algorithms to extract the causes of the learners’ problems. Subsequently, the agent uses this information to provide useful and customized explanations to learners.
Learning about Machine Learning: An Extended Assignment to Classify Twitter Accounts
Mustafaraj, Eni (Wellesley College) | Anderson, Scott D. (Wellesley College)
We describe a four-week series of assignments in an undergraduate AI course at a liberal arts college developing a supervised learning solution to the problem of classifying Twitter accounts as either a person account or a non-person account (e.g. organization or spambot). This problem employs real data in an ongoing research project by the first author, yet is accessible to students with limited programming expertise.The students were able to experience a complete cycle of creating a machine learning solution: exploring raw data,creating a training set, engineering features, comparing different classifiers, evaluating the results, and performing erroranalysis. We received positive feedback from the students and intend to refine the assignment and make it available (together with the created training data) for use by the research community.