The goal of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) conference is to highlight new, innovative, systems and application areas of AI technology and to point out the often-overlooked difficulties involved in deploying complex technology to end users. Those of us who have ventured out of the realm of pure research and tried to build applications to be used by our fellow humans realize that it takes a lot more than just brilliant algorithms to make an application survive in the real world. Each application that succeeds is worth celebrating and the teams behind them are due wholehearted congratulations. It is in this spirit that we bring you this special issue covering select applications from the IAAI conference held last year in Chicago.

Autonomous agents that sense, reason, and act in real-world environments for extended periods often need to solve streams of incoming problems. Traditionally, effort is applied only to problems that have already arrived and have been noted. We examine continual computation methods that allow agents to ideally allocate time to solving current as well as potential future problems under uncertainty. We first review prior work on continual computation. Then, we present new directions and results, including the consideration of shared subtasks and multiple tasks. We present results on the computational complexity of the continual-computation problem and provide approximations for arbitrary models of computational performance. Finally, we review special formulations for addressing uncertainty about the best algorithm to apply, learning about performance, and considering costs associated with delayed use of results.

We review and extend earlier work on the logic CFD, a description logic that allows terminological cycles with universal restrictions over functional roles. In particular, we consider the problem of reasoning about concept subsumption and the problem of computing certain answers for a family of attribute-connected conjunctive queries, showing that both problems are in PTIME. We then consider the effect on the complexity of these problems after adding a concept constructor that expresses concept union, or after adding a concept constructor for the bottom class. Finally, we show that adding both constructors makes both problems EXPTIME-complete.

In this paper, we consider semi-supervised classification on evolutionary data, where the distribution of the data and the underlying concept that we aim to learn change over time due to short-term noises and long-term drifting, making a single aggregated classifier inapplicable for long-term classification. The drift is smooth if we take a localized view over the time dimension, which enables us to impose temporal smoothness assumption for the learning algorithm. We first discuss how to carry out such assumption using temporal regularizers defined in a structural way with respect to the Hilbert space, and then derive the online algorithm that efficiently finds the closed-form solution to the classification functions. Experimental results on real-world evolutionary mailing list data demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms classical semi-supervised learning algorithms in both algorithmic stability and classification accuracy.

Beside impressive progresses made by SAT solvers over the last ten years, only few works tried to understand why Conflict Directed Clause Learning algorithms (CDCL) are so strong and efficient on most industrial applications. We report in this work a key observation of CDCL solvers behavior on this family of benchmarks and explain it by an unsuspected side effect of their particular Clause Learning scheme. This new paradigm allows us to solve an important, still open, question: How to designing a fast, static, accurate, and predictive measure of new learnt clauses pertinence. Our paper is followed by empirical evidences that show how our new learning scheme improves state-of-the art results by an order of magnitude on both SAT and UNSAT industrial problems.

Sensors provide computer systems with a window to the outside world. Activity recognition "sees" what is in the window to predict the locations, trajectories, actions, goals and plans of humans and objects. Building an activity recognition system requires a full range of interaction from statistical inference on lower level sensor data to symbolic AI at higher levels, where prediction results and acquired knowledge are passed up each level to form a knowledge food chain. In this article, I will give an overview of some of the current activity recognition research works and explore a life-cycle of learning and inference that allows the lowest-level radio-frequency signals to be transformed into symbolic logical representations for AI planning, which in turn controls the robots or guides human users through a sensor network, thus completing a full life-cycle of knowledge.

Data analysis and data mining are concerned with unsupervised pattern finding and structure determination in data sets. The data sets themselves are explicitly linked as a form of representation to an observational or otherwise empirical domain of interest. "Structure" has long been understood as symmetry which can take many forms with respect to any transformation, including point, translational, rotational, and many others. Beginning with the role of number theory in expressing data, we show how we can naturally proceed to hierarchical structures. We show how this both encapsulates traditional paradigms in data analysis, and also opens up new perspectives towards issues that are on the order of the day, including data mining of massive, high dimensional, heterogeneous data sets. Linkages with other fields are also discussed including computational logic and symbolic dynamics. The structures in data surveyed here are based on hierarchy, represented as p-adic numbers or an ultrametric topology.

In this paper certain knowledge and software engineering methods integration issues are discussed. The principal idea is to consider an effective design and implementation framework for rule design with UML, and implementation with Java. The solution proposed in the paper consists of using a custom knowledge engineering design method for rules in the design stage. The rule base is then transformed to UML behavioral diagrams, which can be considered a visual encoding. The rule implementation involves the serialization to Java language using classes representing the decision tables grouping rules sharing the same attributes.

Presentations are one of the most common and effective ways of communicating the overview of a work to the audience. Given a technical paper, automatic generation of presentation slides reduces the effort of the presenter and helps in creating a structured summary of the paper. In this paper, we propose the framework of a novel system that does this task. Any paper that has an abstract and whose sections can be categorized under introduction, related work, model, experiments and conclusions can be given as input. As documents in LaTeX are rich in structural and semantic information we used them as input to our system. These documents are initially converted to XML format. This XML file is parsed and information in it is extracted. A query specific extractive summarizer has been used to generate slides. All graphical elements from the paper are made well use of by placing them at appropriate locations in the slides. These slides are presented in the document order.

Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks. This article provides a comprehensive description of this work. It focuses on research that extracts and makes use of the concepts, relations, facts and descriptions found in Wikipedia, and organizes the work into four broad categories: applying Wikipedia to natural language processing; using it to facilitate information retrieval and information extraction; and as a resource for ontology building. The article addresses how Wikipedia is being used as is, how it is being improved and adapted, and how it is being combined with other structures to create entirely new resources. We identify the research groups and individuals involved, and how their work has developed in the last few years. We provide a comprehensive list of the open-source software they have produced.