Personal
David L Waltz, in Memoriam
Gabriel, Richard P. (IBM) | Finin, Tim (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Sun, Ron (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
David L. Waltz (1943-2012), was director, Center for Computational Learning Systems In 1973, Dave Waltz with Richard P. Gabriel in tow headed Dave Waltz delivers his AAAI Presidential Address at AAAI-98 in Madison, Wisconsin. While at Illinois, Dave produced system, paving the way for an engineering-style 11 Ph.D. students and many more MS students, approach to emergent AI techniques; and even mentored junior researchers and postdocs, attracted though their first attempts to create a multidisciplinary new AI faculty, and helped create the Beckman AI degree program failed, Dave was able in Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. In 1984, Marvin Minsky asked Dave to return to During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Waltz's Thinking Machines, Inc., an MIT spinoff in Cambridge group explored new ideas in natural language processing, -- with the temptation that the atmosphere cognitive science, qualitative reasoning, would be like the early days of the AI Lab all over and parallel computation in a collaborative environment again. At the same time he took a parttime including researchers in computer science, tenured position at Brandeis. Machines and Brandeis, Dave developed the ideas He chaired and brought the influential of massively parallel AI and, with Craig Stanfill, the Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing memory-based reasoning approach to case-based conference to Urbana in 1978.
What Question Would Turing Pose Today?
Grosz, Barbara (Harvard University)
In 1950, when Turing proposed to replace the question "Can machines think?" with the question "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" computer science was not yet a field of study, Shannon’s theory of information had just begun to change the way people thought about communication, and psychology was only starting to look beyond behaviorism. It is stunning that so many predictions in Turing’s 1950 Mind paper were right. In the decades since that paper appeared, with its inspiring challenges, research in computer science, neuroscience, and the behavioral sciences has radically changed thinking about mental processes and communication, and the ways in which people use computers has evolved even more dramatically. Turing, were he writing now, might still replace "Can machines think?" with an operational challenge, but it is likely he would propose a very different test. This paper considers what that might be in light of Turing’s paper and advances in the decades since it was written.
TRUSTS: Scheduling Randomized Patrols for Fare Inspection in Transit Systems Using Game Theory
Yin, Zhengyu (University of Southern California) | Jiang, Albert Xin (University of Southern California) | Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California) | Kiekintveld, Christopher (University of Texas at El Paso) | Leyton-Brown, Kevin (University of British Columbia) | Sandholm, Tuomas (Carnegie Mellon University) | Sullivan, John P. (Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)
In proof-of-payment transit systems, passengers are legally required to purchase tickets before entering but are not physically forced to do so. Instead, patrol units move about the transit system, inspecting the tickets of passengers, who face fines if caught fare evading. The deterrence of fare evasion depends on the unpredictability and effectiveness of the patrols. In this paper, we present TRUSTS, an application for scheduling randomized patrols for fare inspection in transit systems. TRUSTS models the problem of computing patrol strategies as a leader-follower Stackelberg game where the objective is to deter fare evasion and hence maximize revenue. This problem differs from previously studied Stackelberg settings in that the leader strategies must satisfy massive temporal and spatial constraints; moreover, unlike in these counterterrorism-motivated Stackelberg applications, a large fraction of the ridership might realistically consider fare evasion, and so the number of followers is potentially huge. A third key novelty in our work is deliberate simplification of leader strategies to make patrols easier to be executed. We present an efficient algorithm for computing such patrol strategies and present experimental results using real-world ridership data from the Los Angeles Metro Rail system. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department is currently carrying out trials of TRUSTS.
McCarthy as Scientist and Engineer, with Personal Recollections
Feigenbaum, Edward (Stanford University)
At one of those conferences, I met John. Stanford moved toward a computer science department under the leadership of George Forsythe, John suggested to George, and then supported, the idea of hiring me into the founding faculty of the department. Since we were both Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) contract awardees, we quickly formed a close bond concerning ARPA-sponsored AI research and graduate student teaching. And the joint intelligence of both of us was quickly deployed in a very rapid and, in retrospect, brilliant decision to hire Les Earnest to be the executive officer of the new Stanford AI Lab that ARPA supported. John McCarthy's first breakthrough paper was his 1958 Teddington Symposium paper on programs with commonsense reasoning abilities.
When you talk about "Information processing" what actually do you have in mind?
"Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is the lack of a suitable definition for the term "information". In my attempt to amend this bizarre situation, I have realized that, following the insights of Kolmogorov's Complexity theory, information can be defined as a description of structures observable in a given data set. Two types of structures could be easily distinguished in every data set - in this regard, two types of information (information descriptions) should be designated: physical information and semantic information. Kolmogorov's theory also posits that the information descriptions should be provided as a linguistic text structure. This inevitably leads us to an assertion that information processing has to be seen as a kind of text processing. The idea is not new - inspired by the observation that human information processing is deeply rooted in natural language handling customs, Lotfi Zadeh and his followers have introduced the so-called "Computing With Words" paradigm. Despite of promotional efforts, the idea is not taking off yet. The reason - a lack of a coherent understanding of what should be called "information", and, as a result, misleading research roadmaps and objectives. I hope my humble attempt to clarify these issues would be helpful in avoiding common traps and pitfalls.
Shadows and headless shadows: a worlds-based, autobiographical approach to reasoning
Many cognitive systems deploy multiple, closed, individually consistent models which can represent interpretations of the present state of the world, moments in the past, possible futures or alternate versions of reality. While they appear under different names, these structures can be grouped under the general term of worlds. The Xapagy architecture is a story-oriented cognitive system which relies exclusively on the autobiographical memory implemented as a raw collection of events organized into world-type structures called {\em scenes}. The system performs reasoning by shadowing current events with events from the autobiography. The shadows are then extrapolated into headless shadows corresponding to predictions, hidden events or inferred relations.
AAAI News
Hamilton, Carol M. (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)
He has been chairman/president the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Board of Trustees, as well as treasurer 100 Americans most likely to shape Manuela Veloso, incoming AAAI President, of SSAISB and ECCAI. He is presently the next century; TIME Digital selected and Eric Horvitz, AAAI Past editor-in-chief of the AAAI Press, Spatial her as a member of the Cyber-Elite; President and Awards Committee Cognition and Computation, and the World Economic Forum honored Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in the Artificial Intelligence Journal. He was her with the title Global Leader for Tomorrow; August at AAAI-12 in Toronto. She holds bachelor's and or 1-650-328-3123.)
NewsFinder: Automating an AI News Service
Eckroth, Joshua (The Ohio State University) | Dong, Liang (Clemson University) | Smith, Reid G. (Marathon Oil Corporation) | Buchanan, Bruce G. (University of Pittsburgh)
NewsFinder automates the steps involved in finding, selecting, categorizing, and publishing news stories that meet relevance criteria for the Artificial Intelligence community. The software combines a broad search of online news sources with topic-specific trained models and heuristics. Since August 2010, the program has been used to operate the AI in the News service that is part of the AAAI AITopics website.