Artificial intelligence is frequently used to control virtual characters in movies and games. When these characters appear in crowds, controlling them is called crowd simulation. In this paper, I suggest that crowd simulation could be accomplished by multi-agent reinforcement learning, a method by which groups of agents can learn to act autonomously in their environment. I present a case study that explores the challenges and benefits of this type of approach and encourages the development of learning techniques for AI in entertainment media.

Chris Jurney (Lead Programmer, Double Fine Productions) Sumit Basu (Microsoft Research) Chris Jurney is a rock and roll experimental game For those who can play an instrument or have a respectable programmer at Double Fine Productions, with 11 singing voice, music can be a wonderful years experience in games and simulation. He has means of creative expression, social engagement, shipped 4 titles in the games industry: Company of and fun. For many others, though, it can be frustrating Heroes, Frontline: Fuel of War, Dawn of War 2, and and inaccessible: even if an inspired youth Brutal Legend. Jurney frequently speaks on the topic has great musical ideas, she may not have the of game AI, having presented at the Game Developers knowledge or ability to get her latest song out from Conference (GDC), GDC China, Columbia her head and into her MP3 player. In this talk, Basu will show three vignettes of how he and his colleagues University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the have used interactive machine learning to New Jersey and Philadelphia chapters of the International extend the creative reach of aspiring musicians: a Game Developers Association (IGDA).

AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, and the second AAAI Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence Symposium, to name only a few of the AAAI is pleased to present the 2011 Spring Symposium Series, to highlights. For complete information be held Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, 2011, at on these programs, including Tutorial Stanford University.

The Best Paper award went to Sidney D'Mello, Blair Lehman, and Natalie Person for "Expert Tutors' Feedback Is Immediate, Direct, and Discriminating" in the special track on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The Best Student Paper award went to Rong Hu, Brian Mac Namee, and Sarah Jane Delany for "Off to a Good Start: Using Clustering to Select the Initial Training Set in Active Learning" in the general conference. The Best Poster award went to Robert Holder for "Problem Space Analysis for Library Generation and Algorithm Selection in Real-Time Systems" in the general conference. In addition to a diverse assortment of papers and British Columbia, who presented "What Should posters presented at the conference, FLAIRS-23 featured the World-Wide Mind Believe? Information about FLAIRS-24, University, who presented "Rational Ways of Talking"; including the call for papers, is available online at and Janet L. Kolodner of the Georgia Institute www.flairs-24.info. of Technology, who presented "How Can We Help Université de Paris-Sorbonne, who presented "Reasoning in Natural Language Using Combinatory

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, is pleased to present the 2010 Spring Symposium Series, to be held Monday through Wednesday, March 22–24, 2010 at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia are Artificial Intelligence for Development; Cognitive Shape Processing; Educational Robotics and Beyond: Design and Evaluation; Embedded Reasoning: Intelligence in Embedded Systems Intelligent Information Privacy Management; It’s All in the Timing: Representing and Reasoning about Time in Interactive Behavior; and Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence.

In the winter, 2004 issue of AI Magazine, we reported Vulcan Inc.'s first step toward creating a question-answering system called "Digital Aristotle." The goal of that first step was to assess the state of the art in applied Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) by asking AI experts to represent 70 pages from the advanced placement (AP) chemistry syllabus and to deliver knowledge-based systems capable of answering questions from that syllabus. This paper reports the next step toward realizing a Digital Aristotle: we present the design and evaluation results for a system called AURA, which enables domain experts in physics, chemistry, and biology to author a knowledge base and that then allows a different set of users to ask novel questions against that knowledge base. These results represent a substantial advance over what we reported in 2004, both in the breadth of covered subjects and in the provision of sophisticated technologies in knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and question answering to domain experts and novice users.

Narrative, and in particular storytelling, is an important part of the human experience. Consequently, computational systems that can reason about narrative can be more effective communicators, entertainers, educators, and trainers. One of the central challenges in computational narrative reasoning is narrative generation, the automated creation of meaningful event sequences. There are many factors -- logical and aesthetic -- that contribute to the success of a narrative artifact. Central to this success is its understandability. We argue that the following two attributes of narratives are universal: (a) the logical causal progression of plot, and (b) character believability. Character believability is the perception by the audience that the actions performed by characters do not negatively impact the audience's suspension of disbelief. Specifically, characters must be perceived by the audience to be intentional agents. In this article, we explore the use of refinement search as a technique for solving the narrative generation problem -- to find a sound and believable sequence of character actions that transforms an initial world state into a world state in which goal propositions hold. We describe a novel refinement search planning algorithm -- the Intent-based Partial Order Causal Link (IPOCL) planner -- that, in addition to creating causally sound plot progression, reasons about character intentionality by identifying possible character goals that explain their actions and creating plan structures that explain why those characters commit to their goals. We present the results of an empirical evaluation that demonstrates that narrative plans generated by the IPOCL algorithm support audience comprehension of character intentions better than plans generated by conventional partial-order planners.

We propose a novel reformulation of the stochastic optimal control problem as an approximate inference problem, demonstrating, that such a interpretation leads to new practical methods for the original problem. In particular we characterise a novel class of iterative solutions to the stochastic optimal control problem based on a natural relaxation of the exact dual formulation. These theoretical insights are applied to the Reinforcement Learning problem where they lead to new model free, off policy methods for discrete and continuous problems.

We propose a simple kernel based nearest neighbor approach for handwritten digit classification. The "distance" here is actually a kernel defining the similarity between two images. We carefully study the effects of different number of neighbors and weight schemes and report the results. With only a few nearest neighbors (or most similar images) to vote, the test set error rate on MNIST database could reach about 1.5%-2.0%,

This paper proposes a method to construct an adaptive agent that is universal with respect to a given class of experts, where each expert is designed specifically for a particular environment. This adaptive control problem is formalized as the problem of minimizing the relative entropy of the adaptive agent from the expert that is most suitable for the unknown environment. If the agent is a passive observer, then the optimal solution is the well-known Bayesian predictor. However, if the agent is active, then its past actions need to be treated as causal interventions on the I/O stream rather than normal probability conditions. Here it is shown that the solution to this new variational problem is given by a stochastic controller called the Bayesian control rule, which implements adaptive behavior as a mixture of experts. Furthermore, it is shown that under mild assumptions, the Bayesian control rule converges to the control law of the most suitable expert.