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Interchanging Agents and Humans in Military Simulation

AI Magazine

The innovative reapplication of a multiagent system for human-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation was a consequence of appropriate agent-oriented design. The use of intelligent agents for simulating human decision making offers the potential for analysis and design methodologies that do not distinguish between agent and human until implementation. With this as a driver in the design process, the construction of systems in which humans and agents can be interchanged is simplified. Two systems have been constructed and deployed to provide defense analysts with the tools required to advise and assist the Australian Defense Force in the conduct of maritime surveillance and patrol. The experiences gained from this process indicate that it is simpler, both in design and implementation, to add humans to a system designed for intelligent agents than it is to add intelligent agents to a system designed for humans.


AI in the News

AI Magazine

This book looks at some of the results of this synergy among AI, cognitive science, and education. Examples include virtual students whose misconceptions force students to reflect on their own knowledge, intelligent tutoring systems, and speech recognition technology that helps students learn to read. Some of the systems described are already used in classrooms and have been evaluated; a few are still laboratory efforts. The book also addresses cultural and political issues involved in the deployment of new educational technologies. ISBN 0-0-262-56141-7 To order call 800-405-1619.


TALPS: The T-AVB Automated Load-Planning System

AI Magazine

Because of military drawdowns and the need for additional transportation lift requirements, the United States Marine Corps developed a concept that enabled it to modify a commercial container ship to support deployed aviation units. However, a problem soon emerged in that there were too few people who were expert enough to do the unique type of planning required for this ship. Additionally, once someone did develop some expertise, it was time for him/her to move on, retire, or leave active duty. There needed to be a way to capture this knowledge. This condition was the impetus for the T-AVB AUTOMATED LOAD-PLANNING SYSTEM (TALPS) effort. TALPS is now a fielded, certified application for Marine Corps aviation.


SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

An approach to the construction of classifiers from imbalanced datasets is described. A dataset is imbalanced if the classification categories are not approximately equally represented. Often real-world data sets are predominately composed of ``normal'' examples with only a small percentage of ``abnormal'' or ``interesting'' examples. It is also the case that the cost of misclassifying an abnormal (interesting) example as a normal example is often much higher than the cost of the reverse error. Under-sampling of the majority (normal) class has been proposed as a good means of increasing the sensitivity of a classifier to the minority class. This paper shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority (abnormal) class and under-sampling the majority (normal) class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space) than only under-sampling the majority class. This paper also shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority class and under-sampling the majority class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space) than varying the loss ratios in Ripper or class priors in Naive Bayes. Our method of over-sampling the minority class involves creating synthetic minority class examples. Experiments are performed using C4.5, Ripper and a Naive Bayes classifier. The method is evaluated using the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) and the ROC convex hull strategy.


AAAI/RoboCup-2001 Urban Search and Rescue Events

AI Magazine

The RoboCup Rescue Physical Agent League Competition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. Blitch, through his position as program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robots Program, was a supporter of the competition; he also served as a member of the rules committee and a judge. USF participated by chairing the rules committee, judging, assisting with the logistics, providing commentary, and demonstrating tethered and wireless robots whenever entrants had to skip around during the competition.


AAAI/RoboCup-2001 Robot Rescue

AI Magazine

The search and rescue efforts involving structural joint rules committee from RoboCup and collapse and other urban environments (Fire AAAI brought two communities together to 1993). The main task of USAR is to recover live develop the rules and scoring method. Robots involved with USAR must were four registered teams in the competition: identify victims and send back the locations to (1) Sharif University, (2) Swarthmore College, trained medical rescue personnel for removal (3) Utah State University, and (4) the University of the victims from the collapsed area. Additionally, several teams Robot Rescue League rules, designed by the exhibited their robots in the rescue arena, rules committee, keep the USAR task in focus including the University of South Florida and by addressing several issues that arise in real the University of Minnesota. This article discusses USAR situations, such as the time to transport the 2001 Robot Rescue event: the and set up the robot; the number of personnel course, the rules, the research approaches of required to run the robot; and, most importantly, the participants, and the final scores.


Reasoning with Cause and Effect

AI Magazine

This article is an edited transcript of a lecture given at IJCAI-99, Stockholm, Sweden, on 4 August 1999. The article summarizes concepts, principles, and tools that were found useful in applications involving causal modeling. The principles are based on structural-model semantics in which functional (or counterfactual) relationships representing autonomous physical processes are the fundamental building blocks. The article presents the conceptual basis of this semantics, illustrates its application in simple problems, and discusses its ramifications to computational and cognitive problems concerning causation.


AAAI/RoboCup-2001 Urban Search and Rescue Events

AI Magazine

The RoboCup Rescue Physical Agent League Competition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. The four teams were Foster- Miller and iRobot (both robot manufacturers from the Boston area), the United States Navy's Space Warfare Center (SPAWAR) group from San Diego, and the University of South Florida (USF). Blitch, through his position as program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robots Program, was a supporter of the competition; he also served as a member of the rules committee and a judge. USF participated by chairing the rules committee, judging, assisting with the logistics, providing commentary, and demonstrating tethered and wireless robots whenever entrants had to skip around during the competition. Based on our experiences and history, we were asked to comment on the validity of the competition. The CRASAR collective experience suggests that most of the basic rules of the competition matched reality because the rules accurately reflected deployment scenarios, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Standard Test Course, and hardware or software approaches forwarded by competitors in last summer's event, missed the mark. This article briefly reviews the types of robots and missions used by CRASAR at the WTC site, then discusses the robotassisted search and rescue effort in terms of lessons for the competition.


Case-Based Reasoning Integrations

AI Magazine

This article presents an overview and survey of current work in case-based reasoning (CBR) integrations. There has been a recent upsurge in the integration of CBR with other reasoning modalities and computing paradigms, especially rule-based reasoning (RBR) and constraint-satisfaction problem (CSP) solving. CBR integrations with modelbased reasoning (MBR), genetic algorithms, and information retrieval are also discussed. This article characterizes the types of multimodal reasoning integrations where CBR can play a role, identifies the types of roles that CBR components can fulfill, and provides examples of integrated CBR systems. Past progress, current trends, and issues for future research are discussed.