We describe an application of a dynamic replanning technique in a highly dynamic and complex domain: the military aeromedical evacuation of patients to medical treatment facilities. U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) is the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) agency responsible for evacuating patients during wartime and peace. Doctrinally, patients requiring extended treatment must be evacuated by air to a suitable medical treatment facility. The Persian Gulf War was the first significant armed conflict in which this concept was put to a serious test. The results were far from satisfactory--about 60 percent of the patients ended up at the wrong destinations.

These collocations are used by native speakers of a language almost without thought, yet they must be learned by nonnative speakers of the language. A native speaker of English might say that he/she drinks "strong coffee," but a nonnative speaker might say either "powerful coffee" or "sturdy coffee." Collocations tend to vary among languages and topic domains. Unfortunately, the task of correctly identifying lexical collocations, even by native speakers of the language, has been shown to be difficult. Computer systems that translate natural languages, or machine-translation systems, need to know about lexical collocation information to produce natural-sounding or colloquially proper text.

In nearly a year since he took office, President Donald Trump has had countless meetings with leaders all around the world – and, with that, countless awkward handshakes. But, with a little training, one robot-maker says the notorious grip can be'defeated.' A hilarious video has demonstrated the'Donald Trump Handshake Robot,' which aims to mimic the unpredictable nature of the president's handshake to reveal the best option for reciprocating. The robot itself is essentially just a robotic arm, decorated in a large suit and topped off with a cut-out of the president's face. There are several different types of handshakes it can do, from'regular' and'hand on shoulder,' to'locking fingers' Recent research from the Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina found men and women under 30 have a weaker grip strength than they did in 1985.

The capabilities for representing and reasoning about three-dimensional (3-D) objects are essential for knowledgebased, 3-D photointerpretation systems that combine domain knowledge with image processing, as demonstrated by 3-D Mosaic and ACRONYM. Three-dimensional representation of objects is necessary for many additional applications, such as robot navigation and 3-D change detection. Geometric reasoning is especially important because geometric relationships between object parts are a rich source of domain knowledge. A practical framework for geometric representation and reasoning must incorporate projections between a two-dimensional (2-D) image and a 3-D scene, shape and surface properties of objects, and geometric and topological relationships between objects. In addition, it should allow easy modification and extension of the system's domain knowledge and be flexible enough to organize its reasoning efficiently to take advantage of the current available knowledge.

It was motivated by two difficulties in scaling up existing generators. Current generators only accept input that are relatively poor in information, such as feature structures or lists of propositions; they are unable to deal with input rich in information, as one might expect from, for example, an expert system with a complete model of its domain or a natural language understander with good inference ability. Current generators also have a very restricted knowledge of language-- indeed, they succeed largely because they have few syntactic or lexical options available (McDonald 1987)-- and they are unable to cope with more knowledge because they deal with interactions among the various possible choices only as special cases. An utterance is simply the result of successive word choices. The treatment of syntax in connectionist and spreading activation systems is a well-known problem.

We are interested in solving real-world planning problems and, to that end, argue for the use of domain knowledge in planning. We believe that the field must develop methods capable of using rich knowledge models to make planning tools useful for complex problems. We discuss the suitability of current planning paradigms for solving these problems. Real-world problems have been found to require more expressive representations and capabilities than are needed for the standard set of benchmark planning problems (blocks world, towers of Hanoi, simplified logistics, and the like) or for the problems used in the 1998 and 2000 Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) Conference planning competitions (Bacchus et al. 2000; Long 2000; McDermott 2000). Past research in AI planning can roughly be divided into two camps: (1) systems that take a minimalist approach to domain knowledge and (2) systems that focus on leveraging as much domain knowledge as possible.

The Twelfth Annual American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in Acapulco, Mexico, in conjunction with the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The events included the Robot Host and Urban Search and Rescue competitions, the AAAI Robot Challenge, and the Robot Exhibition. In the Robot Host event, the robots had to act as mobile information servers and guides to the exhibit area of the conference. In the Urban Search and Rescue competition, teams attempted to find victims in a simulated disaster area using teleoperated, semiautonomous, and autonomous robots. The AAAI Robot Challenge is a noncompetitive event where the robots attempt to attend the conference by locating the registration booth, registering for the conference, and then giving a talk to an audience.

The first Robotics Exhibition and Competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence was held in San Jose, California, on 14-16 July 1992 in conjunction with the Tenth National Conference on AI. This article describes the history behind the competition, the preparations leading to the competition, the threedays during which 12 teams competed in the three events making up the competition, and the prospects for other such competitions in the future. Advanced sensors and efficient actuators and power systems are now available for a wide range of applications. Related technology in vision, planning, and learning has also matured, and the time is ripe for a marriage of these technologies. Further, the growing economic incentives for robotic systems point the way to challenging research.

This is a continuation of my previous blog, "Natural Language Understanding – Application Notes with Context Discriminant". Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a subtopic of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Successful implementations of NLU are difficult because of limitations in prevailing technology. SiteFocus solved these limitations with a new approach to NLU. This approach has been successfully implemented into a commercial solution called Communications in Focus (CIF).

Every year, China's president Xi Jinping delivers a New Year's Eve address, outlining the country's plans for the months ahead. But Chinese netizens don't just pay attention to his words; they also scour the bookshelves behind Xi, analyzing the titles and authors found there to try and gain some insight into his mind. As reported by The Shanghaiist (and seen via Quartz), the books on AI were Pedro Domingos' The Master Algorithm and Brett King's Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane. Both deal with the potential impact of artificial intelligence on society, with King's book providing a futurist's slightly fantastical overview on this and other technologies, while Domingos' offers a more grounded and practical look at the rise of machine learning. Xi is said to be a voracious reader, and other books spotted on his shelf this year included a growing collection of Western classics (from War and Peace and The Old Man and the Sea to The Odyssey and Les Misérables), economic texts like Money Changes Everything by William N. Goetzmann and Michele Wucker's The Grey Rhino, and numerous titles on Chinese history and military strategy.