The 30th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-30) was held May 22–24, 2017, at the Hilton Marco Island Beach Resort and Spa in Marco Island, Florida, USA. The conference events included invited speakers, special tracks, and presentations of papers, posters, and awards. The conference chair was Ingrid Russell from the University of Hartford. The program cochairs were Vasile Rus from The University of Memphis and Zdravko Markov from Central Connecticut State University. The special tracks were coordinated by Keith Brawner from the Army Research Laboratory.

This article discusses verification and validation (V&V) of autonomous systems, a concept that will prove to be difficult for systems that were designed to execute decision initiative. V&V of such systems should include evaluations of the trustworthiness of the system based on transparency inputs and scenario-based training. Transparency facets should be used to establish shared awareness and shared intent between the designer, tester, and user of the system. The transparency facets will allow the human to understand the goals, social intent, contextual awareness, task limitations, analytical underpinnings, and team-based orientation of the system in an attempt to verify its trustworthiness. Scenario-based training can then be used to validate that programming in a variety of situations that test the behavioral repertoire of the system. This novel method should be used to analyze behavioral adherence to a set of governing principles coded into the system.

We summarize the potential impact that the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation will have on the routine use of machine learning algorithms. Slated to take effect as law across the EU in 2018, it will restrict automated individual decision-making (that is, algorithms that make decisions based on user-level predictors) which “significantly affect” users. The law will also effectively create a “right to explanation,” whereby a user can ask for an explanation of an algorithmic decision that was made about them. We argue that while this law will pose large challenges for industry, it highlights opportunities for computer scientists to take the lead in designing algorithms and evaluation frameworks which avoid discrimination and enable explanation.

The field of computational models of argument is emerging as an important aspect of artificial intelligence research. The reason for this is based on the recognition that if we are to develop robust intelligent systems, then it is imperative that they can handle incomplete and inconsistent information in a way that somehow emulates the way humans tackle such a complex task. And one of the key ways that humans do this is to use argumentation either internally, by evaluating arguments and counterarguments‚ or externally, by for instance entering into a discussion or debate where arguments are exchanged. As we report in this review, recent developments in the field are leading to technology for artificial argumentation, in the legal, medical, and e-government domains, and interesting tools for argument mining, for debating technologies, and for argumentation solvers are emerging.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are encouraging governments and corporations to deploy AI in high-stakes settings including driving cars autonomously, managing the power grid, trading on stock exchanges, and controlling autonomous weapons systems. Such applications require AI methods to be robust to both the known unknowns (those uncertain aspects of the world about which the computer can reason explicitly) and the unknown unknowns (those aspects of the world that are not captured by the system’s models). This article discusses recent progress in AI and then describes eight ideas related to robustness that are being pursued within the AI research community. While these ideas are a start, we need to devote more attention to the challenges of dealing with the known and unknown unknowns. These issues are fascinating, because they touch on the fundamental question of how finite systems can survive and thrive in a complex and dangerous world

Deep neural networks have become widely used, obtaining remarkable results in domains such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, social network filtering, machine translation, and bio-informatics, where they have produced results comparable to human experts. However, these networks can be easily fooled by adversarial perturbations: minimal changes to correctly-classified inputs, that cause the network to mis-classify them. This phenomenon represents a concern for both safety and security, but it is currently unclear how to measure a network's robustness against such perturbations. Existing techniques are limited to checking robustness around a few individual input points, providing only very limited guarantees. We propose a novel approach for automatically identifying safe regions of the input space, within which the network is robust against adversarial perturbations. The approach is data-guided, relying on clustering to identify well-defined geometric regions as candidate safe regions. We then utilize verification techniques to confirm that these regions are safe or to provide counter-examples showing that they are not safe. We also introduce the notion of targeted robustness which, for a given target label and region, ensures that a NN does not map any input in the region to the target label. We evaluated our technique on the MNIST dataset and on a neural network implementation of a controller for the next-generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System for unmanned aircraft (ACAS Xu). For these networks, our approach identified multiple regions which were completely safe as well as some which were only safe for specific labels. It also discovered several adversarial perturbations of interest.

Efficient algorithms for $k$-means clustering frequently converge to suboptimal partitions, and given a partition, it is difficult to detect $k$-means optimality. In this paper, we develop an a posteriori certifier of approximate optimality for $k$-means clustering. The certifier is a sub-linear Monte Carlo algorithm based on Peng and Wei's semidefinite relaxation of $k$-means. In particular, solving the relaxation for small random samples of the dataset produces a high-confidence lower bound on the $k$-means objective, and being sub-linear, our algorithm is faster than $k$-means++ when the number of data points is large. We illustrate the performance of our algorithm with both numerical experiments and a performance guarantee: If the data points are drawn independently from any mixture of two Gaussians over $\mathbb{R}^m$ with identity covariance, then with probability $1-O(1/m)$, our $\operatorname{poly}(m)$-time algorithm produces a 3-approximation certificate with 99% confidence.

In today's era of big data, robust least-squares regression becomes a more challenging problem when considering the adversarial corruption along with explosive growth of datasets. Traditional robust methods can handle the noise but suffer from several challenges when applied in huge dataset including 1) computational infeasibility of handling an entire dataset at once, 2) existence of heterogeneously distributed corruption, and 3) difficulty in corruption estimation when data cannot be entirely loaded. This paper proposes online and distributed robust regression approaches, both of which can concurrently address all the above challenges. Specifically, the distributed algorithm optimizes the regression coefficients of each data block via heuristic hard thresholding and combines all the estimates in a distributed robust consolidation. Furthermore, an online version of the distributed algorithm is proposed to incrementally update the existing estimates with new incoming data. We also prove that our algorithms benefit from strong robustness guarantees in terms of regression coefficient recovery with a constant upper bound on the error of state-of-the-art batch methods. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approaches are superior to those of existing methods in effectiveness, with competitive efficiency.

KYOTO – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed Sunday to push forward deregulation to bring about more technological innovations in Japan. Delivering a speech at an international conference on science and technology in Kyoto, Abe said he aims to make Japan a "cradle" for the so-called open innovations that go beyond organizational boundaries for the development of novel products and services. "The key is deregulation," Abe stressed. He pointed out that foreign companies have already been interested in Japan as a place to test self-driving technologies and develop new drugs. The use of robots is expected to help Japan's agriculture, where the farming population is aging and decreasing, Abe noted.

Lauren Peace talks with attorney Sharon Stiller and Michelle Cammarata of Restore Sexual Assault services about how to identify instances of sexual harassment and what to do about it. Since the allegations surfaced publicly in early September against psycholinguistics professor T. Florian Jaeger, 41, the number of alleged victims has grown to 14, according to managing partner Jef McAllister of McAllister Olivarius law firm, the complainants' legal team. Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological and neuroscientific processes that allow people to use and understand language, and Jaeger was at the forefront of that research. Sept. 14: What you need to know about university's sexual harassment case Sept. 13: Student criticism on handling of sex harassment allegations mounts Sept. 11: Clearing of prof accused of sex harassment focus of faculty complaint The private university itself is accused of protecting Jaeger, even going so far as to retaliate against those who complained about his behavior before relief was sought from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The two who wrote a letter to the university Board of Trustees have been past department chairpersons who have worked a total of 57 years for the University of Rochester.