Subcontracted by British Aerospace, AIAI were involved in part of a larger project for EUMETSAT, the European agency responsible for meteorological satellites. Our role was helping in the specification and prototyping of the scheduling component. After an initial feasibility study it was decided to prototype the system using PECOS, an object-oriented constraint programming tool. This approach allowed rapid development while retaining the flexibility to make changes as the problem specification evolved. A typical problem that the EUMETSAT scheduler has to deal with consists of some 1300 activities over a 14 day period. Activities to be scheduled include regular fixed activities (e.g.

Optional modules in Gemini provide robustness through a novel technique for detecting and correcting speech repairs, and by heuristically combining interpretations of grammatical fragments into an overall interpretation for the utterance, in cases where the Gemini grammar and lexicon do not provide a single complete analysis. Gemini has also been used as part of a language model to increase speech recognition accuracy. Recently we have developed software to compile Gemini grammars into context-free grammars that can be directly used as language models in the Nuance speech recognizer (a commercially available system based on SRI-developed technology).

Audit sampling is selecting a group of items such as invoices for investigation to draw inferences about an account balance. Ratio analysis involves comparisons between two financial statement accounts such as current ratios and gross profit percentage. Reasonable tests involve using financial and nonfinancial data to estimate an account balance. An example would be multiplying items sold by price to determine expected revenue. However, there are audit engagement risks with current auditing techniques.

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will have profound effects on the lives of every citizen. It promises to deliver to people in their homes and offices a vast array of information in many forms, changing the ways in which business is conducted, offering new educational opportunities, bringing geographically dispersed library resources and entertainment materials to everyone's doorstep. It will connect people to people, and help them with their jobs and tasks. For the NII to be useful, however, people will need easy and efficient access to its resources. Today's computers are complex and difficult to use, even for experts. The NII will be orders of magnitude more complex than current systems; it could easily become a labyrinth of databases and services that is inconvenient for experts and inaccessible to many Americans. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in meeting major challenges of the NII. AI uses the theoretical and experimental tools of ...

The Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS) was founded in 1987 to promote and advance artificial intelligence research within the state of Florida, fostering interaction between researchers at colleges, universities, and industry. From its inception, one major goal of the society has been to promote the advancement of AI through a yearly conference. During the first two years of the conference, participation was limited to Florida residents. Since 1990, the conference has been open to all and has logged a dramatic increase in participation from around the world, due in part to the warm climate offered by this conference location, but also due to the increase in research quality.

The Artificial Intelligence Group performs basic research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling, with applications to science analysis, spacecraft commanding, deep space network operations, and space transportation systems.

Although real-world solutions for robotic demining have not as yet been demonstrated, multirobot systems will clearly yield significant benefits over a single robot, given the extremely hazardous nature of the domain [JP1999]. Having multiple robots adds a desirable redundancy to the system, as well as potentially reducing the time required to clear an area if the robots are deployed effectively. In this paper, we describe a software implementation of a multirobot demining system that was deployed as part of a larger multiagent system, AgentStorm, to assist human commanders in command and control scenarios. Simulated robotic demining agents coordinate to breach a path through a minefield; demining is modeled as a distributed optimization problem in which the robots strive to minimize an abstract cost function. Although researchers have drawn comparisons between robot demining and foraging [Goldberg & Mataric1997], path breaching cannot be modeled as a simple foraging task because the goal of the exercise is not to optimize on number of mines removed but to assure coverage of a connected path.

What if there was a robot apocalypse? Before I answer this question, let me give you a little background on where I'm coming from. I'm by no means an expert, but I have some experience with robotics. My first job out of college was working on robots at NASA, and my undergraduate degree project was on robotic navigation. I spent my teenage years participating in FIRST Robotics, programming software bots to fight in virtual tournaments, and working on homemade underwater ROVs.

With the recent launch of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT News examines research with the potential to reshape medicine and health care through new scientific knowledge, novel treatments and products, better management of medical data, and improvements in health-care delivery. At the end of 2012, the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" featured a segment in which its linguistics commentator argued that "big data" should be the word of the year. The term refers not only to the deluge of data produced by the proliferation of Internet-connected, sensor-studded portable devices but also to innovative techniques for analyzing that data; and big data has received a good deal of credit for Barack Obama's victory in the last presidential election. Certainly, the term was in heavy use around MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which in 2012 launched a new big-data initiative called bigdata@CSAIL. Several of the researchers affiliated with bigdata@CSAIL are developing new techniques for processing medical data, to make it more accessible to both physicians and patients and to find correlations that could improve diagnosis or choice of therapies.

MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system that automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving. The prototype system, described in a paper slated for the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Portugal next month, is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response. In experiments conducted on the MIT campus, a graduate student wearing the sensor system wandered the halls, and the sensors wirelessly relayed data to a laptop in a distant conference room. Observers in the conference room were able to track the student's progress on a map that sprang into being as he moved. Connected to the array of sensors is a handheld pushbutton device that the wearer can use to annotate the map.