Students have implemented approaches to these problems, using our HRTeam framework (Sklar et al. 2010), which is built on Player/Stage (Vaughan and Gerkey 2007).

This work focuses on developing domain-independent heuristics for probabilistic planning problems characterized by full observability and non-deterministic effects of actions that are expressed by probability distributions. The approach is to first search for a high probability deterministic plan using a classical planner. A novel probabilistic plan graph heuristic is used to guide the search towards high probability plans. The resulting plans can be used in a system that handles unexpected outcomes by runtime replanning. The plans can also be incrementally augmented with contingency branches for the most critical action outcomes. This abstract will describe the steps that we have taken in completing the above work and the obtained results.

The automated processing of multiple seismic signals to detect and localize seismic events is a central tool in both geophysics and nuclear treaty verification. This paper reports on a project, begun in 2009, to reformulate this problem in a Bayesian framework. A Bayesian seismic monitoring system, NET-VISA, has been built comprising a spatial event prior and generative models of event transmission and detection, as well as an inference algorithm. Applied in the context of the International Monitoring System (IMS), a global sensor network developed for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), NET-VISA achieves a reduction of around 50% in the number of missed events compared to the currently deployed system. It also finds events that are missed even by the human analysts who post-process the IMS output.

The conservation of wildlife corridors between existing habitat preserves is important for combating the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation facing species of concern. We introduce the Steiner Multigraph Problem to model the problem of minimum-cost wildlife corridor design for multiple species with different landscape requirements. This problem can also model other analogous settings in wireless and social networks. As a generalization of Steiner forest, the goal is to find a minimum-cost subgraph that connects multiple sets of terminals. In contrast to Steiner forest, each set of terminals can only be connected via a subset of the nodes. Generalizing Steiner forest in this way makes the problem NP-hard even when restricted to two pairs of terminals. However, we show that if the node subsets have a nested structure, the problem admits a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm in the number of terminals. We successfully test exact and heuristic solution approaches on a wildlife corridor instance for wolverines and lynx in western Montana, showing that though the problem is computationally hard, heuristics perform well, and provably optimal solutions can still be obtained.

We present a method for dependency grammar induction that utilizes sparse annotations of semantic relations. This induction set-up is attractive because such annotations provide useful clues about the underlying syntactic structure, and they are readily available in many domains (e.g., info-boxes and HTML markup). Our method is based on the intuition that syntactic realizations of the same semantic predicate exhibit some degree of consistency. We incorporate this intuition in a directed graphical model that tightly links the syntactic and semantic structures. This design enables us to exploit syntactic regularities while still allowing for variations. Another strength of the model lies in its ability to capture non-local dependency relations. Our results demonstrate that even a small amount of semantic annotations greatly improves the accuracy of learned dependencies when tested on both in-domain and out-of-domain texts.

Many networks are complex dynamical systems, where both attributes of nodes and topology of the network (link structure) can change with time. We propose a model of co-evolving networks where both node attributes and network structure evolve under mutual influence. Specifically, we consider a mixed membership stochastic blockmodel, where the probability of observing a link between two nodes depends on their current membership vectors, while those membership vectors themselves evolve in the presence of a link between the nodes. Thus, the network is shaped by the interaction of stochastic processes describing the nodes, while the processes themselves are influenced by the changing network structure. We derive an efficient variational inference procedure for our model, and validate the model on both synthetic and real-world data.

Approval-like voting rules, such as Sincere-Strategy Preference-Based Approval voting (SP-AV), the Bucklin rule (an adaptive variant of k-Approval voting), and the Fallback rule (an adaptive variant of SP-AV) have many desirable properties: for example, they are easy to understand and encourage the candidates to choose electoral platforms that have a broad appeal. In this paper, we investigate both classic and parameterized computational complexity of electoral campaign management under such rules. We focus on two methods that can be used to promote a given candidate: asking voters to move this candidate upwards in their preference order or asking them to change the number of candidates they approve of. We show that finding an optimal campaign management strategy of the first type is easy for both Bucklin and Fallback. In contrast, the second method is computationally hard even if the degree to which we need to affect the votes is small. Nevertheless, we identify a large class of scenarios that admit a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm.

We propose influence games, a new class of graphical games, as a model of the behavior of large but finite networked populations. Grounded in non-cooperative game theory, we introduce a new approach to the study of influence in networks that captures the strategic aspects of complex interactions in the network. We study computational problems on influence games, including the identification of the most influential nodes. We characterize the computational complexity of various problems in influence games, propose several heuristics for the hard cases, and design approximation algorithms, with provable guarantees, for the most influential nodes problem.

We prove that it is NP-hard for a coalition of two manipulators to compute how to manipulate the Borda voting rule. This resolves one of the last open problems in the computational complexity of manipulating common voting rules. Because of this NP-hardness, we treat computing a manipulation as an approximation problem where we try to minimize the number of manipulators. Based on ideas from bin packing and multiprocessor scheduling, we propose two new approximation methods to compute manipulations of the Borda rule. Experiments show that these methods significantly outperform the previous best known approximation method. We are able to find optimal manipulations in almost all the randomly generated elections tested. Our results suggest that, whilst computing a manipulation of the Borda rule by a coalition is NP-hard, computational complexity may provide only a weak barrier against manipulation in practice.

Information retrieval may suggest a document, and information extraction may tell us what it says, but which information sources do we trust and which assertions do we believe when different authors make conflicting claims? Trust algorithms known as fact-finders attempt to answer these questions, but consider only which source makes which claim, ignoring a wealth of background knowledge and contextual detail such as the uncertainty in the information extraction of claims from documents, attributes of the sources, the degree of similarity among claims, and the degree of certainty expressed by the sources. We introduce a new, generalized fact-finding framework able to incorporate this additional information into the fact-finding process. Experiments using several state-of-the-art fact-finding algorithms demonstrate that generalized fact-finders achieve significantly better performance than their original variants on both semi-synthetic and real-world problems.