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Synthetic Adversaries for Urban Combat Training

AI Magazine

Six high-level requirements drive the implementation of intelligent synthetic adversaries for training: (1) competence, (2) taskability, (3) observational fidelity, (4) behavior variability, most difficult tasks soldiers perform. Frequent Competence: The adversaries must perform training is an essential element in reducing the tactics and missions humans perform in casualties. For this application, the adversaries' environments is costly and restricted to physical goal is to defend a small multistoried mockups of buildings and small towns. The agents must move Environments (VIRTE) program is developing immersive virtual trainers for military operations through the environment, identify tactically on urbanized terrain (MOUT). In this relevant features (such as escape routes), and trainer, four-person fire teams of U.S. Marines communicate and coordinate with other are situated in a virtual urban environment and agents. Virtual opponents new missions for different training scenarios, are required to populate the environment and and they must change their objectives challenge the trainees. Behavior is not scripted or This article describes the general requirements specific to a particular mission, terrain, or operational for virtual MOUT opponents and our development setting, providing flexibility for operational of synthetic adversaries to meet use.


Calendar of Events

AI Magazine

(EDOC 2005). Moscow State University, Russia, King's Email: patrick.hung@uoit.ca In cooperation with the American Association for Artificial Intelligence General Chairs The 19th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS 2006) will be held May 11-13 Philip Chan, Debasis Mitra 2006, in Melbourne Beach, Florida, USA. Coast" (centered around NASA's Kennedy Space Center), and has easy access to Florida Institute of Technology Orlando and the Disney World attractions. Submission of papers for presentation at the conference is now invited.


AAAI-05: Twentieth National AI Conference Is a Panoply of Content

AI Magazine

After rigorous evaluation, 150 papers were accepted for oral presentation, and 79 for poster presentation. The analogical and case based reasoning category features 6 papers; auctions and market-based systems features 5 papers, and automated reasoning ... out over the Ocean, the winter State University), Amy Greenwald features 12 papers. Twenty papers sky is brilliant panoply of (Brown University), Marti Hearst will be published in constraint stars and comets, beckoning to (University of California, Berkeley), satisfaction and satisfiability; game adventurers... who seek to divine Sridhar Mahadevan (University of theory and economic models features its mysteries. Machine his year marks the twenty-fifth for Artificial Intelligence pioneer and visionary Jay M. ("Marty") learning, the category with the and the twentieth National Tenenbaum4 who will speak on largest number of papers, has 35, Conference on AI (AAAI-05).1 The "The Future of AI and the Web"; while machine perception has 6.


Intelligent Technology for an Aging Population: The Use of AI to Assist Elders with Cognitive Impairment

AI Magazine

Today, approximately 10 percent of the world's population is over the age of 60; by 2050 this proportion will have more than doubled. Moreover, the greatest rate of increase is amongst the "oldest old," people aged 85 and over. While many older adults remain healthy and productive, overall this segment of the population is subject to physical and cognitive impairment at higher rates than younger people. This article surveys new technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence techniques to support older adults and help them cope with the changes of aging, in particular with cognitive decline.


Reports on the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium Series

AI Magazine

Techniques in this symposium series were he calls the "twenty-first century for analyzing terrorist networks (1) AI Technologies for Homeland Security; strategic threat triad," which consists were reported by Alphatech (2) Challenges to Decision of failed states, global terrorism, and and the University of Arizona. Popp noted that and retrieving information for Robots: Verbal Interaction with convergence of these three elements counter intelligence was demonstrated Embodied Agents and Situated Devices; is highly destabilizing and a key by Jim Hendler of the University (5) Knowledge Collection from strategic concern to the national security of Maryland. They also aimed to chart out future from Stanford University, Lawrence For example, systems that are research agenda by identifying specific Livermore Laboratories, SRI International, based on probabilistic or decisiontheoretic interesting issues in various and Syracuse University. Homeland security applications for unable to cope with change by themselves, The recurrent themes from data mining and mobile robots were as neither probability theory the presentations included the following: reported by Alphatech and the University nor decision theory says much about of South Florida, respectively. How do The highlights of the symposium let alone how they should be modified.


AAAI News

AI Magazine

Every year four new councilors are Raymond J. Mooney, University of elected to serve three-year terms on Chair: Thomas Roth-Nominating Committee encourages Conference Chair is Bruce Porter, Berghofer (trb at dfki.uni-kl.de), Committee, in turn, will nominate to miss 2006! From Reactive to Anticipatory eight candidates for councilor The calls for papers for both conferences, Cognitive Embodied Systems in the spring. Cochairs: Cristiano recommendations, the committee workshop proposals, student abstracts, Castelfranchi (c.castelfranchi at will actively recruit individuals in intelligent systems demonstrations, istc.cnr.it), Christian Balkenius order to provide a balanced slate of and the robot competition will (Christian.Balkenius at lucs.


Keys, Nominals, and Concrete Domains

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Many description logics (DLs) combine knowledge representation on an abstract, logical level with an interface to 'concrete' domains like numbers and strings with built-in predicates such as >, +, and prefix-of. These hybrid DLs have turned out to be useful in several application areas, such as reasoning about conceptual database models. We propose to further extend such DLs with key constraints that allow the expression of statements like 'US citizens are uniquely identified by their social security number'. Based on this idea, we introduce a number of natural description logics and perform a detailed analysis of their decidability and computational complexity. It turns out that naive extensions with key constraints easily lead to undecidability, whereas more careful extensions yield NExpTime-complete DLs for a variety of useful concrete domains.


An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually. However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ? typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance; specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine.


Generalizing Boolean Satisfiability III: Implementation

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

This is the third of three papers describing ZAP, a satisfiability engine that substantially generalizes existing tools while retaining the performance characteristics of modern high-performance solvers. The fundamental idea underlying ZAP is that many problems passed to such engines contain rich internal structure that is obscured by the Boolean representation used; our goal has been to define a representation in which this structure is apparent and can be exploited to improve computational performance. The first paper surveyed existing work that (knowingly or not) exploited problem structure to improve the performance of satisfiability engines, and the second paper showed that this structure could be understood in terms of groups of permutations acting on individual clauses in any particular Boolean theory. We conclude the series by discussing the techniques needed to implement our ideas, and by reporting on their performance on a variety of problem instances.


Calendar of Events

AI Magazine

Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Email: patrick.hung@uoit.ca (MDAI 2005).