Collaboration between research scientists, particularly those with diverse backgrounds, is a driver of scientific innovation. However, finding the right collaborator is often an unscientific process that is subject to chance. This paper explores recommending collaborators based on repeating patterns of previous successful collaboration experiences, what we term prototypical collaborations. We investigate a method for discovering such prototypes to use them as a basis to guide the recommendation of new collaborations. To this end, we also examine two methods for matching collaboration seekers to these prototypical collaborations. Our initial studies reveal that though promising, improving collaborations through recommendation is a complex goal.

Data mining is a field of research dedicated to the process of extracting underlying patterns in data collections. The FLAIRS special track on data mining has the goal of presenting new and important contributions to this field. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, applications such as intelligence analysis, medical and health applications, text, video, and multimedia mining, e-commerce and web data, financial data analysis, intrusion detection, remote sensing, earth sciences, and astronomy; modeling algorithms such as hidden Markov, decision trees, neural networks, statistical methods, or probabilistic methods; case studies in areas of application, or over different algorithms and approaches; feature extraction and selection; post-processing techniques such as visualization, summarization, or trending; preprocessing and data reduction; data engineering or warehousing; or other data mining research that is related to artificial intelligence.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 22nd International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS-22) held 19-21 May 2009 on Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. The call for papers attracted 158 paper submissions, 40 to the general conference and 118 to the 10 special tracks. Over 80 percent of the papers were reviewed by at least four reviewers, and all papers by at least three. Reviewing was coordinated by the program committees of the general conference and the special tracks. The program committees finally accepted the 85 papers that appear in these proceedings, all as presented papers (21 from the general conference and 64 from the special tracks) and 29 as poster papers (6 from the general conference and 23 from the special tracks).

The gaming industry has reached a point where improving graphics has only a small effect on how much a player will enjoy a game. The focus has turned to adding more humanlike characteristics into computer game agents. Machine learning techniques are scarcely being used in games, although they do offer powerful means for creating humanlike behaviors in agents. The first person shooter (FPS), Quake 2, is an open source game that offers a multi-agent environment in which to create game agents (bots). The work described in this paper seeks to combine neural networks with a modeling paradigm known as context based reasoning (CxBR) to create a contextual game observation (CONGO) system that produces humanlike Quake 2 bots. A default level of intelligence is instilled into the bots through contextual scripts to prevent the bot from being trained to be completely useless. The results show that the humanness and entertainment value as compared to a traditional scripted bot have improved, although, CONGO bots usually ranked only slightly above a novice skill level. Overall, CONGO offers the gaming community a mode of game play that has promising entertainment value.

We studied the effect of post-practice reflection on learning, using programming tutors, and multiple-choice format for reflection. We conducted in-vivo controlled studies with introductory programming students from multiple schools over 3 semesters, and used mixed-factor ANOVA to analyze the collected data. We found that reflecting on the concept underlying each problem neither promotes greater learning, measured as pre-post increase in the average score per problem, nor promotes faster learning, measured as the problems solved per concept learned. We conjecture that the benefits of reflecting on the concept underlying each problem may be limited if a tutor already promotes deep understanding of the domain.

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, for example higher incomes, lower costs and more interesting and fairer seasons. This paper presents a successful solution method to schedule the Finnish 1st division ice hockey league. The solution method is an improved version of the method used to schedule the Finnish major ice hockey league. The method is a combination of local search heuristics and evolutionary methods. An analyzer for the quality of the produced schedules will be introduced. Finally, we propose a set of test instances that we hope the researchers of the sports scheduling problems would adopt. The generated schedule for the Finnish 1st division ice hockey league is currently in use for the season 2008-2009.

The field of artificial intelligence needs to attract new researchers to the field to continue current explorations and look for novel approaches to tomorrow's problems. One approach involves providing students with learning tools that excite their imagination and help them obtain an appreciation for what artificial intelligence can do. The tools described here are used in an undergraduate course at Sam Houston State University. They include heuristic-driven search in a potential game's terrain map, reinforcement learning in a tank battle game, and game tree search techniques in tic-tac-toe.

Computer Science has a bad reputation among non-CS majors. This paper describes three assignments from a gentle introduction to programming course for non-majors that uses robots and simple game programming as a hook to get students interested in the subject. In each of the assignments presented, what might be considered a trivial twist to an instructor was a key factor in making an otherwise standard project into something that is more engaging.

Using robots as part of any curriculum requires careful management of the significant complexity that physical embodiment introduces. Students need to be made aware of this complexity without being overwhelmed by it, and navigating students through this complexity is the biggest challenge faced by an instructor.  Achieving this requires a framework that allows complexity to be introduced in stages, as students' abilities improve. Such a framework should also be flexible enough to provide a range of application environments that can grow with student  sophistication, and be able to quickly change between applications.  It should be portable and maintainable, and require a minimum of overhead to manage in a classroom. Finally, the framework should provide repeatability and control for evaluating the students' work, as well as for performing research. In this paper, we discuss the advantages of a mixed reality approach to applying robotics to education in order to accomplish these challenges.  We introduce a framework for managing mixed reality in the classroom, and discuss our experiences with using this framework for teaching robotics and AI.

Emotions are a ubiquitous component of motivation and learning. We have developed an affective behavior model for intelligent tutoring systems that considers both the affective and knowledge state of the student to generate tutorial actions. The affective behavior model (ABM) was designed based on teachers' expertise obtained through interviews. It relies on a dynamic decision network with a utility measure on both student learning and affect to generate tutorial actions aimed at balancing the two. We have integrated and evaluated the ABM in an educational game to learn number factorization. We carried out a controlled user study to evaluate the impact of the affective model on learning. The results show that for the younger students there is a significant improvement on learning when the affective behavior model is incorporated.