Partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) are a robust and precise model for decentralized decision making under conditions of imperfect information, and extend popular Markov decision problem models. Complexity results for a wide range of such problems are known when agents work cooperatively to pursue common interests. When agents compete, things are less well understood. We show that under one understanding of rational competition, such problems are complete for the class NEXP^NP. This result holds for any such problem comprised of two competing teams of agents, where teams may be of any size whatsoever.

External factors are hard to model using a Markovian state in several real-world planning domains. Although planning can be difficult in such domains, it may be possible to exploit long-term dependencies between states of the environment during planning. We introduce weighted state scenarios to model long-term sequences of states, and we use a model based on a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process to reason about scenarios during planning. Experiments show that our model outperforms other methods for decision making in two real-world domains.

This work presents a general-purpose character reasoning model intended for usage by autonomous team actors that are acting as believable characters (e.g., human team actors fall into this category). The idea is that selecting a cast of believable characters can predetermine a solution to an unexpected challenge that the team may be facing in a rescue mission. This approach in certain cases proves more efficient than an alternative approach based on rational decision making and planning, which ignores the question of character believability. This point is illustrated with a simple numerical example in a virtual world paradigm.

This paper details how OntoAgents, language-endowed intelligent agents developed in the OntoAgent framework, assess their confidence in understanding language inputs. It presents scoring heuristics for the following subtasks of natural language understanding: lexical disambiguation and the establishment of semantic dependencies; reference resolution; nominal compounding; the treatment of fragments; and the interpretation of indirect speech acts. The scoring of confidence in individual linguistic subtasks is a prerequisite for computing the overall confidence in the understanding of an utterance. This, in turn, is a prerequisite for the agent’s deciding how to act upon that level of understanding.

The topic of the self-confidence of autonomous systems is discussed from the perspective of its use in a military environment. The concepts of autonomy and self-confidence are quite different in a military environment from the civilian environment. The military’s recruit indoctrination provided a basis for the concept, the factors affecting the concept, and its measurement and communication. These and other aspects of the topic self-confidence in autonomous systems are discussed along with examples based on current research on the interface between human operators and such systems.

Personalized medicine targets the customization of treatment strategies to patients' individual characteristics. Here we consider the problem of optimizing personalized pharmacological treatment strategies for cancer. We focus primarily on developing effective strategies to collect the data necessary for the construction of personalized treatments. We formulate this problem as a contextual bandit and present a new algorithm based on repeated sub-sampling for robust data collection in this framework. We present a case study showing experiments on a simulation setting, built from real data collected in a previous animal experiments. Promising results in this case study have since lead us to deploy this strategy in a partner wet lab to allocate treatments for the next phase of animal experiments.

A key contribution of this paper is to introduce an extended BO setting, called Bayesian Optimization with Resources We consider optimizing an unknown function f by running (BOR), that explicitly models experimental resources experiments that each take an input x and return a noisy output and activities. In particular, our model specifies f(x). In particular, we focus on the setting where experiments the following: 1) resource requirements for experiments, are expensive, limiting the number of experiments which may vary across different experiments, 2) resourceproduction that can be run. Bayesian Optimization (BO) addresses this actions, which produce the various resources and setting by maintaining a Bayesian posterior over f to capture can require varying amounts of time, and 3) a set of "labs" our uncertainty about f given prior experiments (Jones for running concurrent experiments and a set of "production 2001; Brochu, Cora, and de Freitas 2010). The posterior is lines" for concurrent resource production. The problem is then used to select new experiments that trades-off exploring then to select and schedule the experiments and resourceproduction uncertain areas of the experimental space and exploiting actions in order to optimize the unknown objective promising areas.

The identity of every human subject is imprinted in the subject’s mind. This work explores one possible approach to authentication of the user identity using implicit long-term memory, specifically, memory for faces.

The rich expressivity provided by the cognitive event calculus (CEC) knowledge representation framework allows for reasoning over deeply nested beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on. I put CEC to the test by attempting to model the complex reasoning and deceptive planning used in an episode of the popular television show Breaking Bad. CEC is used to represent the knowledge used by reasoners coming up with plans like the ones devised by the fictional characters I describe. However, it becomes clear that a form of nonmonotonic reasoning is necessary—specifically so that an agent can reason about the nonmonotonic beliefs of another agent. I show how CEC can be augmented to have this ability, and then provide examples detailing how my proposed augmentation enables much of the reasoning used by agents such as the Breaking Bad characters. I close by discussing what sort of reasoning tool would be necessary to implement such nonmonotonic reasoning.

One of the primary realms into which artificial intelligence research has ventured is that of psychometric tests. It has been debated since Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test whether performance on tests should serve as the metric by which we should determine whether a machine is intelligent. This is an idea that may either solidify or challenge, depending on the reader's predisposition, one's sense of what artificial intelligence really is. As will be discussed in this paper, there is a history of efforts to create agents that perform well on tests in the spirit of an interpretation of artificial intelligence called ``Psychometric AI''. However, the focus of this paper is to describe a machine agent, hereafter called the CFE Agent, developed in this tradition. The CFE Exam is a gateway to certification in the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), a widely recognized professional credential within the fraud examiner profession. The CFE Agent attempts to emulate the successful performance of a human test taker, using what would appear to be simplistic natural language processing approaches to answer test questions. But it is also hoped that the the reader will be convinced that the same core technologies can be successfully applied within the larger domain of fraud detection. Further work will also be briefly discussed, in which we attempt to take these techniques to the next level, a deeper level, by which we can get a better sense of the knowledge the agent is using, and how that knowledge is being applied to formulate answers.