Opponent modeling is a critical mechanism in repeated games. It allows a player to adapt its strategy in order to better respond to the presumed preferences of its opponents. We introduce a modeling technique that adaptively balances safety and exploitability. The opponent's strategy is modeled with a set of possible strategies that contains the actual one with high probability. The algorithm is safe as the expected payoff is above the minimax payoff with high probability, and can exploit the opponent's preferences when sufficient observations are obtained. We apply the algorithm to a robot table-tennis setting where the robot player learns to prepare to return a served ball. By modeling the human players, the robot chooses a forehand, backhand or middle preparation pose before they serve. The learned strategies can exploit the opponent's preferences, leading to a higher rate of successful returns.

MAPP has been previously shown as a state-of-the-art multi-agent path planning algorithm on criteria including scalability and success ratio (i.e., percentage of solved units) on realistic game maps. MAPP further provides a formal characterization of problems it can solve, and low-polynomial upper bounds on the resources required. However, until now, MAPP's solution quality had not been extensively analyzed. In this work we empirically analyze the quality of MAPP's solutions, using multiple quality criteria such as the total travel distance, the makespan and the sum of actions (including move and wait actions). We also introduce enhancements that improve MAPP's solution quality significantly. For example, the sum of actions is cut to half on average. The improved MAPP is competitive in terms of solution quality with FAR and WHCA*, two successful algorithms from the literature, and maintains its advantages on different performance criteria, such as scalability, success ratio, and ability to tell apriori if it will succeed in the instance at hand. As optimal algorithms have limited scalability, evaluating the quality of the solutions provided by suboptimal algorithms is another important topic. Using lower bounds of optimal values, we show that MAPP's solutions have a reasonable quality. For example, MAPP's total travel distance is on average 19% longer than a lower bound on the optimal value.

Integrating the expressive power of first-order logic with the ability of probabilistic reasoning of Bayesian networks has attracted the interest of many researchers for decades. We present an approach to integration that translates logical knowledge into Bayesian networks and uses Bayesian network composition to build a uniform representation that supports both logical and probabilistic reasoning. In particular, we propose a new way of translation of logical knowledge, relation search. Through the use of the proposed framework, without learning new languages or tools, modelers are allowed to 1) specify special knowledge using the most suitable languages, while reasoning in a uniform engine; 2) make use of pre-existing logical knowledge bases for probabilistic reasoning (to complete the model or minimize potential inconsistencies).

Their information needs are long and popular information needs of the masses. Topic term and highly dynamic - nearly everything about this topic specificity, customizability, and automatically pursuing the is in flux. For these users, information search can be made long term unique information needs of individual users are more effective with knowledge about the field and about the not among the strengths of current main stream search engines types of documents being retrieved. Because the resource (Jansen, Spink, and Saracevic 2000) (Teevan, Dumais, management decisions require judgment about the materials and Horvitz 2005). This gap has inspired web personalization collected, the users require confidentiality and must trust the and collaborative information seeking tools such as sources. Google Alerts and has encouraged topic-specific blogs and Matilda is designed to 1) tailor information collection for podcasts.

The number of elderly people is constantly increasing in the developed countries. Elderly tend to lead an isolated life away from their offspring; however, they may fear being unable to obtain help if they are injured or ill. During the last decades, this fear has generated research attempts to find assistive technologies for making living of elderly people at homes easier and independent, as is the aim of this research work. Research study proposes a generalized approach to an intelligent and ubiquitous care system to recognize a few of the most common and important health problems of the elderly, which can be detected by analyzing their movement. In the event that the system was to recognize a health problem, it would automatically notify a physician with an included explanation of the automatic diagnosis. It is two-step approach; in the first step it classifies person's activities into five activities: fall, unconscious fall, walking, standing/sitting, lying down/lying. In the second step, it classifies walking patterns into five different health states; one healthy and four unhealthy: hemiplegia (usually the result of stroke), Parkinson’s disease, leg pain and back pain. Moreover, since elderly having these health problems are less stable and more prone to falls, recognizing them leads not only to detection but indirectly also to prevention of falls of elderly people. In the initial approach movement of the user is captured with the motion capture system, which consists of the tags attached to the body, whose coordinates are acquired by the sensors situated in the apartment. In the current approach wearable inertial sensors are used, allowing monitoring inside or outside of the buildings. Output time-series of coordinates are modeled with the proposed data mining approach to recognize the specific health problem.

We present a computational method to generate explanations to answers of complex queries over biomedical ontologies and databases, using the high-level representation and efficient automated reasoners of Answer Set Programming. We show the applicability of our approach with some queries related to drug discovery over PHARMGKB, DRUGBANK, BIOGRID, CTD and SIDER.

Korf, Reid, and Edelkamp launched a line of research aimed at predicting how many nodes IDA* will expand with a given depth bound. This paper advances this line of research in three ways. First, we identify a source of prediction error that has hitherto been overlooked. We call it the "discretization effect." Second, we disprove the intuitively appealing idea that a "more informed" prediction system cannot make worse predictions than a ``less informed'' one. More informed systems are more susceptible to the discretization effect, and in our experiments the more informed system makes poorer predictions. Our third contribution is a method, called "Epsilon-truncation," which makes a prediction system less informed, in a carefully chosen way, so as to improve its predictions by reducing the discretization effect. In our experiments Epsilon-truncation improved predictions substantially.

We focus on a class of models used for representing the dynamics between a discrete set of probabilistic events in a continuous-time setting. The proposed framework offers tractable learning and inference procedures and provides compact state representations for processes which exhibit variable delays between events. The approach is applied to a heart sound labeling task that exhibits long-range dependencies on previous events, and in which explicit modeling of the rhythm timings is justifiable by cardiological principles.

Real-time heuristic search algorithms that precompute search space-specific databases have demonstrated exceptional performance in video-game pathfinding. We discuss the first steps towards extending these algorithms to other search spaces that also benefit from the real-time property. We present our initial progress in characterizing the performance of current algorithms based on the features of a search space, and discuss future directions of this research.

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.