Knowledge acquisition is the essential process of extracting and encoding knowledge, both domainspecific and commonsense, to be used in intelligent systems. While many large knowledge bases have been constructed, none is close to complete. This paper presents an approach to improving a knowledge base efficiently under resource constraints. Using a guiding knowledge base, questions are generated from a weak form of similarity-based inference given the glossary mapping between two knowledge bases. The candidate questions are prioritized in terms of the concept coverage of the target knowledge. Experiments were conducted to find questions to grow the Chinese ConceptNet using the English ConceptNet as a guide. The results were evaluated by online users to verify that 94.17% of the questions and 85.77% of the answersare good. In addition, the answers collected in a six-week period showed consistent improvement to a 36.33% increase in concept coverage of the Chinese commonsense knowledge base against the English ConceptNet.

The original Yahoo! search engine consists of manually organized topic hierarchy of webpages for easy browsing. Modern search engines (such as Google and Bing), on the other hand, return a flat list of webpages based on keywords. It would be ideal if hierarchical browsing and keyword search can be seamlessly combined. The main difficulty in doing so is to automatically (i.e., not manually) classify and rank a massive number of webpages into various hierarchies (such as topics, media types, regions of the world). In this paper we report our attempt towards building this integrated search engine, called SEE (Search Engine with hiErarchy). We implement a hierarchical classification system based on Support Vector Machines, and embed it in SEE. We also design a novel user interface that allows users to dynamically adjust their desire for a higher accuracy vs. more results in any (sub)category of the hierarchy. Though our current search engine is still small (indexing about 1.2 million webpages), the results, including a small user study, have shown a great promise for integrating such techniques in the next-generation search engine.

In this paper, we propose to extract a compact yet discriminative visual descriptor directly on the mobile device, which tackles the wireless query transmission latency in mobile landmark search. This descriptor is offline learnt from the location contexts of geo-tagged Web photos from both Flickr and Panoramio with two phrases: First, we segment the landmark photo collections into discrete geographical regions using a Gaussian Mixture Model [Stauffer et al., 2000]. Second, a ranking sensitive vocabulary boosting is introduced to learn a compact codebook within each region. To tackle the locally optimal descriptor learning caused by imprecise geographical segmentation, we further iterate above phrases by feedback an “entropy” based descriptor compactness into a prior distribution to constrain the Gaussian mixture modeling. Consequently, when entering a specific geographical region, the codebook in the mobile device is downstream adapted, which ensures efficient extraction of compact descriptor, its low bit rate transmission, as well as promising discrimination ability. We deploy our descriptor within both HTC and iPhone mobile phones, testing landmark search in typical areas included Beijing, New York, and Barcelona containing one million images. Our learning descriptor outperforms alternative compact descriptors [Chen et al., 2009][Chen et al., 2010][Chandrasekhar et al., 2009a][Chandrasekhar et al., 2009b] with a large margin.

This requires, for Goal-driven autonomy (GDA) is a reflective model example, experts to anticipate what discrepancies can occur, of goal reasoning that controls the focus of an identify what goals can be formulated, and define their agent's planning activities by dynamically relative priority. However, few techniques have been resolving unexpected discrepancies in the world investigated for learning this knowledge, and those that do state, which frequently arise when solving tasks in learn only goal formulation knowledge (Weber et al. 2010; complex environments. GDA agents have Powell et al. 2011). This can be problematic; while these performed well on such tasks by integrating agents may perform well in simple environments, in others a methods for discrepancy recognition, explanation, domain expert might not know the (state) expectations for goal formulation, and goal management. However, executing every action in every state, nor which goal should they require substantial domain knowledge, be pursued to resolve every possible discrepancy, or even including what constitutes a discrepancy and how the space of all possible discrepancies.

In an introductory engineering course with an annual enrollment of over 1000 students, a professor has little option but to rely on multiple choice exams for midterms and finals. Furthermore, the teaching assistants are too overloaded to give detailed feedback on submitted homework assignments. We introduce Mechanix, a computer-assisted tutoring system for engineering students. Mechanix uses recognition of freehand sketches to provide instant, detailed, and formative feedback as the student progresses through each homework assignment, quiz, or exam. Free sketch recognition techniques allow students to solve free-body diagram and static truss problems as if they were using a pen and paper. The same recognition algorithms enable professors to add new unique problems simply by sketching out the correct answer. Mechanix is able to ease the burden of grading so that instructors can assign more free response questions, which provide a better measure of student progress than multiple choice questions do.

It is well known that the three water categories science. Methods in biophysics only provide qualitative have different functions. Individually bound water has multiple description of the structure and thus clarifying contacts that stabilize the protein structure. Hydration the collective phenomena of a huge number water has heterogeneous dynamical behavior, contributing to of water molecules is still beyond intuition protein folding, stability and dynamics, and interacting with in biophysics. We introduce a simulation-based the bulk water. Bulk water is free to move and continuously data mining approach that quantitatively model the exchanges with hydration water, and indirectly influences on structure of water surrounding a protein as clusters the protein [Bizzarri and Cannistraro, 2002], [Halle, 2004]. of water molecules having similar moving behavior. Much effort has been devoted to quantitatively model the The paper presents and explains how the advances relative motion (orientation, rotation and velocity) and dynamical of AI technique can potentially solve this properties of individual water molecules in protein challenging data-intensive problem.

This paper presents a new Monte-Carlo search algorithm for very large sequential decision-making problems. We apply non-linear regression within Monte-Carlo search, online, to estimate a state-action value function from the outcomes of random roll-outs. This value function generalizes between related states and actions, and can therefore provide more accurate evaluations after fewer rollouts. A further significant advantage of this approach is its ability to automatically extract and leverage domain knowledge from external sources such as game manuals. We apply our algorithm to the game of Civilization II, a challenging multi-agent strategy game with an enormous state space and around 10^21 joint actions. We approximate the value function by a neural network, augmented by linguistic knowledge that is extracted automatically from the official game manual. We show that this non-linear value function is significantly more efficient than a linear value function, which is itself more efficient than Monte-Carlo tree search. Our non-linear Monte-Carlo search wins over 78% of games against the built-in AI of Civilization II.

Deep space missions are characterized by severely constrained communication links. To meet the needs of future missions and increase their scientific return, future space systems will require an increased level of autonomy on-board. In this work, we propose a comprehensive approach to on-board autonomy relying on model-based reasoning, and encompassing many important reasoning capabilities such as plan generation, validation, execution and monitoring, FDIR, and run-time diagnosis. The controlled platform is represented symbolically, and the reasoning capabilities are seen as symbolic manipulation of such formal model. We have developed a prototype of our framework, implemented within an on-board Autonomous Reasoning Engine. We have evaluated our approach on two case-studies inspired by real-world, ongoing projects, and characterized it in terms of reliability, availability and performance.

Human environments are challenging for robots, which need to be trainable by lay people and learn new behaviours rapidly without disrupting much the ongoing activity. A system that integrates AI techniques for planning and learning is here proposed to satisfy these strong demands. The approach rapidly learns planning operators from few action experiences using a competitive strategy where many alternatives of cause-effect explanations are evaluated in parallel, and the most successful ones are used to generate the operators. The success of a cause-effect explanation is evaluated by a probabilistic estimate that compensates the lack of experience, producing more confident estimations and speeding up the learning in relation to other known estimates. The system operates without task interruption by integrating in the planning-learning loop a human teacher that supports the planner in making decisions. All the mechanisms are integrated and synchronized in the robot using a general decision-making framework. The feasibility and scalability of the architecture are evaluated in two different robot platforms: a Stäubli arm, and the humanoid ARMAR III.

The possibility that influenza activity can be generally detected through search log analysis has been explored in recent years. However, previous studies have mainly focused on influenza, and little attention has been paid to other epidemics. With an analysis of web user behavior data, we consider the problem of predicting the tendency of hand-foot -and-mouth disease  (HFMD), whose out-break in 2010 resulted in a great panic in China. In addi-tion to search queries, we consider users’ interactions with search engines. Given the collected search logs, we cluster HFMD-related search queries, medical pages and news reports into the following sets: epidemic-related queries (ERQs), epidemic-related pages (ERPs) and ep-idemic-related news (ERNs). Furthermore, we count their own frequencies as different features, and we conduct a regression analysis with current HFMD occurrences. The experimental results show that these features exhibit good performances on both accuracy and timeliness.