Industry
The 2008 Classic Paper Award: Summary and Significance
We at the NASA laboratory believed that our best work came when we simultaneously advanced AI theory and provided immediately usable solutions for current NASA problems. โSolving Large-Scale Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems Using a Heuristic Repair Method,โ by Steve Minton, Mark Johnston, Andy Phillips, and Phil Laird clearly achieved both. It proved that local search and repair was applicable to a wide class of constraint satisfaction problems and clearly explicated the theory behind that proof.
AAAI News
Hamilton, Carol M. (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)
The Doctoral Consortium materials; a workshop for of ideas between basic and applied AI. (DC) provides an opportunity for a mentoring new faculty, instructors, IAAI-11 will consider papers in two group of Ph.D. students to discuss and and graduate students on teaching; an tracks: (1) deployed application case explore their research interests and career Educational Video Track within the studies and (2) emerging applications objectives with a panel of established AAAI-11 Video program; and a Student/Educator or methodologies.
Reports of the AAAI 2010 Conference Workshops
Aha, David W. (Naval Research Laboratory) | Boddy, Mark (Adventium Labs) | Bulitko, Vadim (University of Alberta) | Garcez, Artur S. d' (City University London) | Avila (University of Georgia) | Doshi, Prashant (TZI, Bremen University) | Edelkamp, Stefan (University of Edinburgh) | Geib, Christopher (University of Illinois, Chicago) | Gmytrasiewicz, Piotr (Smart Information Flow Technologies) | Goldman, Robert P. (Wright State University) | Hitzler, Pascal (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Isbell, Charles (University of Maryland, College Park) | Josyula, Darsana (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Kaelbling, Leslie Pack (University of Bonn) | Kersting, Kristian (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Kunda, Maithilee (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)) | Lamb, Luis C. (Willow Garage) | Marthi, Bhaskara (Georgia Institute of Technology) | McGreggor, Keith (EML Research gGmbH) | Nastase, Vivi (University College Cork) | Provan, Gregory (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) | Raja, Anita (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Ram, Ashwin (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Riedl, Mark (University of California, Berkeley) | Russell, Stuart (Cornell University) | Sabharwal, Ashish (University of Freiburg) | Smaus, Jan-Georg (University of Central Florida) | Sukthankar, Gita (Maastricht University) | Tuyls, Karl (University of New South Wales) | Meyden, Ron van der (Google, Inc.) | Halevy, Alon (University of Maryland) | Mihalkova, Lilyana (University of Wisconsin) | Natarajan, Sriraam
The AAAI-10 Workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 11โ12, 2010 at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. The AAAI-10 workshop program included 13 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were AI and Fun, Bridging the Gap between Task and Motion Planning, Collaboratively-Built Knowledge Sources and Artificial Intelligence, Goal-Directed Autonomy, Intelligent Security, Interactive Decision Theory and Game Theory, Metacognition for Robust Social Systems, Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence, Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning, Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition, Statistical Relational AI, Visual Representations and Reasoning, and Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation. This article presents short summaries of those events.
Dynamic Incentive Mechanisms
Parkes, David C. (Harvard University) | Cavallo, Ruggiero (University of Pennsylvania) | Constantin, Florin (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Singh, Satinder (University of Michigan)
Much of AI is concerned with the design of intelligent agents. A complementary challenge is to understand how to design โrules of encounterโ by which to promote simple, robust and beneficial interactions between multiple intelligent agents. This is a natural development, as AI is increasingly used for automated decision making in real-world settings. As we extend the ideas of mechanism design from economic theory, the mechanisms (or rules) become algorithmic and many new challenges surface. Starting with a short background on mechanism design theory, the aim of this paper is to provide a nontechnical exposition of recent results on dynamic incentive mechanisms, which provide rules for the coordination of agents in sequential decision problems. The framework of dynamic mechanism design embraces coordinated decision-making both in the context of uncertainty about the world external to an agent and also in regard to the dynamics of agent preferences. In addition to tracing some recent developments, we point to ongoing research challenges.
The State of Solving Large Incomplete-Information Games, and Application to Poker
Sandholm, Tuomas (Carnegie Mellon University)
Game-theoretic solution concepts prescribe how rational parties should act, but to become operational the concepts need to be accompanied by algorithms. I will review the state of solving incomplete-information games. They encompass many practical problems such as auctions, negotiations, and security applications. I will discuss them in the context of how they have transformed computer poker. In short, game-theoretic reasoning now scales to many large problems, outperforms the alternatives on those problems, and in some games beats the best humans.
Designing Markets for Prediction
Chen, Yiling (Harvard University) | Pennock, David M. (Yahoo! Research)
In this article, we survey a number of mechanisms created to elicit predictions, many newly proposed within the last decade. We focus on the engineering questions: How do they work and why? What factors and goals are most important in their design? The primary goal of a prediction mechanism is to obtain and aggregate dispersed information, which often exists in tacit forms as beliefs, opinions, or judgements of agents. Coalescing information is a necessary first step for decision making in almost all domains. For example, consider seasonal influenza, a significant cause of illness and death around the world. Although it recurs every year, the geographic location, timing, magnitude, and duration of outbreaks vary widely. Many people possess relevant pieces of the full information puzzle, including doctors who meet patients, clinical microbiologists who perform respiratory culture tests, pharmacists who fill prescriptions, people who have the flu, and people who know people who have the flu.
Algorithmic Game Theory and Artificial Intelligence
Elkind, Edith (Nanyang Technological University) | Leyton-Brown, Kevin (University of British Columbia)
Indeed, game theory now serves as perhaps the main analytical framework in microeconomic theory, as evidenced by its prominent role in economics textbooks (for example, Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green 1995) and by the many Nobel prizes in economic sciences awarded to prominent game theorists. Artificial intelligence got its start shortly after game theory (McCarthy et al. 1955), and indeed pioneers such as von Neumann and Simon made early contributions to both fields (see, for example, Findler [1988], Simon [1981]). Both game theory and AI draw (nonexclusively) on decision theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1947); for example, one prominent view defines artificial intelligence as "the study and construction of rational agents" (Russell and Norvig 2003), and hence takes a decision-theoretic approach when the world is stochastic. However, artificial intelligence spent most of its first 40 years focused on the design and analysis of agents that act in isolation, and hence had little need for game-theoretic analysis. Starting in the mid to late 1990s, game theory became a major topic of study for computer scientists, for at least two main reasons. First, economists began to be interested in systems whose computational properties posed serious barriers to practical use, and hence reached out to computer scientists; notably, this occurred around the study of combinatorial auctions (see, for example, Cramton, Shoham, and Steinberg 2006). Second, the rise of distributed computing in general and the Internet in particular made it increasingly necessary for computer scientists to study settings in which intelligent agents reason about and interact with other agents.
Extracting Features from Ratings: The Role of Factor Models
Selke, Joachim, Balke, Wolf-Tilo
Performing effective preference-based data retrieval requires detailed and preferentially meaningful structurized information about the current user as well as the items under consideration. A common problem is that representations of items often only consist of mere technical attributes, which do not resemble human perception. This is particularly true for integral items such as movies or songs. It is often claimed that meaningful item features could be extracted from collaborative rating data, which is becoming available through social networking services. However, there is only anecdotal evidence supporting this claim; but if it is true, the extracted information could very valuable for preference-based data retrieval. In this paper, we propose a methodology to systematically check this common claim. We performed a preliminary investigation on a large collection of movie ratings and present initial evidence.