There is a wealth of information on the Web about any number of topics. Many communities in developing regions are often interested in information relating to specific topics. For example, health workers are interested in specific medical information regarding epidemic diseases in their region while teachers and students are interested in educational information relating to their curriculum. This paper presents the design of Contextual Information Portals, searchable information portals that contain a vertical slice of the Web about arbitrary topics tailored to a specific context. Contextual portals are particularly useful for communities that lack Internet or Web access or in regions with very poor network connectivity. This paper outlines the design space for constructing contextual information portals and describes the key technical challenges involved. We have implemented a proof-of-concept of our ideas, and performed an initial evaluation on a variety of topics relating to epidemiology, agriculture, and education.

This paper presents an approach for mining agricultural problems that have been accumulated in a textual database over a period of 5 years. The problems, which are accompanied by their solutions, offer a wealth of knowledge that can be used by decision makers, researchers, and farmers alike. However, this wealth of knowledge can not be unlocked without a) representing these problems in a structured format, and b) applying algorithms that can summarize and analyze this information. Towards the achievement of the first goal, a multi-faceted object extraction methodology is presented, and for the achievement of the second, association rules are employed. As a proof of concept, the tool was applied of a set of weed problems. The presented methodology can be modified to work with any help and support textual database where both problems and their solutions are present.

Road traffic accidents (RTAs) are a major public health concern, resulting in an estimated 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries worldwide each year. In the developing world, RTAs are among the leading cause of death and injury; Ethiopia in particular experiences the highest rate of such accidents. Thus, methods to reduce accident severity are of great interest to traffic agencies and the public at large. In this work, we applied data mining technologies to link recorded road characteristics to accident severity in Ethiopia, and developed a set of rules that could be used by the Ethiopian Traffic Agency to improve safety.

Human trafficking is a multi-dimensional problem for which we have incomplete data, limited knowledge of the exploiters, and no understanding of the dynamics of the process. It is a problem that requires a larger, more complete database, understanding of key actors and their interactions in a dynamic environment. These methods exist in the areas of Data Mining, Machine Learning, Network Analysis, and Multi-agent systems. Using these methods, it is possible to create a model which is unique to detecting and preventing human trafficking. These methods can give applicable and successful solutions for different components of the problem of human trafficking. The goal is to build an intelligent system to enable collaboration and analysis, to identify and profile victims, traffickers, buyers, and exploiters, to predict human trafficking patterns, and to disrupt and destabilize human trafficking networks. In this paper, I will outline how some of these methods may be able to help analyze and model the dynamic phenomenon of human trafficking. The purpose is to see whether, using intelligent systems and appropriate collaboration and analysis tools, optimized intervention strategies can be created to profile victims and traffickers as well as impact, dissolve, and disrupt the human trafficking network in such a way that the network is unable to recover.

This collection contains a set of articles and position papers Our main goal in organizing the AAAI Spring Symposium on topics in artificial intelligence for development at Stanford on Artificial Intelligence for Development has (AID). Each paper explores one or more opportunities for been to bring together a critical mass of researchers who harnessing AI to promote the socioeconomic development share an interest in applying AI research to development and enhance the quality of life of disadvantaged populations, challenges. We hope that the meeting will catalyze new research including people living within developing countries. Insightful applications of machine learning, reasoning, We note that the use of machine intelligence has been pursued planning, and perception have the potential to bring great before in projects within the information and communication value to disadvantaged populations in a wide array of areas, technologies for development (ICT-D) community. We hope that can extend medical care to remote regions through this new collection of papers, and the presentations, panels, automated diagnosis and effective triaging of limited and discussions at the AID symposium, will help to further medical expertise and transportation resources.

Some manufacturers provide benchmarks for individual sensors but we found no benchmarks that take a holistic view of the overall screening procedures and no benchmarks that take operator variability into account. Just adding up resources and manpower used is not an effective way for assessing systems where human decision-making and operator compliance to rules play a vital role. Our aim is to develop a decision support tool (cargo-screening system simulator) that will map the right technology and manpower to the right commodity-threat combination in order to maximise detection rates. In this paper we present our ideas for developing such a system and highlight the research challenges we have identified. Then we introduce our first case study and report on the progress we have made so far. Keywords: port security, cargo screening, modelling and simulation, decision support, detection rate matrix 1. INTRODUCTION The primary goal of cargo screening at sea ports and air ports is to detect human stowaways, conventional, nuclear, chemical and radiological weapons and other potential threats. This is an extremely difficult task due to the sheer volume of cargo being moved through ports between countries. For example in sea freight, 200 million containers are moved through 220 ports around the globe every year; this is 90% of all non bulk sea cargo (Dorndorf, Herbers, Panascia, and Zimmermann 2007). Little is known about the efficiency of current cargo screening processes as few benchmarks exist against which they could be measured (e.g.

Previous work has shown that robot navigation systems that employ an architecture based upon the idiotypic network theory of the immune system have an advantage over control techniques that rely on reinforcement learning only. This is thought to be a result of intelligent behaviour selection on the part of the idiotypic robot. In this paper an attempt is made to imitate idiotypic dynamics by creating controllers that use reinforcement with a number of different probabilistic schemes to select robot behaviour. The aims are to show that the idiotypic system is not merely performing some kind of periodic random behaviour selection, and to try to gain further insight into the processes that govern the idiotypic mechanism. Trials are carried out using simulated Pioneer robots that undertake navigation exercises. Results show that a scheme that boosts the probability of selecting highly-ranked alternative behaviours to 50% during stall conditions comes closest to achieving the properties of the idiotypic system, but remains unable to match it in terms of all round performance.

The analysis of system calls is one method employed by anomaly detection systems to recognise malicious code execution. Similarities can be drawn between this process and the behaviour of certain cells belonging to the human immune system, and can be applied to construct an artificial immune system. A recently developed hypothesis in immunology, the Danger Theory, states that our immune system responds to the presence of intruders through sensing molecules belonging to those invaders, plus signals generated by the host indicating danger and damage. We propose the incorporation of this concept into a responsive intrusion detection system, where behavioural information of the system and running processes is combined with information regarding individual system calls.

In this paper, we investigate output accuracy for a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model and Agent Based Simulation (ABS) model. The purpose of this investigation is to find out which of these simulation techniques is the best one for modelling human reactive behaviour in the retail sector. In order to study the output accuracy in both models, we have carried out a validation experiment in which we compared the results from our simulation models to the performance of a real system. Our experiment was carried out using a large UK department store as a case study. We had to determine an efficient implementation of management policy in the store's fitting room using DES and ABS. Overall, we have found that both simulation models were a good representation of the real system when modelling human reactive behaviour.

We consider a living organism as an observer of the evolution of its environment recording sensory information about the state space X of the environment in real time. Sensory information is sampled and then processed on two levels. On the biological level, the organism serves as an evaluation mechanism of the subjective relevance of the incoming data to the observer: the observer assigns excitation values to events in X it could recognize using its sensory equipment. On the algorithmic level, sensory input is used for updating a database - the memory of the observer - whose purpose is to serve as a geometric/combinatorial model of X, whose nodes are weighted by the excitation values produced by the evaluation mechanism. These values serve as a guidance system for deciding how the database should transform as observation data mounts. We define a searching problem for the proposed model and discuss the model's flexibility and its computational efficiency, as well as the possibility of implementing it as a dynamic network of neuron-like units. We show how various easily observable properties of the human memory and thought process can be explained within the framework of this model. These include: reasoning (with efficiency bounds), errors, temporary and permanent loss of information. We are also able to define general learning problems in terms of the new model, such as the language acquisition problem.