Industry
AAAI-96 Workshop on Agent Modeling
Tambe, Milind, Gmytrasiewicz, Piotr
Interestingly, the advantage for more effective access to traditional applications of agent of modeling others is diminished global and corporate information modeling, which requires an agent to when the volatility of the domain is repositories. These repositories are model the problem-solving processes low. Thus, the models of other agents increasingly multimedia, including of the interacting human to provide are more useful in variable domains, text, audio, graphics, imagery, and video. Now attention has turned appropriate feedback. Ole Mengshoel when they are a particularly valuable guide to predict what the other rational toward the problem of processing and D. C. Wilkins's (both of University agents are going to do. and managing multiple and heterogeneous of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) media in a principled manner, presentation focused on recognizing
Towards Flexible Teamwork
Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains obstruct coherent teamwork. In particular, team members often encounter differing, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent views of their environment. Furthermore, team members can unexpectedly fail in fulfilling responsibilities or discover unexpected opportunities. Highly flexible coordination and communication is key in addressing such uncertainties. Simply fitting individual agents with precomputed coordination plans will not do, for their inflexibility can cause severe failures in teamwork, and their domain-specificity hinders reusability. Our central hypothesis is that the key to such flexibility and reusability is providing agents with general models of teamwork. Agents exploit such models to autonomously reason about coordination and communication, providing requisite flexibility. Furthermore, the models enable reuse across domains, both saving implementation effort and enforcing consistency. This article presents one general, implemented model of teamwork, called STEAM. The basic building block of teamwork in STEAM is joint intentions (Cohen & Levesque, 1991b); teamwork in STEAM is based on agents' building up a (partial) hierarchy of joint intentions (this hierarchy is seen to parallel Grosz & Kraus's partial SharedPlans, 1996). Furthermore, in STEAM, team members monitor the team's and individual members' performance, reorganizing the team as necessary. Finally, decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate sensitivity to the environmental conditions. This article describes STEAM's application in three different complex domains, and presents detailed empirical results.
Worldwide Perspectives and Trends in Expert Systems: An Analysis Based on the Three World Congresses on Expert Systems
Some people believe that the expert system field is dead, yet others believe it is alive and well. To gain a better insight into these possible views, the first three world congresses on expert systems (which typically attract representatives from some 45-50 countries) are used to determine the health of the global expert system field in terms of applied technologies, applications, and management. This article highlights some of these findings.
SAVVYSEARCH: A Metasearch Engine That Learns Which Search Engines to Query
Howe, Adele E., Dreilinger, Daniel
Search engines are among the most successful applications on the web today. So many search engines have been created that it is difficult for users to know where they are, how to use them, and what topics they best address. Metasearch engines reduce the user burden by dispatching queries to multiple search engines in parallel. The SAVVYSEARCH metasearch engine is designed to efficiently query other search engines by carefully selecting those search engines likely to return useful results and responding to fluctuating load demands on the web.
AAAI News
Behind were maneuvering through an officelike The Fourteenth National Conference the playing lies years of research in environment, getting from one on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97) imbuing machines with the intelligence location to another. Then the tasks and the Ninth Conference on Innovative to plan strategies based on a became more complex as they had to Applications of Artificial Intelligence changing environment. The implications find an object, for example, and transport (IAAI-97) will be held in of such problem-solving abilities it from point A to point B. Providence, Rhode Island, from 27-lie far beyond the game board, Now the events are becoming 31 July 1997. The Third International and the programs' authors will be on more closely linked to real-world Conference on Knowledge Discovery hand to discuss the technical and social tasks. There are four events this year.
LIFESTYLE FINDER: Intelligent User Profiling Using Large-Scale Demographic Data
A number of approaches have been advanced for taking data about a user's likes and dislikes and generating a general profile of the user. These profiles can be used to retrieve documents matching user interests; recommend music, movies, or other similar products; or carry out other tasks in a specialized fashion. This article presents a fundamentally new method for generating user profiles that takes advantage of a large-scale database of demographic data. These data are used to generalize user-specified data along the patterns common across the population, including areas not represented in the user's original data. I describe the method in detail and present its implementation in the LIFESTYLE FINDER agent, an internet-based experiment testing our approach on more than 20,006 users worldwide.
On the Other Hand
Hayes, Patrick J., Ford, Kenneth M.
Date: 4/1/2002 WASA -- World Aeronautics & Space Administration Executive Summary of Committee Report on Disaster Investigation, Incident # 362 Analysis of records downloaded from the 2001 Jupiter Orbital Black Parallelopiped Investigation Mission indicates that the basic source of failure was excessive emotional stress in the HAL computer, leading to a previously unknown condition now called Computational Paranoia. This in turn was an unforeseen side-effect of the design of the HAL-9000 series. HAL was given a genuine personality, enabling it to act as an onboard psychiatric advisor, colleague, and confidante to the human crew members. As a consequence, much of HAL's perceptual software was devoted to reading subtleties of facial expression, unconscious intonation stresses, and other emotional signals. Its performance at empathy and emotional insight was at least two orders of magnitude (as measured by the Kraft-Ebbing-Rachmaninoff method) better than that of the rest of the crew.
Worldwide Perspectives and Trends in Expert Systems: An Analysis Based on the Three World Congresses on Expert Systems
Some people believe that the expert system field is dead, yet others believe it is alive and well. To gain a better insight into these possible views, the first three world congresses on expert systems (which typically attract representatives from some 45-50 countries) are used to determine the health of the global expert system field in terms of applied technologies, applications, and management. This article highlights some of these findings.
Artificial Intelligence: What Works and What Doesn't?
AI has been well supported by government research and development dollars for decades now, and people are beginning to ask hard questions: What really works? What are the limits? What doesn't work as advertised? What isn't likely to work? What isn't affordable? This article holds a mirror up to the community, both to provide feedback and stimulate more self-assessment. The significant accomplishments and strengths of the field are highlighted. The research agenda, strategy, and heuristics are reviewed, and a change of course is recommend-ed to improve the field's ability to produce reusable and interoperable components.
Moving Up the Information Food Chain: Deploying Softbots on the World Wide Web
I view the World Wide Web as an information food chain. The maze of pages and hyperlinks that comprise the Web are at the very bottom of the chain. The WEBCRAWLERs and ALTAVISTAs of the world are information herbivores; they graze on Web pages and regurgitate them as searchable indices. Today, most Web users feed near the bottom of the information food chain, but the time is ripe to move up. Since 1991, we have been building information carnivores, which intelligently hunt and feast on herbivores in UNIX, on the Internet, and on the Web. Information carnivores will become increasingly critical as the Web continues to grow and as more naive users are exposed to its chaotic jumble.