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AI in (and for) Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This chapter outlines the relation between artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) algorithms and digital games. This relation is two-fold: on one hand, AI/ML researchers can generate large, in-the-wild datasets of human affective activity, player behaviour (i.e. actions within the game world), commercial behaviour, interaction with graphical user interface elements or messaging with other players, while games can utilise intelligent algorithms to automate testing of game levels, generate content, develop intelligent and responsive non-player characters (NPCs) or predict and respond player behaviour across a wide variety of player cultures. In this work, we discuss some of the most common and widely accepted uses of AI/ML in games and how intelligent systems can benefit from those, elaborating on estimating player experience based on expressivity and performance, and on generating proper and interesting content for a language learning game.


Game Plan: What AI can do for Football, and What Football can do for AI

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of both individual players' and coordinated teams' behaviors. The research challenges associated with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators, and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself, but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-the-art and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports (real and virtual).


Revisiting Citizen Science Through the Lens of Hybrid Intelligence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can augment and sometimes even replace human cognition. Inspired by efforts to value human agency alongside productivity, we discuss the benefits of solving Citizen Science (CS) tasks with Hybrid Intelligence (HI), a synergetic mixture of human and artificial intelligence. Currently there is no clear framework or methodology on how to create such an effective mixture. Due to the unique participant-centered set of values and the abundance of tasks drawing upon both human common sense and complex 21st century skills, we believe that the field of CS offers an invaluable testbed for the development of HI and human-centered AI of the 21st century, while benefiting CS as well. In order to investigate this potential, we first relate CS to adjacent computational disciplines. Then, we demonstrate that CS projects can be grouped according to their potential for HI-enhancement by examining two key dimensions: the level of digitization and the amount of knowledge or experience required for participation. Finally, we propose a framework for types of human-AI interaction in CS based on established criteria of HI. This "HI lens" provides the CS community with an overview of several ways to utilize the combination of AI and human intelligence in their projects. It also allows the AI community to gain ideas on how developing AI in CS projects can further their own field.


Why AI is Harder Than We Think

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment ("AI spring") and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding ("AI winter"). Even with today's seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational companions has turned out to be much harder than many people expected. One reason for these repeating cycles is our limited understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself. In this paper I describe four fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field. I conclude by discussing the open questions spurred by these fallacies, including the age-old challenge of imbuing machines with humanlike common sense.


Learning future terrorist targets through temporal meta-graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In the last 20 years, terrorism has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive economic, political, and humanitarian crises in several regions of the world. Using real-world data on attacks occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2018, we propose the use of temporal meta-graphs and deep learning to forecast future terrorist targets. Focusing on three event dimensions, i.e., employed weapons, deployed tactics and chosen targets, meta-graphs map the connections among temporally close attacks, capturing their operational similarities and dependencies. From these temporal meta-graphs, we derive 2-day-based time series that measure the centrality of each feature within each dimension over time. Formulating the problem in the context of the strategic behavior of terrorist actors, these multivariate temporal sequences are then utilized to learn what target types are at the highest risk of being chosen. The paper makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates that engineering the feature space via temporal meta-graphs produces richer knowledge than shallow time-series that only rely on frequency of feature occurrences. Second, the performed experiments reveal that bi-directional LSTM networks achieve superior forecasting performance compared to other algorithms, calling for future research aiming at fully discovering the potential of artificial intelligence to counter terrorist violence.


Cetacean Translation Initiative: a roadmap to deciphering the communication of sperm whales

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The past decade has witnessed a groundbreaking rise of machine learning for human language analysis, with current methods capable of automatically accurately recovering various aspects of syntax and semantics - including sentence structure and grounded word meaning - from large data collections. Recent research showed the promise of such tools for analyzing acoustic communication in nonhuman species. We posit that machine learning will be the cornerstone of future collection, processing, and analysis of multimodal streams of data in animal communication studies, including bioacoustic, behavioral, biological, and environmental data. Cetaceans are unique non-human model species as they possess sophisticated acoustic communications, but utilize a very different encoding system that evolved in an aquatic rather than terrestrial medium. Sperm whales, in particular, with their highly-developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete click-based encoding make for an excellent starting point for advanced machine learning tools that can be applied to other animals in the future. This paper details a roadmap toward this goal based on currently existing technology and multidisciplinary scientific community effort. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive bioacoustic data of sperm whales, detecting their basic communication units and language-like higher-level structures, and validating these models through interactive playback experiments. The technological capabilities developed by such an undertaking are likely to yield cross-applications and advancements in broader communities investigating non-human communication and animal behavioral research.


Interval-censored Hawkes processes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Hawkes processes are a popular means of modeling the event times of self-exciting phenomena, such as earthquake strikes or tweets on a topical subject. Classically, these models are fit to historical event time data via likelihood maximization. However, in many scenarios, the exact times of historical events are not recorded for either privacy (e.g., patient admittance to hospitals) or technical limitations (e.g., most transport data records the volume of vehicles passing loop detectors but not the individual times). The interval-censored setting denotes when only the aggregate counts of events at specific time intervals are observed. Fitting the parameters of interval-censored Hawkes processes requires designing new training objectives that do not rely on the exact event times. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate the parameters of a Hawkes process in interval-censored settings. Our model builds upon the existing Hawkes Intensity Process (HIP) of in several important directions. First, we observe that while HIP is formulated in terms of expected intensities, it is more natural to work instead with expected counts; further, one can express the latter as the solution to an integral equation closely related to the defining equation of HIP. Second, we show how a non-homogeneous Poisson approximation to the Hawkes process admits a tractable likelihood in the interval-censored setting; this approximation recovers the original HIP objective as a special case, and allows for the use of a broader class of Bregman divergences as loss function. Third, we explicate how to compute a tighter approximation to the ground truth in the likelihood. Finally, we show how our model can incorporate information about varying interval lengths. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data confirm our HIPPer model outperforms HIP and several other baselines on the task of interval-censored inference.


Meta-tuning Language Models to Answer Prompts Better

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large pretrained language models like GPT-3 have acquired a surprising ability to perform zero-shot classification (ZSC). For example, to classify review sentiments, we can "prompt" the language model with the review and the question "Is the review positive?" as the context, and ask it to predict whether the next word is "Yes" or "No". However, these models are not specialized for answering these prompts. To address this weakness, we propose meta-tuning, which trains the model to specialize in answering prompts but still generalize to unseen tasks. To create the training data, we aggregated 43 existing datasets, annotated 441 label descriptions in total, and unified them into the above question answering (QA) format. After meta-tuning, our model outperforms a same-sized QA model for most labels on unseen tasks, and we forecast that the performance would improve for even larger models. Therefore, measuring ZSC performance on non-specialized language models might underestimate their true capability, and community-wide efforts on aggregating datasets and unifying their formats can help build models that understand prompts better.


Characterization of Time-variant and Time-invariant Assessment of Suicidality on Reddit using C-SSRS

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S (1999-2019). However, predicting when someone will attempt suicide has been nearly impossible. In the modern world, many individuals suffering from mental illness seek emotional support and advice on well-known and easily-accessible social media platforms such as Reddit. While prior artificial intelligence research has demonstrated the ability to extract valuable information from social media on suicidal thoughts and behaviors, these efforts have not considered both severity and temporality of risk. The insights made possible by access to such data have enormous clinical potential - most dramatically envisioned as a trigger to employ timely and targeted interventions (i.e., voluntary and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization) to save lives. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by developing deep learning algorithms to assess suicide risk in terms of severity and temporality from Reddit data based on the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). In particular, we employ two deep learning approaches: time-variant and time-invariant modeling, for user-level suicide risk assessment, and evaluate their performance against a clinician-adjudicated gold standard Reddit corpus annotated based on the C-SSRS. Our results suggest that the time-variant approach outperforms the time-invariant method in the assessment of suicide-related ideations and supportive behaviors (AUC:0.78), while the time-invariant model performed better in predicting suicide-related behaviors and suicide attempt (AUC:0.64). The proposed approach can be integrated with clinical diagnostic interviews for improving suicide risk assessments.


The Duo of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data for Industry 4.0: Review of Applications, Techniques, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing need for economic, safe, and sustainable smart manufacturing combined with novel technological enablers, has paved the way for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data in support of smart manufacturing. This implies a substantial integration of AI, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Robotics, Big data, Blockchain, 5G communications, in support of smart manufacturing and the dynamical processes in modern industries. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of different aspects of AI and Big Data in Industry 4.0 with a particular focus on key applications, techniques, the concepts involved, key enabling technologies, challenges, and research perspective towards deployment of Industry 5.0. In detail, we highlight and analyze how the duo of AI and Big Data is helping in different applications of Industry 4.0. We also highlight key challenges in a successful deployment of AI and Big Data methods in smart industries with a particular emphasis on data-related issues, such as availability, bias, auditing, management, interpretability, communication, and different adversarial attacks and security issues. In a nutshell, we have explored the significance of AI and Big data towards Industry 4.0 applications through panoramic reviews and discussions. We believe, this work will provide a baseline for future research in the domain.