Requirements engineering in large-scaled industrial, government, and international projects can be a highly complex process involving thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of potentially distributed stakeholders. As a result, many human intensive tasks in requirements elicitation, analysis, and management processes can be augmented and supported through the use of recommender system and machine learning techniques. In this article we describe several areas in which recommendation technologies have been applied to the requirements engineering domain, namely stakeholder identification, domain analysis, requirements elicitation, and decision support across several requirements analysis and prioritization tasks. We also highlight ongoing challenges and opportunities for applying recommender systems in the requirements engineering domain.

State of the art recommender systems support users in the selection of items from a predefined assortment (for example, movies, books, and songs). In contrast to an explicit definition of each individual item, configurable products such as computers, financial service portfolios, and cars are repre sented in the form of a configuration knowledge base that describes the properties of allowed instances. Although the knowledge representation used is different compared to non-confi gurable products, the decision support requirements remain the same: users have to be supported in finding a solution that fits their wishes and needs. In this article we show how recommendation technologies can be applied for supporting the configuration of products.

Recommender systems have been part of the Internet for almost two decades. Today recommender systems are found in a multitude of online services. However, when we evaluate the current generation of recommender systems from the point of view of the "recommendee," we find that most recommender systems serve the goals of the business instead of their users' interests. We foresee a third wave of recommender systems that act directly on behalf of their users across a range of domains instead of acting as a sales assistant.

Marketers evaluate recommender systems not on its algorithms but on how well the vendor's expertise and interfaces will support achieving business goals. Driven by a business model that pays based on recommendation success, vendors guide clients through continuous optimization of recommendations. While recommender technology is mature, the solutions and market are still young. As a result, solutions are not fully integrated with other business systems and technology platforms.

In a field of research about general reasoning mechanisms, it is essential to have appropriate benchmarks. Ideally, the benchmarks should reflect possible applications of the developed technology. In AI Planning, researchers more and more tend to draw their testing examples from the benchmark collections used in the International Planning Competition (IPC). In the organization of (the deterministic part of) the fourth IPC, IPC-4, the authors therefore invested significant effort to create a useful set of benchmarks. They come from five different (potential) real-world applications of planning: airport ground traffic control, oil derivative transportation in pipeline networks, model-checking safety properties, power supply restoration, and UMTS call setup. Adapting and preparing such an application for use as a benchmark in the IPC involves, at the time, inevitable (often drastic) simplifications, as well as careful choice between, and engineering of, domain encodings. For the first time in the IPC, we used compilations to formulate complex domain features in simple languages such as STRIPS, rather than just dropping the more interesting problem constraints in the simpler language subsets. The article explains and discusses the five application domains and their adaptation to form the PDDL test suites used in IPC-4. We summarize known theoretical results on structural properties of the domains, regarding their computational complexity and provable properties of their topology under the h+ function (an idealized version of the relaxed plan heuristic). We present new (empirical) results illuminating properties such as the quality of the most wide-spread heuristic functions (planning graph, serial planning graph, and relaxed plan), the growth of propositional representations over instance size, and the number of actions available to achieve each fact; we discuss these data in conjunction with the best results achieved by the different kinds of planners participating in IPC-4.

Many Knowledge Bases (KBs) are now readily available and encompass colossal quantities of information thanks to either a long-term funding effort (e.g. WordNet, OpenCyc) or a collaborative process (e.g. Freebase, DBpedia). However, each of them is based on a different rigorous symbolic framework which makes it hard to use their data in other systems. It is unfortunate because such rich structured knowledge might lead to a huge leap forward in many other areas of AI like nat- ural language processing (word-sense disambiguation, natural language understanding, ...), vision (scene classification, image semantic annotation, ...) or collaborative filtering. In this paper, we present a learning process based on an innovative neural network architecture designed to embed any of these symbolic representations into a more flexible continuous vector space in which the original knowledge is kept and enhanced. These learnt embeddings would allow data from any KB to be easily used in recent machine learning meth- ods for prediction and information retrieval. We illustrate our method on WordNet and Freebase and also present a way to adapt it to knowledge extraction from raw text.

Transfer learning aims to solve new learning problems by extracting and making use of the common knowledge found in related domains. A key element of transfer learning is to identify structured knowledge to enable the knowledge transfer. In this article, we describe three of our recent works on transfer learning in a progressively more sophisticated order of the structured knowledge being transferred. We show that optimization methods, and techniques inspired by the concerns of data reuse can be applied to extract and transfer deep structural knowledge between a variety of source and target problems.

This issue of AI Magazine provides extended versions of several papers that were recently presented at the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-2010). We present three articles reflecting deployed applications of AI, one describing a unique, emerging application, plus an article based on the invited talk by Jay M. Tenenbaum, who was the 2010 Engelmore Award recipient.

Challenges for Computing include Learning for Life (Taylor et al, 2008). Grand Research Challenges in Information Systems identifies the need to "provide a teacher for These are amongst the key challenges that AIED responds to. What will next generation AIED learning environments be like? GROE report (Woolf, 2010), in order to highlight the expected role of AIED research.

This book presents a methodology and philosophy of empirical science based on large scale lossless data compression. In this view a theory is scientific if it can be used to build a data compression program, and it is valuable if it can compress a standard benchmark database to a small size, taking into account the length of the compressor itself. This methodology therefore includes an Occam principle as well as a solution to the problem of demarcation. Because of the fundamental difficulty of lossless compression, this type of research must be empirical in nature: compression can only be achieved by discovering and characterizing empirical regularities in the data. Because of this, the philosophy provides a way to reformulate fields such as computer vision and computational linguistics as empirical sciences: the former by attempting to compress databases of natural images, the latter by attempting to compress large text databases. The book argues that the rigor and objectivity of the compression principle should set the stage for systematic progress in these fields. The argument is especially strong in the context of computer vision, which is plagued by chronic problems of evaluation. The book also considers the field of machine learning. Here the traditional approach requires that the models proposed to solve learning problems be extremely simple, in order to avoid overfitting. However, the world may contain intrinsically complex phenomena, which would require complex models to understand. The compression philosophy can justify complex models because of the large quantity of data being modeled (if the target database is 100 Gb, it is easy to justify a 10 Mb model). The complex models and abstractions learned on the basis of the raw data (images, language, etc) can then be reused to solve any specific learning problem, such as face recognition or machine translation.