Humans can manipulate Rubik's cubes with relative ease, but robots have historically had a tougher go of it. That's not to suggest there aren't exceptions to the rule -- an MIT invention recently solved a cube in a record-breaking 0.38 seconds -- but they typically involve purpose-built motors and controls. Encouragingly, a group of researchers at Tencent and the Chinese University of Hong Kong say they've designed a Rubik's cube manipulator that uses multi-fingered hands. "Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a key building block for robots to achieve human-level dexterity, and accomplish everyday tasks which involve rich contact," wrote the researchers. "Despite concerted progress, reliable multi-fingered dexterous hand manipulation has remained an open challenge, due to its complex contact patterns, high dimensional action space, and fragile mechanical structure."

Stream reasoning systems are designed for complex decision-making from possibly infinite, dynamic streams of data. Modern approaches to stream reasoning are usually performing their computations using stand-alone solvers, which incrementally update their internal state and return results as the new portions of data streams are pushed. However, the performance of such approaches degrades quickly as the rates of the input data and the complexity of decision problems are growing. This problem was already recognized in the area of stream processing, where systems became distributed in order to allocate vast computing resources provided by clouds. In this paper we propose a distributed approach to stream reasoning that can efficiently split computations among different solvers communicating their results over data streams. Moreover, in order to increase the throughput of the distributed system, we suggest an interval-based semantics for the LARS language, which enables significant reductions of network traffic. Performed evaluations indicate that the distributed stream reasoning significantly outperforms existing stand-alone LARS solvers when the complexity of decision problems and the rate of incoming data are increasing.

Reiter's HS-Tree is one of the most popular diagnostic search algorithms due to its desirable properties and general applicability. In sequential diagnosis, where the addressed diagnosis problem is subject to successive change through the acquisition of additional knowledge about the diagnosed system, HS-Tree is used in a stateless fashion. That is, the existing search tree is discarded when new knowledge is obtained, albeit often large parts of the tree are still relevant and have to be rebuilt in the next iteration, involving redundant operations and costly reasoner calls. As a remedy to this, we propose DynamicHS, a variant of HS-Tree that avoids these redundancy issues by maintaining state throughout sequential diagnosis while preserving all desirable properties of HS-Tree. Preliminary results of ongoing evaluations in a problem domain where HS-Tree is the state-of-the-art diagnostic method suggest significant time savings achieved by DynamicHS by reducing expensive reasoner calls.

We present a system for online composite event recognition over streaming positions of commercial vehicles. Our system employs a data enrichment module, augmenting the mobility data with external information, such as weather data and proximity to points of interest. In addition, the composite event recognition module, based on a highly optimised logic programming implementation of the Event Calculus, consumes the enriched data and identifies activities that are beneficial in fleet management applications. We evaluate our system on large, real-world data from commercial vehicles, and illustrate its efficiency. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

In a decentralised knowledge representation system such as the W eb of Data, it is common and indeed desirable for different knowledge graphs to overlap. Whenever multiple names are used to denote the same thing, owl:sameAs statements are needed in order to link the data and foster reuse. Whilst the deductive value of such identity statements can be extremely useful in enhancing various knowledge-based systems, incorrect use of identity can have wide-ranging effects in a global knowledge space like the W eb of Data. With several works already proven that identity in the W eb is broken, this survey investigates the current state of this "sameAs problem". An open discussion highlights the main weaknesses suffered by solutions in the literature, and draws open challenges to be faced in the future.

Few things reveal the limits of someone's problem-solving skills faster than a Rubik's Cube, the multicolored, three-dimensional puzzle that has befuddled so many since the 1970s. Though the cube has furrowed countless human brows over the years, it's not much of a challenge for an emerging group of hyper-intelligent machines, as it turns out. This week, the University of California at Irvine announced that an artificial intelligence system solved the puzzle in just over a second, besting the current human world record by more than two seconds. The system, known as DeepCubeA -- a reinforcement-learning algorithm programmed by UCI computer scientists and mathematicians -- solved the puzzle without prior knowledge of the game or coaching from its human handlers, according to the university. The feat is even more impressive considering that there are billions of potential moves available to a Rubik's Cube player, with the puzzle's six sides and nine sections, but only one goal: each of the cube's six sides displaying a solid color.

What do we mean when we say'context'? In essence, context is the information that frames something to give it meaning. Taken on its own, a shout could be anything from an expression of joy to warning. In the context of a structured piece of on-stage Grime, it's what made Stormzy's appearance at Glastonbury the triumph it was. The problem is that context doesn't come free – it has to be discovered.

Specifying a complete domain model is time-consuming, which has been a bottleneck of AI planning technique application in many real-world scenarios. Most classical domain-model learning approaches output a domain model in the form of the declarative planning language, such as STRIPS or PDDL, and solve new planning instances by invoking an existing planner. However, planning in such a representation is sensitive to the accuracy of the learned domain model which probably cannot be used to solve real planning problems. In this paper, to represent domain models in a vectorization representation way, we propose a novel framework based on graph neural network (GNN) integrating model-free learning and model-based planning, called LP-GNN . By embedding propositions and actions in a graph, the latent relationship between them is explored to form a domain-specific heuristics. We evaluate our approach on five classical planning domains, comparing with the classical domain-model learner ARMS. The experimental results show that the domain models learned by our approach are much more effective on solving real planning problems.

"The solution to the Rubik's Cube involves more symbolic, mathematical and abstract thinking, so a deep learning machine that can crack such a puzzle is getting closer to becoming a system that can think, reason, plan and make decisions." An expert system designed for a narrow task, such as only solving a Rubik's Cube will forever be limited to that domain. But a system like DeepCubeA, boasting an adaptable neural net, can be used for other tasks, such as solving complex scientific, mathematical, and engineering problems. Stephen McAleer, a co-author of the new paper, told Gizmodo how this system "is a small step toward creating agents that are able to learn how to think and plan for themselves in new environments." Reinforcement learning works the way it sounds.

Since its invention by a Hungarian architect in 1974, the Rubik's Cube has furrowed the brows of many who have tried to solve it, but the 3-D logic puzzle is no match for an artificial intelligence system created by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm programmed by UCI computer scientists and mathematicians, can find the solution in a fraction of a second, without any specific domain knowledge or in-game coaching from humans. This is no simple task considering that the cube has completion paths numbering in the billions but only one goal state--each of six sides displaying a solid color--which apparently can't be found through random moves. For a study published today in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers demonstrated that DeepCubeA solved 100 percent of all test configurations, finding the shortest path to the goal state about 60 percent of the time. The algorithm also works on other combinatorial games such as the sliding tile puzzle, Lights Out and Sokoban.