Sequential decision tasks present many opportunities for the study of transfer learning. A principal one among them is the existence of multiple domains that share the same underlying causal structure for actions. We describe an approach that exploits this shared causal structure to discover a hierarchical task structure in a source domain, which in turn speeds up learning of task execution knowledge in a new target domain. Our approach is theoretically justified and compares favorably to manually designed task hierarchies in learning efficiency in the target domain. We demonstrate that causally motivated task hierarchies transfer more robustly than other kinds of detailed knowledge that depend on the idiosyncrasies of the source domain and are hence less transferable.

Modern Internet services, such as those at Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, handle billions of requests per day on clusters of thousands of computers. Because these services operate under strict performance requirements, a statistical understanding of their performance is of great practical interest. Such services are modeled by networks of queues, where each queue models one of the computers in the system. A key challenge is that the data are incomplete, because recording detailed information about every request to a heavily used system can require unacceptable overhead. In this paper we develop a Bayesian perspective on queueing models in which the arrival and departure times that are not observed are treated as latent variables. Underlying this viewpoint is the observation that a queueing model defines a deterministic transformation between the data and a set of independent variables called the service times. With this viewpoint in hand, we sample from the posterior distribution over missing data and model parameters using Markov chain Monte Carlo. We evaluate our framework on data from a benchmark Web application. We also present a simple technique for selection among nested queueing models. We are unaware of any previous work that considers inference in networks of queues in the presence of missing data.

Structural equation models and Bayesian networks have been widely used to analyze causal relations between continuous variables. In such frameworks, linear acyclic models are typically used to model the data-generating process of variables. Recently, it was shown that use of non-Gaussianity identifies the full structure of a linear acyclic model, i.e., a causal ordering of variables and their connection strengths, without using any prior knowledge on the network structure, which is not the case with conventional methods. However, existing estimation methods are based on iterative search algorithms and may not converge to a correct solution in a finite number of steps. In this paper, we propose a new direct method to estimate a causal ordering and connection strengths based on non-Gaussianity. In contrast to the previous methods, our algorithm requires no algorithmic parameters and is guaranteed to converge to the right solution within a small fixed number of steps if the data strictly follows the model.

To maximize its success, an AGI typically needs to explore its initially unknown world. Is there an optimal way of doing so? Here we derive an affirmative answer for a broad class of environments.

The challenges of effective health risk communication are well known. This paper provides pointers to the health communication literature that discuss these problems. Tailoring printed information, visual displays, and interactive multimedia have been proposed in the health communication literature as promising approaches. On-line risk communication applications are increasing on the internet. However, potential effectiveness of applications using conventional computer technology is limited. We propose that use of artificial intelligence, building upon research in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, might be able to overcome these limitations.

One challenge of building and maintaining large-scale data management systems is managing data fusion from multiple data sources. Often times, different data sources may represent the same data element in a slightly different way. These differences may represent an error in the data or a disagreement between sources on the correct value that best represents the data point. When the quantity of data managed and fused becomes sufficiently large, manual review becomes impossible, and automated systems must be built to manage data fusion. Some of the traditional solutions use simple voting theory, Dempster-Shafer theory, fuzzy matching and incremental learning. This paper presents a novel approach to data fusion in the domain of business listings. The task at hand, business listing categorization, suffers from conflicting and incomplete data from disparate data sources. Given the need for a high degree of accuracy in this task, we use a combination of case-based reasoning, joint probability, and domain-specific rules to improve data accuracy above other methods.

We introduce CIM, a Commonsense Inference Memory system utilizing both Extended Semantic Networks and Bayesian Networks that builds upon the commonsense knowledgebase ConceptNet. CIM introduces a new technique for self-assembling Bayesian Networks that allows only relevant parts of the commonsense database to affect the inference. The Bayesian Network include the activity in the input sentences and the related activities appearing in the commonsense database. They are used to interpret and infer the meaning of the set of sentences input. Without self-assembled networks, only relevant inference is performed, speeding up performance of reasoning with commonsense knowledge. We demonstrate that our system can disambiguate the needs of the user even if they do not state them directly, and do not use keywords. This ability would not be possible without either the use of commonsense or significant training. Eventually this approach may be applied to increase the effectiveness of other natural language understanding techniques as well.

Sustainability requires emphasizing the importance of environmental causes and effects among design knowledge from heterogeneous stakeholders to make a sustainable decision. Recently, such causes and effects have been well developed in ontological representation, which has been challenged to generate and integrate multiple domain knowledge due to its domain specific characteristics. Moreover, it is too challengeable to represent heterogeneous, domain-specific design knowledge in a standardized way. Causal knowledge can meet the necessity of knowledge integration in domains. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a causal knowledge integration system with the authors’ previous mathematical causal knowledge representation.

Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search, for instance, the relevance of documents to a query on breaking news often changes significantly over time, requiring effective adaptation to user intention. In this paper, we focus on recency search and study a number of algorithms to improve ranking results by leveraging user click feedback. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we use real search sessions collected in a random exploration bucket for \emph{reliable} offline evaluation of these algorithms, which provides an unbiased comparison across algorithms without online bucket tests. Second, we propose a re-ranking approach to improve search results for recency queries using user clicks. Third, our empirical comparison of a dozen algorithms on real-life search data suggests importance of a few algorithmic choices in these applications, including generalization across different query-document pairs, specialization to popular queries, and real-time adaptation of user clicks.

Scientific advances over the past 150 years, particularly in the medical field, have allowed the extension of life expectancy in western countries and this trend seems to increase in future years. Conservative estimates suggest that by 2030 in EU countries the proportion of people over 60 years regard the entire population will be around 50%; this means that we will see a gradual increase in the number of those subjects with chronic diseases (ie diseases not involving healing), that will therefore increase the cost and effort over health care facilities [1]. As consequence of the exponential growth of hardware and software infrastructure it is possible to rethink the whole approach to the treatment of complex chronic disease, by limiting the hospitalization only to a severe worsening of patient's condition. This was the original idea behind the CHRONIOUS project: constructing a generic platform to monitor, in an unobtrusive way, a chronic disease patient with two goals[2]: - Improve the patients quality of life, by reducing as much as possible the hospitalizations.