Bibliometric analysis and systematic review of AI applied to wastewater treatment. Wastewater treatment technology, economy, management, and reuse were discussed. Prediction accuracy of AI technologies on pollutant removal ranged 0.64–1.00. Application of AI technology could reduce operational costs by up to 30 %. Combined AI methods could provide higher accuracy and lower error. Wastewater treatment is an important step for pollutant reduction and the promotion of water environment quality.

Extending classical probabilistic reasoning using the quantum mechanical view of probability has been of recent interest, particularly in the development of hidden quantum Markov models (HQMMs) to model stochastic processes. However, there has been little progress in characterizing the expressiveness of such models and learning them from data. We tackle these problems by showing that HQMMs are a special subclass of the general class of observable operator models (OOMs) that do not suffer from the \emph{negative probability problem} by design. We also provide a feasible retraction-based learning algorithm for HQMMs using constrained gradient descent on the Stiefel manifold of model parameters. We demonstrate that this approach is faster and scales to larger models than previous learning algorithms.

This thesis proposal makes the following technical contributions: (i) we provide a definition of the Dynamic Influence Maximization Under Uncertainty (or DIME) problem, which models the problem faced by homeless shelters accurately; (ii) we propose a novel Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model for solving the DIME problem; (iii) we design two scalable POMDP algorithms (PSINET and HEALER) for solving the DIME problem, since conventional POMDP solvers fail to scale up to sizes of interest; and (iv) we test our algorithms effectiveness in the real world by conducting a pilot study with actual homeless youth in Los Angeles. The success of this pilot (as explained later) shows the promise of using influence maximization for social good on a larger scale.

The potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle challenging problems that afflict society is enormous, particularly in the areas of healthcare, conservation and public safety and security. Many problems in these domains involve harnessing social networks of under-served communities to enable positive change, e.g., using social networks of homeless youth to raise awareness about Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and other STDs. Unfortunately, most of these real-world problems are characterized by uncertainties about social network structure and influence models, and previous research in AI fails to sufficiently address these uncertainties. This thesis addresses these shortcomings by advancing the state-of-the-art to a new generation of algorithms for interventions in social networks. In particular, this thesis describes the design and development of new influence maximization algorithms which can handle various uncertainties that commonly exist in real-world social networks. These algorithms utilize techniques from sequential planning problems and social network theory to develop new kinds of AI algorithms. Further, this thesis also demonstrates the real-world impact of these algorithms by describing their deployment in three pilot studies to spread awareness about HIV among actual homeless youth in Los Angeles. This represents one of the first-ever deployments of computer science based influence maximization algorithms in this domain. Our results show that our AI algorithms improved upon the state-of-the-art by 160% in the real-world. We discuss research and implementation challenges faced in deploying these algorithms, and lessons that can be gleaned for future deployment of such algorithms. The positive results from these deployments illustrate the enormous potential of AI in addressing societally relevant problems.

Understanding each other is the key to success in collaboration. For humans, attributing mental states to others, the theory of mind, provides the crucial advantage. We argue for formulating human--AI interaction as a multi-agent problem, endowing AI with a computational theory of mind to understand and anticipate the user. To differentiate the approach from previous work, we introduce a categorisation of user modelling approaches based on the level of agency learnt in the interaction. We describe our recent work in using nested multi-agent modelling to formulate user models for multi-armed bandit based interactive AI systems, including a proof-of-concept user study.

This article reviews recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms for large-scale control systems and communication networks, which learn to communicate and cooperate. We provide an overview of this emerging field, with an emphasis on the decentralized setting under different coordination protocols. We highlight the evolution of reinforcement learning algorithms from single-agent to multi-agent systems, from a distributed optimization perspective, and conclude with future directions and challenges, in the hope to catalyze the growing synergy among distributed optimization, signal processing, and reinforcement learning communities.

Junning Huang* 1, Sirui Xie* 2, Jiankai Sun 4, Qiurui Ma 3, Chunxiao Liu 1, Jianping Shi 1, Dahua Lin 4, Bolei Zhou 4 Abstract -- Classical autonomous driving systems are mod-ularized as a pipeline of perception, decision, planning, and control. The driving decision plays a central role in processing the observation from the perception as well as directing the execution of downstream planning and control modules. Commonly the decision module is designed to be rule-based and is difficult to learn from data. Recently end-to-end neural control policy has been proposed to replace this pipeline, given its generalization ability. However, it remains challenging to enforce physical or logical constraints on the decision to ensure driving safety and stability. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework for learning a decision module, which is agnostic to the mechanisms of perception, planning, and control modules. By imitating the low-level control behavior, it learns the high-level driving decisions while bypasses the ambiguous annotation of high-level driving decisions. We demonstrate that the simulation agents with a learned decision module can be generalized to various complex driving scenarios where the rule-based approach fails. Furthermore, it can generate driving behaviors that are smoother and safer than end-to-end neural policies ‡ .

Automatic dialog act recognition is a task that has been widely explored over the years. In recent works, most approaches to the task explored different deep neural network architectures to combine the representations of the words in a segment and generate a segment representation that provides cues for intention. In this study, we explore means to generate more informative segment representations, not only by exploring different network architectures, but also by considering different token representations, not only at the word level, but also at the character and functional levels. At the word level, in addition to the commonly used uncontextualized embeddings, we explore the use of contextualized representations, which are able to provide information concerning word sense and segment structure. Character-level tokenization is important to capture intention-related morphological aspects that cannot be captured at the word level. Finally, the functional level provides an abstraction from words, which shifts the focus to the structure of the segment. Additionally, we explore approaches to enrich the segment representation with context information from the history of the dialog, both in terms of the classifications of the surrounding segments and the turn-taking history. This kind of information has already been proved important for the disambiguation of dialog acts in previous studies. Nevertheless, we are able to capture additional information by considering a summary of the dialog history and a wider turn-taking context. By combining the best approaches at each step, we achieve performance results that surpass the previous state-of-the-art on generic dialog act recognition on both the Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus (SwDA) and the ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act Corpus (MRDA), which are two of the most widely explored corpora for the task. Furthermore, by considering both past and future context, similarly to what happens in an annotation scenario, our approach achieves a performance similar to that of a human annotator on SwDA and surpasses it on MRDA.

Game Theory is a branch of mathematics used to model the strategic interaction between different players in a context with predefined rules and outcomes. Game Theory can also be used to describe many situations in our daily life and Machine Learning models (Figure 1). For example, a Classification algorithm such as SVM (Support Vector Machines) can be explained in terms of a two-player game in which one player is challenging the other to find the best hyper-plane giving him the most difficult points to classify. The game will then converge to a solution which will be a trade-off between the strategic abilities of the two players (eg. Different aspects of Game Theory are commonly used in Artificial Intelligence, I will now introduce you to the Nash Equilibrium, Inverse Game Theory and give you some practical examples.

This paper proposes a formal approach to learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations about the environment made by an agent earlier in the system run and assuming knowledge of a bound on the maximal rate of change of system dynamics. Such an approach generalizes the estimation method commonly used in learning algorithms for unknown Markov decision processes with time-invariant transition probabilities, but is also able to quickly and correctly identify the system dynamics following a change. Based on the proposed method, we generalize the exploration bonuses used in learning for time-invariant Markov decision processes by introducing a notion of uncertainty in a learned time-varying model, and develop a control policy for time-varying Markov decision processes based on the exploitation and exploration trade-off. We demonstrate the proposed methods on four numerical examples: a patrolling task with a change in system dynamics, a two-state MDP with periodically changing outcomes of actions, a wind flow estimation task, and a multi-arm bandit problem with periodically changing probabilities of different rewards.