When the artist Thomas Jackson began working on "Emergent Behavior," in 2011, he started with found objects. He collected fallen leaves in the Catskills and picked junk off the street in New York, then moved on to purchasing hundreds of cups and cheese balls, construction fences, glow necklaces, hula hoops, and balloons. He assembles these objects on outdoor frameworks, then photographs the installations. The resulting pictures show inanimate objects caught up in restless movement: some circle, some gather, some dip. In the color palette of a birthday party, Jackson's bits of plastic and rubber evoke schools of fish that move like ink in the water, or birds streaking the sky.

Artificial Intelligence Is It Real? Artificial intelligence could improve diagnostic power of lung function tests European Lung ...

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called on Saturday for greater global cooperation against terrorism, state media said, as the Asian giant seeks greater international support for its anti-terror fight. Speaking at an Asia-Europe summit, Li said various security challenges - conventional and unconventional - remain prominent even though those regions had remained generally stable and peaceful. "Acts of terrorism are common challenges faced by every nation. Countries should work more closely to fight terrorism, and build societies that are truly open and tolerant so to root out the soil where it grows," said Li. China has sought Western support for its own "war on terror" since the attacks in Paris last November.

Celaton's inSTREAM software streamlines the handling of unstructured unpredictable (and structured) content such as correspondence, claims, complaints and invoices that organizations receive by email, social media, fax and paper. This minimizes the need for human intervention and ensures that only accurate, relevant and structured data enters business systems. Unique to inSTREAM is its ability to learn through the natural consequence of processing information and collaborating with people. Capgemini's extensive knowledge and experience in business process services will also enable Celaton to accelerate and improve inSTREAM's capabilities. The cooperation will enable Capgemini to increase efficiency, shorten turnaround times and enhance quality in areas where incoming documents and queries need to be processed, improving overall customer satisfaction.

Vice President Joe Biden will push for international cooperation in the fight against cancer in a speech at the Vatican. The vice president's office says the address on Friday will look at global research partnerships and will describe how his cancer "moonshot" project may have an international impact. Biden is due to speak at an international conference on breakthroughs in regenerative medicine. The gathering of doctors, patients and researchers is hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Stem for Life Foundation. Biden's office says the vice president will visit with Pope Francis during the stop.

There has been a great deal of interest in AI recently in applying Nevertheless, the intuition that underlies sequential and ideas of game theory to model interacting agents who perfect equilibrium, namely, players should play optimally have possibly different preferences as to the outcome of the even off the equilibrium path, seems to make sense even interaction.

In cooperative multi-agent sequential decision making under uncertainty, agents must coordinate to find an optimal joint policy that maximises joint value. Typical algorithms exploit additive structure in the value function, but in the fully-observable multi-agent MDP (MMDP) setting such structure is not present. We propose a new optimal solver for transition-independent MMDPs, in which agents can only affect their own state but their reward depends on joint transitions. We represent these dependencies compactly in conditional return graphs (CRGs). Using CRGs the value of a joint policy and the bounds on partially specified joint policies can be efficiently computed. We propose CoRe, a novel branch-and-bound policy search algorithm building on CRGs. CoRe typically requires less runtime than available alternatives and finds solutions to previously unsolvable problems.

In crowded multi-agent navigation environments, the motion of the agents is significantly constrained by the motion of the nearby agents. This makes planning paths very difficult and leads to inefficient global motion. To address this problem, we propose a new distributed approach to coordinate the motions of agents in crowded environments. With our approach, agents take into account the velocities and goals of their neighbors and optimize their motion accordingly and in real-time. We experimentally validate our coordination approach in a variety of scenarios and show that its performance scales to scenarios with hundreds of agents.

As a part of the workshop on Distributed and Multiagent Planning (DMAP) at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2015, we have organized a competition in distributed and multiagent planning. The main aims of the competition were to consolidate the planners in terms of input format; to promote development of multiagent planners both inside and outside of the multiagent research community; and to provide a proof-of-concept of a potential future multiagent planning track of the International Planning Competition (IPC). In this paper we summarize course and highlights of the competition.

Communication between agents has the potential to improve team performance of collaborative tasks. However, communication is not free in most domains, requiring agents to reason about the costs and benefits of sharing information. In this work, we develop an online, decentralized communication policy, ConTaCT, that enables agents to decide whether or not to communicate during time-critical collaborative tasks in unknown, deterministic environments. Our approach is motivated by real-world applications, including the coordination of disaster response and search and rescue teams. These settings motivate a model structure that explicitly represents the world model as initially unknown but deterministic in nature, and that de-emphasizes uncertainty about action outcomes. Simulated experiments are conducted in which ConTaCT is compared to other multi-agent communication policies, and results indicate that ConTaCT achieves comparable task performance while substantially reducing communication overhead.