Along with the rapid growth and rise to prominence of food delivery platforms, concerns have also risen about the terms of employment of the gig workers underpinning this growth. Our analysis on data derived from a real-world food delivery platform across three large cities from India show that there is significant inequality in the money delivery agents earn. In this paper, we formulate the problem of fair income distribution among agents while also ensuring timely food delivery. We establish that the problem is not only NP-hard but also inapproximable in polynomial time. We overcome this computational bottleneck through a novel matching algorithm called FairFoody. Extensive experiments over real-world food delivery datasets show FairFoody imparts up to 10 times improvement in equitable income distribution when compared to baseline strategies, while also ensuring minimal impact on customer experience.

Robotized warehouses are deployed to automatically distribute millions of items brought by the massive logistic orders from e-commerce. A key to automated item distribution is to plan paths for robots, also known as task planning, where each task is to deliver racks with items to pickers for processing and then return the rack back. Prior solutions are unfit for large-scale robotized warehouses due to the inflexibility to time-varying item arrivals and the low efficiency for high throughput. In this paper, we propose a new task planning problem called TPRW, which aims to minimize the end-to-end makespan that incorporates the entire item distribution pipeline, known as a fulfilment cycle. Direct extensions from state-of-the-art path finding methods are ineffective to solve the TPRW problem because they fail to adapt to the bottleneck variations of fulfillment cycles. In response, we propose Efficient Adaptive Task Planning, a framework for large-scale robotized warehouses with time-varying item arrivals. It adaptively selects racks to fulfill at each timestamp via reinforcement learning, accounting for the time-varying bottleneck of the fulfillment cycles. Then it finds paths for robots to transport the selected racks. The framework adopts a series of efficient optimizations on both time and memory to handle large-scale item throughput. Evaluations on both synthesized and real data show an improvement of $37.1\%$ in effectiveness and $75.5\%$ in efficiency over the state-of-the-arts.

Humans may be one of the biggest roadblocks keeping fully autonomous vehicles off city streets. If a robot is going to navigate a vehicle safely through downtown Boston, it must be able to predict what nearby drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians are going to do next. Behavior prediction is a tough problem, however, and current artificial intelligence solutions are either too simplistic (they may assume pedestrians always walk in a straight line), too conservative (to avoid pedestrians, the robot just leaves the car in park), or can only forecast the next moves of one agent (roads typically carry many users at once.) MIT researchers have devised a deceptively simple solution to this complicated challenge. They break a multiagent behavior prediction problem into smaller pieces and tackle each one individually, so a computer can solve this complex task in real-time. Their behavior-prediction framework first guesses the relationships between two road users -- which car, cyclist, or pedestrian has the right of way, and which agent will yield -- and uses those relationships to predict future trajectories for multiple agents.

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is a sub-area within Artificial Intelligence (AI) that focuses on methods for solving off-nominal, or anomalous problems in autonomous systems. Despite many advancements in planning and learning, resolving novel problems or adapting existing knowledge to a new context, especially in cases where the environment may change in unpredictable ways post deployment, remains a limiting factor in the safe and useful integration of intelligent systems. The emergence of increasingly autonomous systems dictates the necessity for AI agents to deal with environmental uncertainty through creativity. To stimulate further research in CPS, we present a definition and a framework of CPS, which we adopt to categorize existing AI methods in this field. Our framework consists of four main components of a CPS problem, namely, 1) problem formulation, 2) knowledge representation, 3) method of knowledge manipulation, and 4) method of evaluation. We conclude our survey with open research questions, and suggested directions for the future.

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Intelligent systems, such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), can be seen as a set of intelligent entities capable of proactively decide how to act to fulfill their own goals. These entities, called generally agents, are notoriously autonomous, i.e., they do not expect input from an user to act, and social, i.e., they usually communicate amongst each other to achieve common goals. Software systems are not easy to trust in general. This is especially true in the case of complex and distributed systems, such as MAS. Because of this, we need verification techniques to verify that such systems behave as expected. More specifically, in the case of MAS, it is relevant to know whether the agents are capable of achieving their own goals, by themselves or by collaborating with other agents by forming a coalition. This is usually referred to as the process of finding a strategy for the agent(s). A well-known formalism for reasoning about strategic behaviours in MAS is Alternating-time Temporal Logic (AT L) [1]. Before verifying AT L specifications, two questions need to be answered: (i) does each agent know everything about the system?

In this paper, we consider a resilient consensus problem for the multi-agent network where some of the agents are subject to Byzantine attacks and may transmit erroneous state values to their neighbors. In particular, we develop an event-triggered update rule to tackle this problem as well as reduce the communication for each agent. Our approach is based on the mean subsequence reduced (MSR) algorithm with agents being capable to communicate with multi-hop neighbors. Since delays are critical in such an environment, we provide necessary graph conditions for the proposed algorithm to perform well with delays in the communication. We highlight that through multi-hop communication, the network connectivity can be reduced especially in comparison with the common onehop communication case. Lastly, we show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by a numerical example.

Embodied agents, trained to explore and navigate indoor photorealistic environments, have achieved impressive results on standard datasets and benchmarks. So far, experiments and evaluations have involved domestic and working scenes like offices, flats, and houses. In this paper, we build and release a new 3D space with unique characteristics: the one of a complete art museum. We name this environment ArtGallery3D (AG3D). Compared with existing 3D scenes, the collected space is ampler, richer in visual features, and provides very sparse occupancy information. This feature is challenging for occupancy-based agents which are usually trained in crowded domestic environments with plenty of occupancy information. Additionally, we annotate the coordinates of the main points of interest inside the museum, such as paintings, statues, and other items. Thanks to this manual process, we deliver a new benchmark for PointGoal navigation inside this new space. Trajectories in this dataset are far more complex and lengthy than existing ground-truth paths for navigation in Gibson and Matterport3D. We carry on extensive experimental evaluation using our new space for evaluation and prove that existing methods hardly adapt to this scenario. As such, we believe that the availability of this 3D model will foster future research and help improve existing solutions.

This paper addresses modeling and simulating pedestrian trajectories when interacting with an autonomous vehicle in a shared space. Most pedestrian–vehicle interaction models are not suitable for predicting individual trajectories. Data-driven models yield accurate predictions but lack generalizability to new scenarios, usually do not run in real time and produce results that are poorly explainable. Current expert models do not deal with the diversity of possible pedestrian interactions with the vehicle in a shared space and lack microscopic validation. We propose an expert pedestrian model that combines the social force model and a new decision model for anticipating pedestrian–vehicle interactions. The proposed model integrates different observed pedestrian behaviors, as well as the behaviors of the social groups of pedestrians, in diverse interaction scenarios with a car. We calibrate the model by fitting the parameters values on a training set. We validate the model and evaluate its predictive potential through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with ground truth trajectories. The proposed model reproduces observed behaviors that have not been replicated by the social force model and outperforms the social force model at predicting pedestrian behavior around the vehicle on the used dataset. The model generates explainable and real-time trajectory predictions. Additional evaluation on a new dataset shows that the model generalizes well to new scenarios and can be applied to an autonomous vehicle embedded prediction.

Environmental Data Science – a new journal devoted to innovative data-driven approaches to environmental problems including climate change, edited by Associate Professor Claire Monteleoni – recently published its first cluster of papers. The open access journal, published by Cambridge University Press, allows anyone to read, reproduce and re-use content and fills a gap as environmental data science research is often seen as too applied for computer science journals and too interdisciplinary for journals in the environmental sciences. The first cluster of papers published in the outlet include four application papers, a data paper, and two perspectives from authors at universities around the globe. Monteleoni is part of the Department of Computer Science at CU Boulder and has been working at this interface for more than a decade – including co–founding the Climate Informatics Conference in 2011. "Data science broadly defined – AI, machine learning, statistics, and data mining – is the key to unlock insights from environmental data, and help us address major challenges, including climate change," she said.