Airline disruption management traditionally seeks to address three problem dimensions: aircraft scheduling, crew scheduling, and passenger scheduling, in that order. However, current efforts have, at most, only addressed the first two problem dimensions concurrently and do not account for the propagative effects that uncertain scheduling outcomes in one dimension can have on another dimension. In addition, existing approaches for airline disruption management include human specialists who decide on necessary corrective actions for airline schedule disruptions on the day of operation. However, human specialists are limited in their ability to process copious amounts of information imperative for making robust decisions that simultaneously address all problem dimensions during disruption management. Therefore, there is a need to augment the decision-making capabilities of a human specialist with quantitative and qualitative tools that can rationalize complex interactions amongst all dimensions in airline disruption management, and provide objective insights to the specialists in the airline operations control center. To that effect, we provide a discussion and demonstration of an agnostic and systematic paradigm for enabling expeditious simultaneously-integrated recovery of all problem dimensions during airline disruption management, through an intelligent multi-agent system that employs principles from artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technology.

When developing AI systems that interact with humans, it is essential to design both a system that can understand humans, and a system that humans can understand. Most deep network based agent-modeling approaches are 1) not interpretable and 2) only model external behavior, ignoring internal mental states, which potentially limits their capability for assistance, interventions, discovering false beliefs, etc. To this end, we develop an interpretable modular neural framework for modeling the intentions of other observed entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with experiments on data from human participants on a search and rescue task in Minecraft, and show that incorporating interpretability can significantly increase predictive performance under the right conditions.

Machine learning-based systems are rapidly gaining popularity and in-line with that there has been a huge research surge in the field of explainability to ensure that machine learning models are reliable, fair, and can be held liable for their decision-making process. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are typically deployed to debug black-box machine learning models but in comparison to tabular, text, and image data, explainability in time series is still relatively unexplored. The aim of this study was to achieve and evaluate model agnostic explainability in a time series forecasting problem. This work focused on proving a solution for a digital consultancy company aiming to find a data-driven approach in order to understand the effect of their sales related activities on the sales deals closed. The solution involved framing the problem as a time series forecasting problem to predict the sales deals and the explainability was achieved using two novel model agnostic explainability techniques, Local explainable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) and Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) which were evaluated using human evaluation of explainability. The results clearly indicate that the explanations produced by LIME and SHAP greatly helped lay humans in understanding the predictions made by the machine learning model. The presented work can easily be extended to any time

Humans possess a unique social cognition capability; nonverbal communication can convey rich social information among agents. In contrast, such crucial social characteristics are mostly missing in the existing scene understanding literature. In this paper, we incorporate different nonverbal communication cues (e.g., gaze, human poses, and gestures) to represent, model, learn, and infer agents' mental states from pure visual inputs. Crucially, such a mental representation takes the agent's belief into account so that it represents what the true world state is and infers the beliefs in each agent's mental state, which may differ from the true world states. By aggregating different beliefs and true world states, our model essentially forms "five minds" during the interactions between two agents. This "five minds" model differs from prior works that infer beliefs in an infinite recursion; instead, agents' beliefs are converged into a "common mind". Based on this representation, we further devise a hierarchical energy-based model that jointly tracks and predicts all five minds. From this new perspective, a social event is interpreted by a series of nonverbal communication and belief dynamics, which transcends the classic keyframe video summary. In the experiments, we demonstrate that using such a social account provides a better video summary on videos with rich social interactions compared with state-of-the-art keyframe video summary methods.

We propose a framework for solving control synthesis problems for multi-agent networked systems required to satisfy spatio-temporal specifications. We use Spatio-Temporal Reach and Escape Logic (STREL) as a specification language. For this logic, we define smooth quantitative semantics, which captures the degree of satisfaction of a formula by a multi-agent team. We use the novel quantitative semantics to map control synthesis problems with STREL specifications to optimization problems and propose a combination of heuristic and gradient-based methods to solve such problems. As this method might not meet the requirements of a real-time implementation, we develop a machine learning technique that uses the results of the off-line optimizations to train a neural network that gives the control inputs at current states. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework by applying it to a model of a robotic team required to satisfy a spatial-temporal specification under communication constraints.

Building operations represent a significant percentage of the total primary energy consumed in most countries due to the proliferation of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) installations in response to the growing demand for improved thermal comfort. Reducing the associated energy consumption while maintaining comfortable conditions in buildings are conflicting objectives and represent a typical optimization problem that requires intelligent system design. Over the last decade, different methodologies based on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been deployed to find the sweet spot between energy use in HVAC systems and suitable indoor comfort levels to the occupants. This paper performs a comprehensive and an in-depth systematic review of AI-based techniques used for building control systems by assessing the outputs of these techniques, and their implementations in the reviewed works, as well as investigating their abilities to improve the energy-efficiency, while maintaining thermal comfort conditions. This enables a holistic view of (1) the complexities of delivering thermal comfort to users inside buildings in an energy-efficient way, and (2) the associated bibliographic material to assist researchers and experts in the field in tackling such a challenge. Among the 20 AI tools developed for both energy consumption and comfort control, functions such as identification and recognition patterns, optimization, predictive control. Based on the findings of this work, the application of AI technology in building control is a promising area of research and still an ongoing, i.e., the performance of AI-based control is not yet completely satisfactory. This is mainly due in part to the fact that these algorithms usually need a large amount of high-quality real-world data, which is lacking in the building or, more precisely, the energy sector.

Artificial Intelligence might be a term for collecting concepts that allow computer systems to vaguely work like a brain. However, the use of numbers to represent complex social reality is flawed. AI might seem factual and precise when it isn't as the results that AI produces depend on how it is designed and what data it uses. At the moment in our everyday world, AI performs narrow tasks such as facial recognition, natural language processing, or internet searches but the pace of its progress is exponential and regardless of its benefits. The impact it is having is hard to ignore with more and more of the world's commerce becoming automated and trading going online.

A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and logical ontology), formalizations of the concept of intelligence, and a proposed high level architecture for AGI systems partly driven by these formalizations and philosophies. The implementation of specific cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, program learning, clustering and attention allocation in the context and language of this high level architecture is considered, as is the importance of a common (e.g. typed metagraph based) knowledge representation for enabling "cognitive synergy" between the various processes. The specifics of human-like cognitive architecture are presented as manifestations of these general principles, and key aspects of machine consciousness and machine ethics are also treated in this context. Lessons for practical implementation of advanced AGI in frameworks such as OpenCog Hyperon are briefly considered.

PVA is a low-code chatbot building tool with which you can build and deploy chatbots in the shortest time possible. This democratises the technology to non-technical users and reduces the dependency on IT expertise. Using PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents. A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes!

This paper proposes a novel nature-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm called the Golden Tortoise Beetle Optimizer (GTBO) to solve optimization problems. It mimics golden tortoise beetle's behavior of changing colors to attract opposite sex for mating and its protective strategy that uses a kind of anal fork to deter predators. The algorithm is modeled based on the beetle's dual attractiveness and survival strategy to generate new solutions for optimization problems. To measure its performance, the proposed GTBO is compared with five other nature-inspired evolutionary algorithms on 24 well-known benchmark functions investigating the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, local optima avoidance, and convergence towards the global optima is statistically significant. We particularly applied GTBO to two well-known engineering problems including the welded beam design problem and the gear train design problem. The results demonstrate that the new algorithm is more efficient than the five baseline algorithms for both problems. A sensitivity analysis is also performed to reveal different impacts of the algorithm's key control parameters and operators on GTBO's performance.