Agents
Artificial Intelligence Systems applied to tourism: A Survey
Duarte, Luis, Torres, Jonathan, Ribeiro, Vitor, Moreira, Inês
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been improving the performance of systems for a diverse set of tasks and introduced a more interactive generation of personal agents. Despite the current trend of applying AI for a great amount of areas, we have not seen the same quantity of work being developed for the tourism sector. This paper reports on the main applications of AI systems developed for tourism and the current state of the art for this sector. The paper also provides an up-to-date survey of this field regarding several key works and systems that are applied to tourism, like Personal Agents, for providing a more interactive experience. We also carried out an in-depth research on systems for predicting traffic human flow, more accurate recommendation systems and even how geospatial is trying to display tourism data in a more informative way and prevent problems before they arise.
Assured Autonomy: Path Toward Living With Autonomous Systems We Can Trust
Topcu, Ufuk, Bliss, Nadya, Cooke, Nancy, Cummings, Missy, Llorens, Ashley, Shrobe, Howard, Zuck, Lenore
The challenge of establishing assurance in autonomy is rapidly attracting increasing interest in the industry, government, and academia. Autonomy is a broad and expansive capability that enables systems to behave without direct control by a human operator. To that end, it is expected to be present in a wide variety of systems and applications. A vast range of industrial sectors, including (but by no means limited to) defense, mobility, health care, manufacturing, and civilian infrastructure, are embracing the opportunities in autonomy yet face the similar barriers toward establishing the necessary level of assurance sooner or later. Numerous government agencies are poised to tackle the challenges in assured autonomy. Given the already immense interest and investment in autonomy, a series of workshops on Assured Autonomy was convened to facilitate dialogs and increase awareness among the stakeholders in the academia, industry, and government. This series of three workshops aimed to help create a unified understanding of the goals for assured autonomy, the research trends and needs, and a strategy that will facilitate sustained progress in autonomy. The first workshop, held in October 2019, focused on current and anticipated challenges and problems in assuring autonomous systems within and across applications and sectors. The second workshop held in February 2020, focused on existing capabilities, current research, and research trends that could address the challenges and problems identified in workshop. The third event was dedicated to a discussion of a draft of the major findings from the previous two workshops and the recommendations.
Succinct and Robust Multi-Agent Communication With Temporal Message Control
Zhang, Sai Qian, Lin, Jieyu, Zhang, Qi
Recent studies have shown that introducing communication between agents can significantly improve overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, existing communication schemes often require agents to exchange an excessive number of messages at run-time under a reliable communication channel, which hinders its practicality in many real-world situations. In this paper, we present \textit{Temporal Message Control} (TMC), a simple yet effective approach for achieving succinct and robust communication in MARL. TMC applies a temporal smoothing technique to drastically reduce the amount of information exchanged between agents. Experiments show that TMC can significantly reduce inter-agent communication overhead without impacting accuracy. Furthermore, TMC demonstrates much better robustness against transmission loss than existing approaches in lossy networking environments.
Affordance as general value function: A computational model
Graves, Daniel, Günther, Johannes, Luo, Jun
General value functions (GVFs) in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature are long-term predictive summaries of the outcomes of agents following specific policies in the environment. Affordances as perceived valences of action possibilities may be cast into predicted policy-relative goodness and modelled as GVFs. A systematic explication of this connection shows that GVFs and especially their deep learning embodiments (1) realize affordance prediction as a form of direct perception, (2) illuminate the fundamental connection between action and perception in affordance, and (3) offer a scalable way to learn affordances using RL methods. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature on recent successes of GVF applications in robotics, rehabilitation, industrial automation, and autonomous driving, we demonstrate that GVFs provide the right framework for learning affordances in real-world applications. In addition, we highlight a few new avenues of research opened up by the perspective of "affordance as GVF", including using GVFs for orchestrating complex behaviors.
Computing Nash Equilibria in Multiplayer DAG-Structured Stochastic Games with Persistent Imperfect Information
Many important real-world settings contain multiple players interacting over an unknown duration with probabilistic state transitions, and are naturally modeled as stochastic games. Prior research on algorithms for stochastic games has focused on two-player zero-sum games, games with perfect information, and games with imperfect-information that is local and does not extend between game states. We present an algorithm for approximating Nash equilibrium in multiplayer general-sum stochastic games with persistent imperfect information that extends throughout game play. We experiment on a 4-player imperfect-information naval strategic planning scenario. Using a new procedure, we are able to demonstrate that our algorithm computes a strategy that closely approximates Nash equilibrium in this game.
Group Search Optimization for Applications in Structural Design - Programmer Books
Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method.
2020 Intro to Agent-Based Modeling Simulation AI in NetLogo
Description When people talk about artificial intelligence, they usually talk about machine learning. Most people have not heard about Agent-Based modeling AI . Agent-Based modeling is much simpler than machine learning. You basically just let agents interact in an environment and watch for any emergent behavior. You practically do not have to have any math background and you are able to create amazing things.
Byzantine Resilient Distributed Multi-Task Learning
Li, Jiani, Abbas, Waseem, Koutsoukos, Xenofon
Distributed multi-task learning provides significant advantages in multi-agent networks with heterogeneous data sources where agents aim to learn distinct but correlated models simultaneously. However, distributed algorithms for learning relatedness among tasks are not resilient in the presence of Byzantine agents. In this paper, we present an approach for Byzantine resilient distributed multi-task learning. We propose an efficient online weight assignment rule by measuring the accumulated loss using an agent's data and its neighbors' models. A small accumulated loss indicates a large similarity between the two tasks. In order to ensure the Byzantine resilience of the aggregation at a normal agent, we introduce a step for filtering out larger losses. We analyze the approach for convex models and show that normal agents converge resiliently towards their true targets. Further, an agent's learning performance using the proposed weight assignment rule is guaranteed to be at least as good as in the non-cooperative case as measured by the expected regret. Finally, we demonstrate the approach using three case studies, including regression and classification problems, and show that our method exhibits good empirical performance for non-convex models, such as convolutional neural networks.
Learning Multi-Agent Coordination for Enhancing Target Coverage in Directional Sensor Networks
Xu, Jing, Zhong, Fangwei, Wang, Yizhou
Maximum target coverage by adjusting the orientation of distributed sensors is an important problem in directional sensor networks (DSNs). This problem is challenging as the targets usually move randomly but the coverage range of sensors is limited in angle and distance. Thus, it is required to coordinate sensors to get ideal target coverage with low power consumption, e.g. no missing targets or reducing redundant coverage. To realize this, we propose a Hierarchical Target-oriented Multi-Agent Coordination (HiT-MAC), which decomposes the target coverage problem into two-level tasks: targets assignment by a coordinator and tracking assigned targets by executors. Specifically, the coordinator periodically monitors the environment globally and allocates targets to each executor. In turn, the executor only needs to track its assigned targets. To effectively learn the HiT-MAC by reinforcement learning, we further introduce a bunch of practical methods, including a self-attention module, marginal contribution approximation for the coordinator, goal-conditional observation filter for the executor, etc. Empirical results demonstrate the advantage of HiT-MAC in coverage rate, learning efficiency,and scalability, comparing to baselines. We also conduct an ablative analysis on the effectiveness of the introduced components in the framework.
Researchers design virtual environment to spur development of helpful home robots
Without much prior experience, kids can recognize other people's intentions and come up with plans to help them achieve their goals, even in novel scenarios. That's why researchers at MIT, Nvidia, and ETH Zurich developed Watch-And-Help (WAH), a challenge in which embodied AI agents need to understand goals by watching a demonstration of a human performing a task and coordinating with the human to solve the task as quickly as possible. The concept of embodied AI draws on embodied cognition, the theory that many features of psychology -- human or otherwise -- are shaped by aspects of the entire body of an organism. By applying this logic to AI, researchers hope to improve the performance of AI systems like chatbots, robots, autonomous vehicles, and even smart speakers that interact with their environments, people, and other AI. A truly embodied robot could check to see whether a door is locked, for instance, or retrieve a smartphone that's ringing in an upstairs bedroom.