In the opening pages of Burn-In , an FBI agent conducts close-quarters surveillance of a suspected terrorist bomber in Washington, D.C. Simultaneously, in New Jersey, an elderly gentleman listens attentively to the enthusiastic technological prognostications of a world-famous computer scientist and mathematician from the back of a hallowed lecture hall at Princeton University. Moments later, he bludgeons the speaker to death with his cane. In this, their second novel, coauthors Peter Warren Singer and August Cole—both renowned technology and policy experts—come close to perfecting the genre of educational and informative techno-thriller. Like their first such collaboration ([ 1 ][1]), this latest entry portrays a world in which conventional aspects of domestic security and law enforcement—combating terrorism, managing protests and social upheavals, tracking a serial killer, providing a secure environment on college campuses—all occur within a transformative technological context that both enables and simultaneously disrupts these myriad objectives. As the narrative unfolds, a complex tapestry of emergent, disruptive technologies is revealed. Far from the fanciful inventions that typically populate science fiction, the systems described herein are currently available or under development for imminent deployment. The D.C. traffic congestion with which agent Lara Keegan and her partner have to contend, for example, is mostly composed of driverless vehicles, their complex operational algorithms engaged in competitive maneuvering for even the slightest comparative advantage. If the agents invoke the emergency override protocol granted to law enforcement personnel and cause the other vehicles to move aside, the surveillance drones buzzing overhead will immediately transmit this activity to the news outlets that operate them, alerting the terrorist to their presence. Keegan's field of vision, meanwhile, is networked into an operations command center via virtual reality glasses, which display real-time data on the suspect's location. These “viz glasses” continuously exchange data with other law enforcement personnel, while simultaneously performing facial scans of the surrounding crowds, subjecting each passerby to massive digital analysis. Once apprehended, despite his uncooperative silence, the suspect's identity is unmasked by a Tactical Autonomous Mobility System (TAMS), a military robot whose combat utility proved minimal and is now being tested for possible use in domestic law enforcement scenarios. Keegan, we learn, has been selected to field-test this robotic deep-learning technology system because of her prior experience managing the deployment and “force mix” of unmanned systems for the Marine Corps in Afghanistan. In technology circles, what she has been asked to undertake is known as a burn-in, a lengthy trial run of any new technological breakthrough, designed to push it to its limits of reliable functionality. The novel also contains ample instances of what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation dub the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of technological development and diffusion. Just before his death, for example, the Princeton computer scientist boasts to his elderly guest how his use of Linux open-source software to develop complex machine-learning algorithms has made artificial intelligence (AI) universally available and affordable for every conceivable purpose. As his killer peels off an AI-designed silicon facial mask (manufactured on a 3D printer to confuse the university's AI-assisted security and surveillance system), he reveals himself to be a former DARPA engineer whose wife and son were tragically killed in a Metro crash caused by dangerous emergent behaviors in one of the scientist's AI-governed public transportation systems. This narrative thread, and many others throughout the book, illustrate what coauthor Peter Warren Singer identified in his widely acclaimed book Wired for War (published in 2009) as a key constituent of technological innovation and advance: “Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.” The aim of this work of fiction is not merely to engage and entertain but also to educate and inform readers about the vast array of automated and increasingly intelligent autonomous systems that are proliferating in availability and use. The authors provide detailed documentation of the actual features and current use of these systems, together with a companion educational guide to help instructors use the novel to teach about the profound depths of the robotic and AI revolution that is taking place all around us. 1. [↵][2]1. P. W. Singer, 2. A. Cole , Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #xref-ref-1-1 "View reference 1 in text"

Given the complexity of real-world, unstructured domains, it is often impossible or impractical to design models that include every feature needed to handle all possible scenarios that an autonomous system may encounter. For an autonomous system to be reliable in such domains, it should have the ability to improve its competence online. In this paper, we propose a method for improving the competence of a system over the course of its deployment. We specifically focus on a class of semi-autonomous systems known as competence-aware systems that model their own competence -- the optimal extent of autonomy to use in any given situation -- and learn this competence over time from feedback received through interactions with a human authority. Our method exploits such feedback to identify important state features missing from the system's initial model, and incorporates them into its state representation. The result is an agent that better predicts human involvement, leading to improvements in its competence and reliability, and as a result, its overall performance.

The actions of intelligent agents, such as chatbots, recommender systems, and virtual assistants are typically not fully transparent to the user. Consequently, using such an agent involves the user exposing themselves to the risk that the agent may act in a way opposed to the user's goals. It is often argued that people use trust as a cognitive shortcut to reduce the complexity of such interactions. Here we formalise this by using the methods of evolutionary game theory to study the viability of trust-based strategies in repeated games. These are reciprocal strategies that cooperate as long as the other player is observed to be cooperating. Unlike classic reciprocal strategies, once mutual cooperation has been observed for a threshold number of rounds they stop checking their co-player's behaviour every round, and instead only check with some probability. By doing so, they reduce the opportunity cost of verifying whether the action of their co-player was actually cooperative. We demonstrate that these trust-based strategies can outcompete strategies that are always conditional, such as Tit-for-Tat, when the opportunity cost is non-negligible. We argue that this cost is likely to be greater when the interaction is between people and intelligent agents, because of the reduced transparency of the agent. Consequently, we expect people to use trust-based strategies more frequently in interactions with intelligent agents. Our results provide new, important insights into the design of mechanisms for facilitating interactions between humans and intelligent agents, where trust is an essential factor.

Long-term autonomy requires autonomous systems to adapt as their capabilities no longer perform as expected. To achieve this, a system must first be capable of detecting such changes. Creating and maintaining a system ontology is a comprehensive solution for this; an agent-maintained formal selfmodel will take the role of this system ontology. It would act as a repository of information about all the processes and functionality of the autonomous system, forming a systematic approach for detecting action failures. Our work will focus on Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) [25] programming languages as they are well known for their use in developing intelligent agents [1, 6, 16, 21].

AOP (Agent-Oriented Programming) [30] is a programming paradigm that aims at providing effective languages and tools to develop agent-based software systems (e.g., [16]). The most challenging parts of the development of complex agent-based software systems are expected to be leveraged by AOP languages and tools. AOP languages and tools allow programmers to reason on high-level views of multi-agent systems instead of concentrating on fine-grained details that tend to distract attention from targeted problems. Examples of such challenging parts of the development of complex agent-based software systems are the deployment of agents to network hosts, the routing of messages across the network, and the handling of sensor information. The abstractions that AOP languages normally support and that make such languages suitable for agent-based software development are discussed, for example, in the specifications from FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents), now IEEE FIPA Standards Committee (http://www.fipa.org),

Autonomous systems developed with the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture are usually mostly implemented in simulated environments. In this project we sought to build a BDI agent for use in the real world for campus mail delivery in the tunnel system at Carleton University. Ideally, the robot should receive a delivery order via a mobile application, pick up the mail at a station, navigate the tunnels to the destination station, and notify the recipient. We linked the Robot Operating System (ROS) with a BDI reasoning system to achieve a subset of the required use cases. ROS handles the low-level sensing and actuation, while the BDI reasoning system handles the high-level reasoning and decision making. Sensory data is orchestrated and sent from ROS to the reasoning system as perceptions. These perceptions are then deliberated upon, and an action string is sent back to ROS for interpretation and driving of the necessary actuator for the action to be performed. In this paper we present our current implementation, which closes the loop on the hardware-software integration, and implements a subset of the use cases required for the full system.

Risk management resulting from the actions and states of the different elements making up a operating room is a major concern during a surgical procedure. Agent-based simulation shows an interest through its interaction concepts, interactivity and autonomy of different simulator entities. We want in our study to implement a generator of alerts to listen the evolution of different settings applied to the simulator of agents (human fatigue, material efficiency, infection rate ...). This article presents our model, its implementation and the first results obtained. It should be noted that this study also made it possible to identify several scientific obstacles, such as the integration of different levels of abstraction, the coupling of species, the coexistence of several scales in the same environment and the deduction of unpredictable alerts. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a beginning of response relative to the last lock mentioned and will be discussed in this paper.

Artificial intelligence is en route to changing all industries and the robotics industry is not an exception. Presently, the innovative combination of AI and robotics has created a number of futuristic possibilities, in all the industry domains. While most of us will agree that most robots will be humanoids in 10 years from now; in many environments, robots are designed to emulate a range of behaviors and physical abilities will reflect a best fit for those characteristics. An exception will likely be robots that provide medical or other care or companionship for humans, and perhaps service robots that are meant to establish a more personal and'humanized' relationship. Though related, some would argue that the correct term is machine vision or robot vision rather than computer vision, because "robots seeing" involves more than just computer algorithms; engineers and roboticists also have to account for camera hardware that allow robots to process physical data.

The ability to jointly understand the geometry of objects and plan actions for manipulating them is crucial for intelligent agents. We refer to this ability as geometric planning. Recently, many interactive environments have been proposed to evaluate intelligent agents on various skills, however, none of them cater to the needs of geometric planning. We present PackIt, a virtual environment to evaluate and potentially learn the ability to do geometric planning, where an agent needs to take a sequence of actions to pack a set of objects into a box with limited space. We also construct a set of challenging packing tasks using an evolutionary algorithm. Further, we study various baselines for the task that include model-free learning-based and heuristic-based methods, as well as search-based optimization methods that assume access to the model of the environment. Code and data are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/PackIt.

When a company relies on distributed users' data to train a machine learning model, federated learning [37, 54, 25] promotes the idea that users/customers' data should be kept local, and only the locally held/learned hypothesis will be shared/contributed from each user. While federated learning has observed success in keyboard recognition [21] and in language modeling [8], existing works have made an implicit assumption that participating users will be willing to contribute their local hypotheses to help the central entity to refine the model. Nonetheless, without proper incentives, agents can choose to opt out of the participation, to contribute either uninformative or outdated information, or to even contribute malicious model information. Though being an important question for federated learning [54, 34, 55, 56], this capability of providing adequate incentives for user participation has largely been overlooked. In this paper we ask the questions that: Can a machine learning hypothesis be incentivized/elicited by a certain form of scoring rules from self-interested agents? The availability of a scoring rule will help us design a payment for the elicited hypothesis properly to motivate the reporting of high-quality ones. The corresponding solutions complement the literature of federated learning by offering a generic template for incentivizing users' participation.