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Reports of the AAAI 2012 Spring Symposia

AI Magazine

The six symposia held were AI, the Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series. The focus of the AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge, and the Autonomy of Hybrid Agent Groups symposium was to explore issues associated with the control of teams of humans, autonomous machines, and robots working together as hybrid agent groups. Bill Lawless of Paine College kicked off the meeting by pointing out the need for a new theory of social dynamics. He showed that majority rule is far better than consensus for group decision processes and proposed a new mathematical model for characterizing social group dynamics based on interdependence.


Logics for Multiagent Systems

AI Magazine

We focus on two paradigms: logics for cognitive models of agency, and logics used to model the strategic structure of a multiagent system. Logic can be a powerful tool for reasoning about multiagent systems. First of all, logics provide a language in which to specify properties -- properties of an agent, of other agents, and of the environment. Ideally, such a language then also provides a means to implement an agent or a multiagent system, either by somehow executing the specification, or by transforming the specification into some computational form. Second, given that such properties are expressed as logical formulas that form part of some inference system, they can be used to deduce other properties.


Negotiating Agents

AI Magazine

From an agent technological perspective creating negotiating agents that can support humans with their negotiations is an interesting challenge. After more than a decade of research, negotiating agents can outperform human beings (in terms of deal optimality) if the negotiation space is well understood. However, the inherent semantic problem and the emotional issues involved mean that negotiation cannot be handled by artificial intelligence alone, and a human-machine collaborative system is required. This article presents research goals, challenges, and an approach to create the next generation of negotiation support agents. However, even professional negotiators can still improve their skills considerably.


Multiagent Learning: Basics, Challenges, and Prospects

AI Magazine

A key to the success of MAS is efficient and effective multiagent learning (MAL). The past 25 years have seen a great interest and tremendous progress in the field of MAL. This article introduces and overviews this field by presenting its fundamentals, sketching its historical development, and describing some key algorithms for MAL. Moreover, main challenges that the field is facing today are identified. These agents may be computer programs, robots, or even humans.


Introduction to the Special Issue

AI Magazine

The research addressed in the autonomous agents field covers a wide spectrum of levels from the cognitive to the organizational, exploits diverse mechanisms and approaches, and has had a major impact on many aspects of artificial intelligence research. In 2011 the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) conference series celebrated its 10th anniversary, having begun as the successful merger of three related events that had run for some years previously. The 2011 AAMAS conference received 575 submissions, and 126 papers were selected for publication as full papers. Representation under all submissions of topics (measured by first keyword) was broad, with top counts in areas such as teamwork, coalition formation, and coordination (31), distributed problem solving (30), game theory (30), planning (26), multiagent learning (24), and trust, reliability, and reputation (17). The tag cloud (figure 1), generated from the titles of the full papers at the conference, conveys a sense of the relative prominence of topics.


The Multi-Agent Programming Contest

AI Magazine

It was started in 2005 and is an annual event that attracts between 5 and 10 teams. It has since been organized by the AI group at Clausthal University of Technology. MAPC is not collocated with any other event. Using our MASSim platform, the participants are running their own systems locally and only interact with the tournament server over the Internet. A steering committee oversees the whole process and determines the organization committee. The scenario changes every other year: the current one is "Agents on Mars." The goal was to implement a team of heterogeneous, cooperating agents to occupy zones on planet Mars. The infrastructure on Mars is given by a directed graph (300 nodes). Agents could take on roles (explorer, sentinel, saboteur, repairer, inspector) and needed to cooperate in an environment with incomplete knowledge so as to win against a competing team: the graph was not known, and each action comes at a price. Conquered terrain brings in money to improve agents. The timeline of the contest is as follows.


PROTECT -- A Deployed Game-Theoretic System for Strategic Security Allocation for the United States Coast Guard

AI Magazine

Toward that end, this article presents PROTECT, a game-theoretic system deployed by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) in the Port of Boston for scheduling its patrols. USCG has termed the deployment of PROTECT in Boston a success; PROTECT is currently being tested in the Port of New York, with the potential for nationwide deployment. PROTECT is premised on an attackerdefender Stackelberg game model and offers five key innovations. First, this system is a departure from the assumption of perfect adversary rationality noted in previous work, relying instead on a quantal response (QR) model of the adversary's behavior -- to the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world deployment of the QR model. Second, to improve PROTECT's efficiency, we generate a compact representation of the defender's strategy space, exploiting equivalence and dominance.


TRUSTS: Scheduling Randomized Patrols for Fare Inspection in Transit Systems Using Game Theory

AI Magazine

Instead, patrol units move about the transit system, inspecting the tickets of passengers, who face fines if caught fare evading. The deterrence of fare evasion depends on the unpredictability and effectiveness of the patrols. TRUSTS models the problem of computing patrol strategies as a leader-follower Stackelberg game where the objective is to deter fare evasion and hence maximize revenue. This problem differs from previously studied Stackelberg settings in that the leader strategies must satisfy massive temporal and spatial constraints; moreover, unlike in these counterterrorism-motivated Stackelberg applications, a large fraction of the ridership might realistically consider fare evasion, and so the number of followers is potentially huge. A third key novelty in our work is deliberate simplification of leader strategies to make patrols easier to execute. We present an efficient algorithm for computing such patrol strategies and present experimental results using real-world ridership data from the Los Angeles Metro Rail system. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is currently carrying out trials of TRUSTS. There are, quite literally, no barriers to entry, as illustrated in figure 1. Instead, security personnel are dynamically deployed throughout the transit system, randomly inspecting passenger tickets. This proof-of-payment fare collection method is typically chosen as a more cost-effective alternative to direct fare collection, that is, when the revenue lost to fare evasion is believed to be less than what it would cost to make fare evasion impossible. For the LA Metro, with approximately 300,000 riders daily, this revenue loss can be significant; the annual cost has been estimated at $5.6 million. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) deploys uniformed patrols onboard trains and at stations for fare checking (and for other purposes such as crime prevention), in order to discourage fare evasion.


Toward Adapting Cars to Their Drivers

AI Magazine

A more modern view is to envision drivers and passengers as actively interacting with a complex automated system. Such interactive activity leads us to consider intelligent and advanced ways of interaction leading to cars that can adapt to their drivers. In this article, we focus on the adaptive cruise control (ACC) technology that allows a vehicle to automatically adjust its speed to maintain a preset distance from the vehicle in front of it based on the driver's preferences. Although individual drivers have different driving styles and preferences, current systems do not distinguish among users. We introduce a method to combine machine-learning algorithms with demographic information and expert advice into existing automated assistive systems.


RoboCup Rescue Robot and Simulation Leagues

AI Magazine

The experience gained during these competitions has increased the maturity level of the field, which allowed deploying robots after real disasters (for example, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). This article provides an overview of these competitions and highlights the state of the art and the lessons learned. A major outcome of this initiative was the RoboCup Rescue competitions. In this article, we introduce the RoboCup Rescue leagues, namely the Rescue Robot League (RRL) and the Rescue Simulation League (RSL) (Tadokoro et al. 2000; Kitano and Tadokoro 2001). Disaster mitigation is an important social issue involving large numbers of heterogeneous agents acting in hostile environments.