The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2015 Fall Symposium Series, on Thursday through Saturday, November 12-14, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the six symposia were as follows: AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Embedded Machine Learning, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents. This article contains the reports from four of the symposia.

Complexity, in my point of view, is the key for disruptive evolutions in Data Science and Machine Learning. Approaches as the one from Edgar Morin allow us to see the world through a completely different point of view, analyzing and deconstructing commom sense, leading to a completely new epistemologic view of the world and problems. An agent-based model is a model where agents are autonomous, interact with each other, iteract, follow rules for this interaction and usually we see an emergence of phenomena, many times completely disassociated from the initial condition. The system self organizes in what is called an open system, by Bertalanffy (1950). It depends upon internal changes in the system and also on environmental changes.

A new class of smart machines is emerging that can help you automate your business and make life easier for professionals by eliminating many of the routine, manual aspects of their jobs, freeing them to work on more innovative and strategic areas. Products and technologies such as intelligent agents/digital assistants, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) systems, intelligent software agents, expert systems and robotic office devices are likely to become more common in work environments in the years to come. A report released in February 2016 by industry research firm Research and Markets, "Artificial Intelligence Market: Global Forecast to 2020," forecasts that the AI market will grow from 419.7 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 54 percent from 2015 to 2020. The key factors driving this growth include diversified application areas of AI, improved productivity, and increased levels of customer satisfaction, the report says. The rising demand for intelligent systems is expected to propel the growth of the market in the next five years.

ARLINGTON, Va.--With support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an artificial intelligence software program named Quixote to teach robots to read stories, learn acceptable behavior and understand successful ways to conduct themselves in diverse social situations. "For years, researchers have debated how to teach robots to act in ways that are appropriate, non-intrusive and trustworthy," said Marc Steinberg, an ONR program manager who oversees the research. "One important question is how to explain complex concepts such as policies, values or ethics to robots. Humans are really good at using narrative stories to make sense of the world and communicate to other people. This could one day be an effective way to interact with robots."

I'm relieved Volition is making something other than Saints Row V. Which is not to say they'll never make one--or that it's not secretly in development right now. But if it is, it's being developed alongside the all-new Agents of Mayhem, which Volition revealed right before E3. It's set in the Saints Row universe, but trades the town of Steelport for Seoul, South Korea and the Saints themselves for a group of superheroes known as the Multi-national AgencY for Hunting Evil Masterminds or M.A.Y.H.E.M. And yes, they lifted the "Y" from the end of "Agency." But after playing a demo of the game recently, I'm a bit worried--worried that maybe Saints Row isn't quite as enjoyable without the Saints.

We have constructed this page in order to sketch how AI is linked to various other disciplines, in both the sciences and humanities. We have done this not only in the hope of helping students and others who are just starting to study AI but also of facilitating further interactions between the AI community and other communities. The set of links is not exhaustive, nor is the explanation given for each individual link. In particular, we do not include all disciplines that do or could use AI tools and/or contribute tools to AI. We concentrate rather on disciplines where there is profound interaction in terms of research ideas.

In the future, a new generation of autonomous robots is set to complete tasks autonomously, even if something unforeseeable happens. With the support of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, information technology experts in Graz are working to advance the development of artificial intelligence and equip robots with common sense. Something that children learn through play and that adults are able to do on the basis of past experience, such as responding to unexpected situations, remains one of the great challenges in robotics. Autonomous systems are expected to complete tasks given to them without external input. The deployment of such intelligent robots would be particularly important in critical situations – such as environmental disasters or industrial accidents.

In the future, a new generation of autonomous robots is set to complete tasks autonomously, even if something unforeseeable happens. With the support of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, information technology experts in Graz are working to advance the development of artificial intelligence and equip robots with common sense. Something that children learn through play and that adults are able to do on the basis of past experience, such as responding to unexpected situations, remains one of the great challenges in robotics. Autonomous systems are expected to complete tasks given to them without external input. The deployment of such intelligent robots would be particularly important in critical situations – such as environmental disasters or industrial accidents.

Versu is a text-based simulationist interactive drama. Because it uses autonomous agents, the drama is highly replayable: you can play the same story from multiple perspectives, or assign different characters to the various roles. The architecture relies on the notion of a social practice to achieve coordination between the independent autonomous agents. A social practice describes a recurring social situation, and is a successor to the Schankian script. Social practices are implemented as reactive joint plans, providing affordances to the agents who participate in them.

We consider a group of Bayesian agents who try to estimate a state of the world $\theta$ through interaction on a social network. Each agent $v$ initially receives a private measurement of $\theta$: a number $S_v$ picked from a Gaussian distribution with mean $\theta$ and standard deviation one. Then, in each discrete time iteration, each reveals its estimate of $\theta$ to its neighbors, and, observing its neighbors' actions, updates its belief using Bayes' Law. This process aggregates information efficiently, in the sense that all the agents converge to the belief that they would have, had they access to all the private measurements. We show that this process is computationally efficient, so that each agent's calculation can be easily carried out. We also show that on any graph the process converges after at most $2N \cdot D$ steps, where $N$ is the number of agents and $D$ is the diameter of the network. Finally, we show that on trees and on distance transitive-graphs the process converges after $D$ steps, and that it preserves privacy, so that agents learn very little about the private signal of most other agents, despite the efficient aggregation of information. Our results extend those in an unpublished manuscript of the first and last authors.