Agents
Reports of the AAAI 2011 Conference Workshops
Agmon, Noa (University of Texas at Austin) | Agrawal, Vikas (Infosys Labs) | Aha, David W. (Naval Research Laboratory) | Aloimonos, Yiannis (University of Maryland, College Park) | Buckley, Donagh (EMC) | Doshi, Prashant (University of Georgia) | Geib, Christopher (University of Edinburgh) | Grasso, Floriana (University of Liverpool) | Green, Nancy (University of North Carolina Greensboro) | Johnston, Benjamin (University of Technology, Sydney) | Kaliski, Burt (VeriSign, Inc.) | Kiekintveld, Christopher (University of Texas at El Paso) | Law, Edith (Carnegie Mellon University) | Lieberman, Henry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Mengshoel, Ole J. (Carnegie Mellon University) | Metzler, Ted (Oklahoma City University) | Modayil, Joseph (University of Alberta) | Oard, Douglas W. (University of Maryland, College Park) | Onder, Nilufer (Michigan Technological University) | O' (University College Cork) | Sullivan, Barry (Cognitive Systems Research Insitute) | Pastra, Katerina (McGill University) | Precup, Doina (Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.) | Ramachandran, Sowmya (University of Dundee) | Reed, Chris (Istanbul Technical University) | Sariel-Talay, Sanem (Carnegie Mellon University) | Selker, Ted (Infosys Technologies Ltd.) | Shastri, Lokendra (Carnegie Mellon University) | Smith, Stephen F. (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) | Singh, Satinder (University of Wisconsin, Madison) | Srivastava, Siddharth (University of Central Florida) | Sukthankar, Gita (Naval Research Laboratory) | Uthus, David C. (University of Technology, Sydney) | Williams, Mary-Anne
The AAAI-11 workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, August 7โ18, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in San Francisco, California USA. The AAAI-11 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages; Analyzing Microtext; Applied Adversarial Reasoning and Risk Modeling; Artificial Intelligence and Smarter Living: The Conquest of Complexity; AI for Data Center Management and Cloud Computing; Automated Action Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robots; Computational Models of Natural Argument; Generalized Planning; Human Computation; Human-Robot Interaction in Elder Care; Interactive Decision Theory and Game Theory; Language-Action Tools for Cognitive Artificial Agents: Integrating Vision, Action and Language; Lifelong Learning; Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition; and Scalable Integration of Analytics and Visualization. This article presents short summaries of those events.
Reports of the AAAI 2011 Fall Symposia
Blisard, Sam (Naval Research Laboratory) | Carmichael, Ted (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) | Ding, Li (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Finin, Tim (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Frost, Wende (Naval Research Laboratory) | Graesser, Arthur (University of Memphis) | Hadzikadic, Mirsad (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) | Kagal, Lalana (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Kruijff, Geert-Jan M. (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) | Langley, Pat (Arizona State University) | Lester, James (North Carolina State University) | McGuinness, Deborah L. (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | Mostow, Jack (Carnegie Mellon University) | Papadakis, Panagiotis (University of Sapienza, Rome) | Pirri, Fiora (Sapienza University of Rome) | Prasad, Rashmi (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) | Stoyanchev, Svetlana (Columbia University) | Varakantham, Pradeep (Singapore Management University)
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2011 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 4โ6, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia are as follows: (1) Advances in Cognitive Systems; (2) Building Representations of Common Ground with Intelligent Agents; (3) Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy, Information and Intelligence; (4) Multiagent Coordination under Uncertainty; (5) Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges; (6) Question Generation; and (7) Robot-Human Teamwork in Dynamic Adverse Environment. The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report.
Mapping the Landscape of Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence
Adams, Sam (IBM) | Arel, Itmar (University of Tennessee) | Bach, Joscha (Humboldt University of Berlin) | Coop, Robert (University of Tennessee) | Furlan, Rod (Quaternix Research, Inc.) | Goertzel, Ben (Independent Researcher and Author) | Hall, J. Storrs (George Mason University) | Samsonovich, Alexei (Tufts University) | Scheutz, Matthias (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) | Schlesinger, Matthew (University of Buffalo, State University of New York) | Shapiro, Stuart C. (VivoMind Research, LLC) | Sowa, John
Of course, this is far from the first attempt to plot a course toward human-level AGI: arguably this was the goal of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence in the 1950s, and has been pursued by a steady stream of AI researchers since, even as the majority of the AI field has focused its attention on more narrow, specific subgoals. The ideas presented here build on the ideas of others in innumerable ways, but to review the history of AI and situate the current effort in the context of its predecessors would require a much longer article than this one. Thus we have chosen to focus on the results of our AGI roadmap discussions, acknowledging in a broad way the many debts owed to many prior researchers. References to the prior literature on evaluation of advanced AI systems are given by Laird (Laird et al. 2009) and Geortzel and Bugaj (2009), which may in a limited sense be considered prequels to this article. We begin by discussing AGI in general and adopt a pragmatic goal for measuring progress toward its attainment. An initial capability landscape for AGI The heterogeneity of general intelligence in will be presented, drawing on major themes from humans makes it practically impossible to develop developmental psychology and illuminated by a comprehensive, fine-grained measurement system mathematical, physiological, and informationprocessing for AGI. While we encourage research in defining perspectives. The challenge of identifying such high-fidelity metrics for specific capabilities, appropriate tasks and environments for measuring we feel that at this stage of AGI development AGI will be taken up. Several scenarios will a pragmatic, high-level goal is the best we can be presented as milestones outlining a roadmap agree upon. I advocate beginning with a system that has minimal, although extensive, built-in capabilities. Many variant approaches have been proposed A classic example of the narrow AI approach was for achieving such a goal, and both the AI and AGI IBM's Deep Blue system (Campbell, Hoane, and communities have been working for decades on Hsu 2002), which successfully defeated world chess the myriad subgoals that would have to be champion Gary Kasparov but could not readily achieved and integrated to deliver a comprehensive apply that skill to any other problem domain without AGI system.
The AAAI 2011 Robot Exhibition
Chernova, Sonia (Worcester Polytechnic Institut) | Dodds, Zachary (Harvey Mudd College) | Stilman, Mike (Georgia Institute of Technology) | Touretzky, Dave (Carnegie Mellon University) | Thomaz, Andrea L. (Georgia Institute of Technology)
On the day before the exhibition the participants convened a workshop of 18 short talks. Each track's exhibitors presented a summary of their exhibit. In addition, four guest speakers provided a broader context for all of the exhibitors' efforts. The first guest speaker was the National Science Foundation's Sven Koenig, who highlighted several federal programs that support projects in embodied intelligence. Koenig also provided insights into some of these program's specific priorities, such as international collaborations and educational engagement.
Temporal Action-Graph Games: A New Representation for Dynamic Games
Jiang, Albert Xin, Leyton-Brown, Kevin, Pfeffer, Avi
In this paper we introduce temporal action graph games (TAGGs), a novel graphical representation of imperfect-information extensive form games. We show that when a game involves anonymity or context-specific utility independencies, its encoding as a TAGG can be much more compact than its direct encoding as a multiagent influence diagram (MAID).We also show that TAGGs can be understood as indirect MAID encodings in which many deterministic chance nodes are introduced. We provide an algorithm for computing with TAGGs, and show both theoretically and empirically that our approach improves significantly on the previous state of the art.
A Market-Inspired Approach for Intersection Management in Urban Road Traffic Networks
Traffic congestion in urban road networks is a costly problem that affects all major cities in developed countries. To tackle this problem, it is possible (i) to act on the supply side, increasing the number of roads or lanes in a network, (ii) to reduce the demand, restricting the access to urban areas at specific hours or to specific vehicles, or (iii) to improve the efficiency of the existing network, by means of a widespread use of so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In line with the recent advances in smart transportation management infrastructures, ITS has turned out to be a promising field of application for artificial intelligence techniques. In particular, multiagent systems seem to be the ideal candidates for the design and implementation of ITS. In fact, drivers can be naturally modelled as autonomous agents that interact with the transportation management infrastructure, thereby generating a large-scale, open, agent-based system. To regulate such a system and maintain a smooth and efficient flow of traffic, decentralised mechanisms for the management of the transportation infrastructure are needed. In this article we propose a distributed, market-inspired, mechanism for the management of a future urban road network, where intelligent autonomous vehicles, operated by software agents on behalf of their human owners, interact with the infrastructure in order to travel safely and efficiently through the road network. Building on the reservation-based intersection control model proposed by Dresner and Stone, we consider two different scenarios: one with a single intersection and one with a network of intersections. In the former, we analyse the performance of a novel policy based on combinatorial auctions for the allocation of reservations. In the latter, we analyse the impact that a traffic assignment strategy inspired by competitive markets has on the drivers' route choices. Finally we propose an adaptive management mechanism that integrates the auction-based traffic control policy with the competitive traffic assignment strategy.
The Complexity of Manipulating $k$-Approval Elections
An important problem in computational social choice theory is the complexity of undesirable behavior among agents, such as control, manipulation, and bribery in election systems. These kinds of voting strategies are often tempting at the individual level but disastrous for the agents as a whole. Creating election systems where the determination of such strategies is difficult is thus an important goal. An interesting set of elections is that of scoring protocols. Previous work in this area has demonstrated the complexity of misuse in cases involving a fixed number of candidates, and of specific election systems on unbounded number of candidates such as Borda. In contrast, we take the first step in generalizing the results of computational complexity of election misuse to cases of infinitely many scoring protocols on an unbounded number of candidates. Interesting families of systems include $k$-approval and $k$-veto elections, in which voters distinguish $k$ candidates from the candidate set. Our main result is to partition the problems of these families based on their complexity. We do so by showing they are polynomial-time computable, NP-hard, or polynomial-time equivalent to another problem of interest. We also demonstrate a surprising connection between manipulation in election systems and some graph theory problems.
An existing, ecologically-successful genus of collectively intelligent artificial creatures
People sometimes worry about the Singularity [Vinge, 1993; Kurzweil, 2005], or about the world being taken over by artificially intelligent robots. I believe the risks of these are very small. However, few people recognize that we already share our world with artificial creatures that participate as intelligent agents in our society: corporations. Our planet is inhabited by two distinct kinds of intelligent beings --- individual humans and corporate entities --- whose natures and interests are intimately linked. To co-exist well, we need to find ways to define the rights and responsibilities of both individual humans and corporate entities, and to find ways to ensure that corporate entities behave as responsible members of society.
Eliminating the Weakest Link: Making Manipulation Intractable?
Davies, Jessica, Narodytska, Nina, Walsh, Toby
Successive elimination of candidates is often a route to making manipulation intractable to compute. We prove that eliminating candidates does not necessarily increase the computational complexity of manipulation. However, for many voting rules used in practice, the computational complexity increases. For example, it is already known that it is NP-hard to compute how a single voter can manipulate the result of single transferable voting (the elimination version of plurality voting). We show here that it is NP-hard to compute how a single voter can manipulate the result of the elimination version of veto voting, of the closely related Coombs' rule, and of the elimination versions of a general class of scoring rules.
On how percolation threshold affects PSO performance
Cases, Blanca, D'Anjou, Alicia, Moujahid, Abdelmalik
Statistical evidence of the influence of neighborhood topology on the performance of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms has been shown in many works. However, little has been done about the implications could have the percolation threshold in determining the topology of this neighborhood. This work addresses this problem for individuals that, like robots, are able to sense in a limited neighborhood around them. Based on the concept of percolation threshold, and more precisely, the disk percolation model in 2D, we show that better results are obtained for low values of radius, when individuals occasionally ask others their best visited positions, with the consequent decrease of computational complexity. On the other hand, since percolation threshold is a universal measure, it could have a great interest to compare the performance of different hybrid PSO algorithms.