Expert System is making enhancements to Cogito, its Artificial Intelligence platform that understands textual information and automatically processes natural language, delivering key updates in the areas of knowledge graphs, machine learning, and RPA. Cogito 14.4 enables users to more easily customize its Knowledge Graph of approximately 350,000 concepts connected by 2.8 Million relationships and lets them import targeted knowledge from any sources (such as company repositories Wikipedia or Geonames) in only a few clicks, enabling the platform to resolve references to real-world entities (such as people, companies, locations) and to link them to knowledge repositories by using standardized identifiers. Cogito 14.4 also extends its Natural Language Processing (NLP) extraction pipeline with a new active learning workflow that accelerates machine-learning-based analytics projects. Through an intuitive web application, Cogito 14.4's active learning workflow enables end-users to visualize the quality of extraction and provide feedback to the engine, which iteratively retrains the engine to reach the user's quality goals, thus reducing the amount of manual annotation needed Cogito 14.4 includes a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) connector that extends the use of RPA bots into process automation leveraging knowledge (and not only structured data) as well as requiring human-like judgement. The Cogito RPA Connector leverages deep contextual understanding to extract precise data from unstructured business documents.

The TriRhenaTech alliance universities and their partners presented their competences in the field of artificial intelligence and their cross-border cooperations with the industry at the tri-national conference 'Artificial Intelligence : from Research to Application' on March 13th, 2019 in Offenburg. The TriRhenaTech alliance is a network of universities in the Upper Rhine Trinational Metropolitan Region comprising of the German universities of applied sciences in Furtwangen, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, and Offenburg, the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Loerrach, the French university network Alsace Tech (comprised of 14 'grandes \'ecoles' in the fields of engineering, architecture and management) and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The alliance's common goal is to reinforce the transfer of knowledge, research, and technology, as well as the cross-border mobility of students.

In this paper, we propose a constraint-based modeling approach for the problem of discovering frequent gradual patterns in a numerical dataset. This SAT-based declarative approach offers an additional possibility to benefit from the recent progress in satisfiability testing and to exploit the efficiency of modern SAT solvers for enumerating all frequent gradual patterns in a numerical dataset. Our approach can easily be extended with extra constraints, such as temporal constraints in order to extract more specific patterns in a broad range of gradual patterns mining applications. We show the practical feasibility of our SAT model by running experiments on two real world datasets.

In this paper we investigate two variants of association rules for preference data, Label Ranking Association Rules and Pairwise Association Rules. Label Ranking Association Rules (LRAR) are the equivalent of Class Association Rules (CAR) for the Label Ranking task. In CAR, the consequent is a single class, to which the example is expected to belong to. In LRAR, the consequent is a ranking of the labels. The generation of LRAR requires special support and confidence measures to assess the similarity of rankings. In this work, we carry out a sensitivity analysis of these similarity-based measures. We want to understand which datasets benefit more from such measures and which parameters have more influence in the accuracy of the model. Furthermore, we propose an alternative type of rules, the Pairwise Association Rules (PAR), which are defined as association rules with a set of pairwise preferences in the consequent. While PAR can be used both as descriptive and predictive models, they are essentially descriptive models. Experimental results show the potential of both approaches.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes an integral part of our life, the development of explainable AI, embodied in the decision-making process of an AI or robotic agent, becomes imperative. For a robotic teammate, the ability to generate explanations to explain its behavior is one of the key requirements of an explainable agency. Prior work on explanation generation focuses on supporting the reasoning behind the robot's behavior. These approaches, however, fail to consider the cognitive effort needed to understand the received explanation. In particular, the human teammate is expected to understand any explanation provided before the task execution, no matter how much information is presented in the explanation. In this work, we argue that an explanation, especially complex ones, should be made in an online fashion during the execution, which helps to spread out the information to be explained and thus reducing the cognitive load of humans. However, a challenge here is that the different parts of an explanation are dependent on each other, which must be taken into account when generating online explanations. To this end, a general formulation of online explanation generation is presented. We base our explanation generation method in a model reconciliation setting introduced in our prior work. Our approach is evaluated both with human subjects in a standard planning competition (IPC) domain, using NASA Task Load Index (TLX), as well as in simulation with four different problems.

His demand for a ban triggered a legal and moral quagmire, as the Pentagon faced the prospect of throwing out service members who had willingly come forward as transgender after being promised they would be protected and allowed to serve. And as legal battles blocked the ban from taking effect, the Obama-era policy continued and transgender individuals were allowed to begin enlisting in the military a little more than a year ago.

WASHINGTON – The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar most transgender troops and military recruits from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender. The new policy comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle, and it falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Donald Trump. But it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and can't or won't serve in their birth gender. The order says the military services must implement the new policy in 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. And it allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis.

Several inconsistency-tolerant semantics have been introduced for querying inconsistent description logic knowledge bases. The first contribution of this paper is a practical approach for computing the query answers under three well-known such semantics, namely the AR, IAR and brave semantics, in the lightweight description logic DL-LiteR. We show that query answering under the intractable AR semantics can be performed efficiently by using IAR and brave semantics as tractable approximations and encoding the AR entailment problem as a propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem. The second issue tackled in this work is explaining why a tuple is a (non-)answer to a query under these semantics. We define explanations for positive and negative answers under the brave, AR and IAR semantics. We then study the computational properties of explanations in DL-LiteR. For each type of explanation, we analyze the data complexity of recognizing (preferred) explanations and deciding if a given assertion is relevant or necessary. We establish tight connections between intractable explanation problems and variants of SAT, enabling us to generate explanations by exploiting solvers for Boolean satisfaction and optimization problems. Finally, we empirically study the efficiency of our query answering and explanation framework using a benchmark we built upon the well-established LUBM benchmark.

We develop a new Low-level, First-order Probabilistic Programming Language (LF-PPL) suited for models containing a mix of continuous, discrete, and/or piecewise-continuous variables. The key success of this language and its compilation scheme is in its ability to automatically distinguish parameters the density function is discontinuous with respect to, while further providing runtime checks for boundary crossings. This enables the introduction of new inference engines that are able to exploit gradient information, while remaining efficient for models which are not everywhere differentiable. We demonstrate this ability by incorporating a discontinuous Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (DHMC) inference engine that is able to deliver automated and efficient inference for non-differentiable models. Our system is backed up by a mathematical formalism that ensures that any model expressed in this language has a density with measure zero discontinuities to maintain the validity of the inference engine.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems need to include an explanation model to communicate the internal decisions, behaviours and actions to the interacting humans. Successful explanation involves both cognitive and social processes. In this paper we focus on the challenge of meaningful interaction between an explainer and an explainee and investigate the structural aspects of an interactive explanation to propose an interaction protocol. We follow a bottom-up approach to derive the model by analysing transcripts of different explanation dialogue types with 398 explanation dialogues. We use grounded theory to code and identify key components of an explanation dialogue. We formalize the model using the agent dialogue framework (ADF) as a new dialogue type and then evaluate it in a human-agent interaction study with 101 dialogues from 14 participants. Our results show that the proposed model can closely follow the explanation dialogues of human-agent conversations.