Argumentation theory is a powerful paradigm that formalizes a type of commonsense reasoning that aims to simulate the human ability to resolve a specific problem in an intelligent manner. A classical argumentation process takes into account only the properties related to the intrinsic logical soundness of an argument in order to determine its acceptability status. However, these properties are not always the only ones that matter to establish the argument's acceptability---there exist other qualities, such as strength, weight, social votes, trust degree, relevance level, and certainty degree, among others.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays varying roles in supporting both existing and emerging technologies. In the area of Learning and Tutoring, it plays key role in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). The fusion of ITS with Adaptive Hypermedia and Multimedia (AHAM) form the backbone of Adaptive eLearning Systems (AES) which provides personalized experiences to learners. This experience is important because it facilitates the accurate delivery of the learning modules in specific to the learner capacity and readiness. AES types vary, with Adaptive Web Based eLearning Systems (AWBES) being the popular type because of wider access offered by the web technology.The retrieval and aggregation of contents for any eLearning system is critical whichis determined by the relevance of learning material to the needs of the learner.In this paper, we discuss components of AES, role of AI in AES content aggregation, possible risks and available opportunities.

The demand of artificial intelligent adoption for condition-based maintenance strategy is astonishingly increased over the past few years. Intelligent fault diagnosis is one critical topic of maintenance solution for mechanical systems. Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been successfully applied to fault diagnosis tasks for mechanical systems and achieved promising results. However, for diverse working conditions in the industry, deep learning suffers two difficulties: one is that the well-defined (source domain) and new (target domain) datasets are with different feature distributions; another one is the fact that insufficient or no labelled data in target domain significantly reduce the accuracy of fault diagnosis. As a novel idea, deep transfer learning (DTL) is created to perform learning in the target domain by leveraging information from the relevant source domain. Inspired by Wasserstein distance of optimal transport, in this paper, we propose a novel DTL approach to intelligent fault diagnosis, namely Wasserstein Distance based Deep Transfer Learning (WD-DTL), to learn domain feature representations (generated by a CNN based feature extractor) and to minimize the distributions between the source and target domains through adversarial training. The effectiveness of the proposed WD-DTL is verified through 3 transfer scenarios and 16 transfer fault diagnosis experiments of both unsupervised and supervised (with insufficient labelled data) learning. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of the network visualization of those transfer tasks.

Increasing amounts of available data have led to a heightened need for representing large-scale probabilistic knowledge bases. One approach is to use a probabilistic database, a model with strong assumptions that allow for efficiently answering many interesting queries. Recent work on open-world probabilistic databases strengthens the semantics of these probabilistic databases by discarding the assumption that any information not present in the data must be false. While intuitive, these semantics are not sufficiently precise to give reasonable answers to queries. We propose overcoming these issues by using constraints to restrict this open world. We provide an algorithm for one class of queries, and establish a basic hardness result for another. Finally, we propose an efficient and tight approximation for a large class of queries.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was all the rage in the 1980s. Specifically, companies invested heavily to build expert systems – AI applications that captured the knowledge of acknowledged human experts and made it available to solve narrowly defined types of problems. Thus, expert systems were created to configure complex computer systems and to detect likely credit card fraud. This earlier round of AI was triggered by a series of successful academic expert applications created at Stanford University. Dendral analyzed mass spectra data and identified organic molecules – something that, previously, only a few chemists could do. Another expert systems was called Mycin, and it analyzed potential of meningitis infections. In a series of tests, it was shown that Mycin could analyze meningitis as well as human meningitis experts, and it even did slightly better, since it never overlooked possible drug incompatibility issues. The expert systems developed in the Eighties all followed the general approach followed by Dendral and Mycin.

In industrial systems, certain process variables that need to be monitored for detecting faults are often difficult or impossible to measure. Soft sensor techniques are widely used to estimate such difficult-to-measure process variables from easy-to-measure ones. Soft sensor modeling requires training datasets including the information of various states such as operation modes, but the fault dataset with the target variable is insufficient as the training dataset. This paper describes a semi-supervised approach to soft sensor modeling to incorporate an incomplete dataset without the target variable in the training dataset. To incorporate the incomplete dataset, we consider the properties of processes at transition points between operation modes in the system. The regression coefficients of the operation modes are estimated under constraint conditions obtained from the information on the mode transitions. In a case study, this constrained soft sensor modeling was used to predict refrigerant leaks in air-conditioning systems with heating and cooling operation modes. The results show that this modeling method is promising for soft sensors in a system with multiple operation modes.

Early fault detection using instrumented sensor data is one of the promising application areas of machine learning in industrial facilities. However, it is difficult to improve the generalization performance of the trained fault-detection model because of the complex system configuration in the target diagnostic system and insufficient fault data. It is not trivial to apply the trained model to other systems. Here we propose a fault diagnosis method for refrigerant leak detection considering the physical modeling and control mechanism of an air-conditioning system. We derive a useful scaling law related to refrigerant leak. If the control mechanism is the same, the model can be applied to other air-conditioning systems irrespective of the system configuration. Small-scale off-line fault test data obtained in a laboratory are applied to estimate the scaling exponent. We evaluate the proposed scaling law by using real-world data. Based on a statistical hypothesis test of the interaction between two groups, we show that the scaling exponents of different air-conditioning systems are equivalent. In addition, we estimated the time series of the degree of leakage of real process data based on the scaling law and confirmed that the proposed method is promising for early leak detection through comparison with assessment by experts.

The dramatic success in machine learning has led to an explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and increasing expectations for autonomous systems that exhibit human-level intelligence. These expectations have, however, met with fundamental obstacles that cut across many application areas. One such obstacle is adaptability, or robustness. Machine learning researchers have noted current systems lack the ability to recognize or react to new circumstances they have not been specifically programmed or trained for. Intensive theoretical and experimental efforts toward "transfer learning," "domain adaptation," and "lifelong learning"4 are reflective of this obstacle. Another obstacle is "explainability," or that "machine learning models remain mostly black boxes"26 unable to explain the reasons behind their predictions or recommendations, thus eroding users' trust and impeding diagnosis and repair; see Hutson8 and Marcus.11 A third obstacle concerns the lack of understanding of cause-effect connections.

Most work on interpretability in machine learning has focused on designing either inherently interpretable models, that typically trade-off interpretability for accuracy, or post-hoc explanation systems, that lack guarantees about their explanation quality. We propose an alternative to these approaches by directly regularizing a black-box model for interpretability at training time. Our approach explicitly connects three key aspects of interpretable machine learning: the model's innate explainability, the explanation system used at test time, and the metrics that measure explanation quality. Our regularization results in substantial (up to orders of magnitude) improvement in terms of explanation fidelity and stability metrics across a range of datasets, models, and black-box explanation systems. Remarkably, our regularizers also slightly improve predictive accuracy on average across the nine datasets we consider. Further, we show that the benefits of our novel regularizers on explanation quality provably generalize to unseen test points.

Artificial Intelligence is way overhyped. I remember well how over-hyped AI was back in the early 1980s when I worked with Applied Expert Systems, a startup founded by some MIT professors that aspired to use expert systems to transform the world of personal financial planning. I helped bring the software to the company and participated in so-called knowledge engineering by interviewing a personal financial planning expert. The idea was to convert the expert's decision making rules into software and build a system that would replace personal financial planners. Sadly for those who invested time and money in this company, its product never found much of a market and it folded.