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 Planning & Scheduling


How WayBlazer is Transforming Travel Planning with Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

For the past few years, the travel industry has been exploring innovative ways to utilize artificial intelligence (AI), in an effort to unlock the promise of more efficient communications and greater customer service between travelers and service provides. So far, most of that potential has remained largely untapped, despite significant advances in both travel and AI sectors. WayBlazer however, is building an extremely powerful travel recommendation engine, and it's doing it with a little help from AI. WayBlazer's Travel Graph uses artificial intelligence to learn about tens of millions of travel products and thousands of global destinations. It ingests and extracts useful from descriptions, reviews, blogs, images, and videos to develop a frame of travel intelligence that's used to power the most relevant recommendations for today's travelers. By using machine learning models, their travel graph gets smarter with every user search. The result is a recommendation engine that understands travel like an expert, factoring both context and search intent.


Post-Hire Employee Engagement and Workforce Management: Leveraging AI in the Workplace

#artificialintelligence

Much of the job of talent acquisition is about establishing a relationship between a company and an employee. Once the offer is made and the candidate accepts, a new journey begins -- one that focuses on fulfilling an initial promise of value and growing it over time. It's about employee engagement, performance management, skills development, and a host of related time- and resource-intensive functions. Moving forward, artificial intelligence (AI) will provide a significant advantage in helping companies to better understand and engage with their workers. AI's impact will be felt across these key areas of employee experience.


Reports of the Workshops of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

AI Magazine

Deep learning and machine learning tailored toward a specific Next to convex optimization, contributed were hot topics, and the workshop application. It is now recognized that papers addressed the problems included papers from across the globe formal languages, and their symbolic of symbolic stochastic planning on deep reinforcement learning agents underpinnings, can enable descriptive and shortest path problems.


Dynamic and Accelerated Partial Order Planning for Interactive Narratives

AAAI Conferences

This paper explores new narrative generation paradigms for open world problems. We propose a speed-up variant of partial plannerโ€“accelerated partial order planner, that can automatically generate narratives for large plan spaces. To incorporate real-time free-form user interaction, a dynamic partial planning technique has been introduced to self-repair the narratives. We also propose a scalable and robust framework to craft open world narratives with minimal effort. Our approach enables content creators to craft complex open world narratives without explicitly authoring user interaction arcs. We tested our framework by developing multiple narratives with free-form interactions. Those narratives were used to test the robustness of the proposed planners.


Sketching a Generative Model of Intention Management for Characters in Stories: Adding Intention Management to a Belief-Driven Story Planning Algorithm

AAAI Conferences

Previous work on story planning has shown success in the generation of plans that are both intention-coherent and demonstrate aspects of inter-character conflict. However, the initial models of intention and conflict have been limited, in that they lack methods to generate story plots wherecharacters drop sub-plans to achieve their goals in believably consistent and expressive ways and adopt new sub-plans in the face of plan failure. In current work, we have developed models of failed actions in stories that go hand in hand with erroneous belief models for character. Motivated by characterizations of rational agents' intentions as choice combined with commitment, we provide a framing of the plan generation process that is intended to show how characters form their own plans to achieve their own goals, act upon those plans until they feel that conditions no longer support their plans, and then re-plan in the face of adversity to achieve their goals. We show an example story plan that contains several types of character-based intention dynamics targeted by our approach.


Planning Graphs for Efficient Generation of Desirable Narrative Trajectories

AAAI Conferences

A goal of Experience Managers (EM) is to guide users through a space of narrative trajectories, or story branches, in an Interactive Narrative (IN). When a user performs an action that deviates from the intended trajectory, the EM uses a mediation strategy called accommodation to transition the user to a new desirable trajectory. However, generating the trajectory options then selecting the appropriate one is computationally expensive and at odds with the low-latency needs of an IN. We define three desirable properties (exemplar trajectories, narrative-theoretic comparison, and efficiency) that general solutions would possess and demonstrate how our plan-based Intention Dependency Graph addresses them.


Memory Bounded Monte Carlo Tree Search

AAAI Conferences

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an effective decision making algorithm that often works well without domain knowledge, finding an increasing application in commercial mobile and video games. A promising application of MCTS is creating AI opponents for board and card games, where Information Set MCTS (ISMCTS) can provide a challenging opponent and reduces the cost of creating game-specific AI opponents. Most research to date has aimed at improving the quality of decision making by (IS)MCTS, with respect to time usage. Memory usage is also an important constraint in commercial applications, particularly on mobile platforms or when there are many AI agents. This paper presents the first systematic study of memory bounding techniques for (IS)MCTS. (IS)MCTS is well known to be an anytime algorithm. We also introduce an anyspace version of (IS)MCTS which can make effective use of any pre-specified amount of memory. This algorithm has been implemented in a commercial version of the card game Spades downloaded more than 6 million times. We find that for games of imperfect information high quality decisions can be made with rather small memory footprints, making (IS)MCTS an even more attractive algorithm for commercial game implementations.


A.I. Serial Planning Graphs and Entrepreneurship

#artificialintelligence

The Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool (DART) is an artificial intelligence program used by the U.S. military to optimize and schedule the transportation of supplies or personnel and solve other logistical problems. In the first 4 years of its use, DART saved the military enough money to recoup the previous 30 years of investments. DART is one of many examples of utilizing AI for planning. Airports use AI for planning flights; Google Maps and other navigation systems use AI for planning; the Mars Rover uses AI to navigate the Red Planet; many large corporations utilize AI planning algorithms to plan logistics and personnel. Using a simplified entrepreneurial analogy, this article will explain a planning approach called "Serial Planning Graphs."


Making the positive case for artificial intelligence - CBR

#artificialintelligence

In part, the critics of AI are driven by the knowledge that'white collar jobs' are the ones that are now under threat. Business leaders are frequently confronted by notions of job-killing automation and headlines on the variation of the theme that "Robots Will Steal Our Jobs." Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Silicon Valley figurehead, and champion of technology-driven innovation even goes a step further by suggesting AI is a fundamental threat to human civilisation. In part, the critics of AI are driven by the knowledge that'white collar jobs' are the ones that are now under threat. The robot on the assembly line is now a familiar image.


Complexity of Scheduling Charging in the Smart Grid

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In the smart grid, the intent is to use flexibility in demand, both to balance demand and supply as well as to resolve potential congestion. A first prominent example of such flexible demand is the charging of electric vehicles, which do not necessarily need to be charged as soon as they are plugged in. The problem of optimally scheduling the charging demand of electric vehicles within the constraints of the electricity infrastructure is called the charge scheduling problem. The models of the charging speed, horizon, and charging demand determine the computational complexity of the charge scheduling problem. For about 20 variants, we show, using a dynamic programming approach, that the problem is either in P or weakly NP-hard. We also show that about 10 variants of the problem are strongly NP-hard, presenting a potentially significant obstacle to their use in practical situations of scale.