Hybrid planning with nonlinear continuous change is a significant challenge for existing planners. Prior works limit their scope to linear change or base their formalisms in model checking frameworkswith inherent limitations. We address nonlinear PDDL+ planning with anew encoding in first order logic over real valued functions. Our planner, PluReal, translates PDDL+ to this logical encoding and applies the dReal Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to construct plans. Unlike prior work that uses dReal in the hybrid system model checking tradition, PluReal is based in the planning as satisfiability (SAT) heritage. Adopting the SAT approach helps lift several unnatural restrictions that are imposed by the translation through hybrid systems and leads to improved scalability even without SMT solver variable selection heuristics.

As robots evolve into an integral part of the human ecosystem, humans and robots will be involved in a multitude of collaborative tasks that require complex coordination and cooperation. Indeed there has been extensive work in the robotics, planning as well as the human-robot interaction communities to understand and facilitate such seamless teaming. However, it has been argued that their increased participation as independent autonomous agents in hitherto human-habited environments has introduced many new challenges to the view of traditional human-robot teaming. When robots are deployed with independent and often self-sufficient tasks in a shared workspace, teams are often not formed explicitly and multiple teams cohabiting an environment interact more like colleagues rather than teammates. In this paper, we formalize these differences and analyze metrics to characterize autonomous behavior in such human-robot cohabitation settings.

Planning in hybrid systems is important for dealing with real world applications. PDDL+ supports this representation of domains with mixed discrete and continuous dynamics, and supports events and processes modeling exogenous change. Motivated by numerous SAT-based planning approaches, we propose an approach to PDDL+ planning through SMT, describing an SMT encoding that captures all the features of the PDDL+ problem as published by Fox and Long (2006). The encoding can be applied on domains with nonlinear continuous change. We apply this encoding in a simple planning algorithm, demonstrating excellent results on a set of benchmark problems.

As robots evolve into fully autonomous agents, settings involving human-robot teams will evolve into human-robot societies, where multiple independent agents and teams, both humans and robots, coexist and work in harmony. Given such a scenario, the question we ask is - How can two or more such agents dynamically form coalitions or teams for mutual benefit with minimal prior coordination? In this work, we provide a game theoretic solution to address this problem. We will first look at a situation with full information, provide approximations to compute the extensive form game more efficiently, and then extend the formulation to account for scenarios when the human is not totally confident of its potential partner's intentions. Finally we will look at possible extensions of the game, that can capture different aspects of decision making with respect to ad-hoc coalition formation in human-robot societies.

In this paper, we propose an intelligent dialogue agent for the IoT home. The goal of the proposed system is to efficiently control IoT devices with natural spoken dialogue. This system is made up of the following components: Spoken Language Understanding for analyzing textual input and understanding user intention, Dialogue Management with a State Manager that consists of dialogue policies, Context Manager for understanding the environment, Action Planner responsible for generating a sequence of actions to achieve user intention, Things Manager for observing and controlling IoT devices, and Natural Language Generation that generates natural language from computer-based representation. This system is fully implemented in software and is evaluated in a real IoT home environment.

Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add significant cognitive load and potentially introduce safety risks to humans when agents behave unexpectedly. Hence, for such agents to be helpful, one important requirement is for them to synthesize plans that can be easily understood by humans. While there exists previous work that studied socially acceptable robots that interact with humans in "natural ways", and work that investigated legible motion planning, there lacks a general solution for high level task planning. To address this issue, we introduce the notions of plan {\it explicability} and {\it predictability}. To compute these measures, first, we postulate that humans understand agent plans by associating abstract tasks with agent actions, which can be considered as a labeling process. We learn the labeling scheme of humans for agent plans from training examples using conditional random fields (CRFs). Then, we use the learned model to label a new plan to compute its explicability and predictability. These measures can be used by agents to proactively choose or directly synthesize plans that are more explicable and predictable to humans. We provide evaluations on a synthetic domain and with human subjects using physical robots to show the effectiveness of our approach

From the increasing use of contingent freelance workers to the growing role of robotics and smart machines, the corporate workforce is changing--radically and rapidly. These changes are no longer simply a distraction; they are now actively disrupting labor markets and the economy. Three years ago, Deloitte introduced the concept of the open talent economy, predicting that new labor models--on and off the balance sheet--would become increasingly important sources of talent.2 Granted, respondents to this year's survey rated workforce management the least important of the trends we explored. At an even more basic level, companies are struggling to understand who (and what) their workforces are composed of and how to manage today's incredibly diverse combination of worker types.

The task of algorithm selection involves choosing an algorithm from a set of algorithms on a per-instance basis in order to exploit the varying performance of algorithms over a set of instances. The algorithm selection problem is attracting increasing attention from researchers and practitioners in AI. Years of fruitful applications in a number of domains have resulted in a large amount of data, but the community lacks a standard format or repository for this data. This situation makes it difficult to share and compare different approaches effectively, as is done in other, more established fields. It also unnecessarily hinders new researchers who want to work in this area. To address this problem, we introduce a standardized format for representing algorithm selection scenarios and a repository that contains a growing number of data sets from the literature. Our format has been designed to be able to express a wide variety of different scenarios. Demonstrating the breadth and power of our platform, we describe a set of example experiments that build and evaluate algorithm selection models through a common interface. The results display the potential of algorithm selection to achieve significant performance improvements across a broad range of problems and algorithms.

We consider planning with uncertainty in the initial state as a case study of incremental quantified Boolean formula (QBF) solving. We report on experiments with a workflow to incrementally encode a planning instance into a sequence of QBFs. To solve this sequence of incrementally constructed QBFs, we use our general-purpose incremental QBF solver DepQBF. Since the generated QBFs have many clauses and variables in common, our approach avoids redundancy both in the encoding phase and in the solving phase. Experimental results show that incremental QBF solving outperforms non-incremental QBF solving. Our results are the first empirical study of incremental QBF solving in the context of planning and motivate its use in other application domains.

You don't have to go very far in the marketing tech space these days to bump into predictive technology that scores future customers, system intelligence that puts unnoticed pieces of data together or machine learning that recognizes useful patterns in piles of data. More and more, smart marketing tools are generating insights, assisting with or making decisions, and even taking actions. But this calls into question what the field is about. Since the first time someone stimulated interest in a new product, marketers have assembled information and made choices about ways to get the word out about their products, increase the number of customers, generate customer loyalty and boost sales. So it's not out of bounds to ask: what is the marketer's role when increasingly self-reliant and autonomous intelligent software does those things?