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Poster Abstracts

McCarthy, Philip Michael (The University of Memphis)

AAAI Conferences

In the Silver Anniversary year of FLAIRS, in an effort to promote discussion of emerging ideas and work in order to encourage and help guide researchers, especially new researchers, the program committee added the poster abstract submission category. This allows researchers to present a full poster in the conference poster session and receive that critical, work-shaping feedback that helps guide good work into great work.


Using Frequent Pattern Mining To Identify Behaviors In A Naked Mole Rat Colony

Imberman, Susan P. (College of Staten Island, Graduate Center, City University of New York) | Kress, Michael E. (College of Staten Island, Graduate Center, City University of New York) | McCloskey, Dan P. (College of Staten Island, CSI/IBR Center for Developmental Neuroscience)

AAAI Conferences

Animal behavior analysis has, in the past, taken a very low tech approach, with direct observer surveillance and automated video surveillance as the norm. These methods are insufficient when one wants to study interactions between large numbers of animals in their housing environment. In this paper we use a housing environment that has been equipped with a system of RFID sensors. RFID transponders were implanted into the study animal, the naked mole rat. The resulting data was analyzed using principal component analysis and frequent pattern mining. Results showed that these methods can identify time periods of high behavioral activity from that of low activity, along with which groups of animals interacted with one another


Special Track on Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Semantics, Computational Linguistics, and Logic

Biskri, Ismaïl (University of Quebec)

AAAI Conferences

Propositional attitudes in noncompositional logic are analysed from the view point of integration of their epistemic and deontic components. A new logical calculus for propositional attitudes inspired by possibility theory, a noncompositional version of fuzzy logic is proposed.


Finding Associations between People

Blanco, Eduardo (Lymba Corporation) | Moldovan, Dan (Lymba Corporation)

AAAI Conferences

Associations between people and other concepts are common in text and range from distant to close connections. This paper discusses and justifies the need to consider subtypes of the generic relation ASSOCIATION. Semantic primitives are used as a concise and formal way of specifying the key semantic differences between subtypes. A taxonomy of association relations is proposed, and a method based on composing previously extracted relations is used to extract subtypes. Experimental results show high precision and moderate recall.


Generating Texture Aware Spatial Decompositions

Hale, D. Hunter (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte) | Youngblood, G. Michael (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

AAAI Conferences

This work presents an algorithm to provide a better represen- tation of space to artificially intelligent characters (i.e., agents or bots) in game and simulation environments by providing a more accurate breakdown of the traversable space present in the game environment. Such representations are generally constructed by decomposing the walkable space present in a game environment into a series of convex regions to form a data structure called a navigation mesh. We extend the basic concept of a navigation mesh by the introduction of an understanding of the textures that are attached to the underlying geometry creating what we refer to as a texture-aware navigation mesh. This does result in a more complex navigation mesh (more regions and a larger search space). However, since the textures of walkable geometry can be used to determine the appropriate traversal method for that terrain, a game character can determine valid paths for their traversal methods using just the navigation mesh (e.g., characters in cars can generate paths containing just roads or walking characters can create paths containing just sidewalks). We also present a use case that shows how such a system of texture aware naviga- tion meshes might benefit character path planning and search in virtual environments. In this use case, we examine a Real Time Strategy game style game environment, which shows it is possible to generate a navigation mesh such that each region is composed of a single terrain type.


SAMHT — Suicidal Avatars for Mental Health Training

Carpenter, Cameron (University of Miami) | Osterberg, Leticia (University of Miami) | Sutcliffe, Geoff (University of Miami)

AAAI Conferences

Psychosocial assessments and treatments are effective for a range of psychological problems.One particular area of concern is youth suicide. This paper reports on the SAMHT intelligent tutoring system, which provides youth suicide risk assessment training.SAMHT's interactive avatar interface is based on an intelligent backend, and provides a believable interaction that is effective for training mental health professionals.


Gestural Control of Household Appliances for the Physically Impaired

Guesgen, Hans Werner (Massey University) | Kessell, Darren (Massey University)

AAAI Conferences

Household appliances such as dishwashers, televisions and radios are an indispensable part of the modern household. Yet, people who have some form of physical impairment often find that they are unable to make use of these commonly available appliances, to the detriment of their lifestyle. This paper proposes a gesture interface for home appliances that can be used by people with physical impairments. Two simulated gesture controlled appliances are developed and evaluated by physically impaired people. The results show that this interface is able to allow physically impaired people to make use of modern appliances by gesture.


Effect of Latency on Pursuit Problems

Birmingham, William Peter (Grove City College) | Rose, Shane (Grove City College) | Miller, Gregory (Grove City College) | Mahan, Matthew (Grove City College)

AAAI Conferences

We model the pursuit problem as a set of distributed agents communicating over a network subject to latency. Latency has serious deleterious effects on solving the pursuit problem. In this paper, we present a simple, yet effective way of dealing with latency that yields very good performance. Our method disperses predators within a region in which the prey may move that accounts for network latency.


Iterative Ontology Selection Guided by User for Building Domain Ontologies

Minyaoui, Asma (University of Sfax) | Gargouri, Faiez (University of Sfax)

AAAI Conferences

In this paper we present a new method for ontology selection in a reuse context. The novel feature of this method is the iterative selection of the reused ontologies. Ontology selection is guided by the user according to his requirements and his perception to the target domain. Starting from a first selected ontology, the concepts with the weakest density are identified then the ontology developer is enabled to choose among them the ones to be refined in order to cover a specific scope of the domain.


The Devil Is in the Details: New Directions in Deception Analysis

McCarthy, Philip Michael (The University of Memphis ) | Duran, Nicholas D. (University of California Merced) | Booker, Lucille M. (The University of Memphis)

AAAI Conferences

In this study, we use the computational textual analysis tool, the Gramulator, to identify and examine the distinctive linguistic features of deceptive and truthful discourse. The theme of the study is abortion rights and the deceptive texts are derived from a Devil’s Advocate approach, conducted to suppress personal beliefs and values. Our study takes the form of a contrastive corpus analysis, and produces systematic differences between truthful and deceptive personal accounts. Results suggest that deceivers employ a distancing strategy that is often associated with deceptive linguistic behavior. Ultimately, these deceivers struggle to adopt a truth perspective. Perhaps of most importance, our results indicate issues of concern with current deception detection theory and methodology. From a theoretical standpoint, our results question whether deceivers are deceiving at all or whether they are merely poorly expressing a rhetorical position, caused by being forced to speculate on a perceived proto-typical position. From a methodological standpoint, our results cause us to question the validity of deception corpora. Consequently, we propose new rigorous standards so as to better understand the subject matter of the deception field. Finally, we question the prevailing approach of abstract data measurement and call for future assessment to consider contextual lexical features. We conclude by suggesting a prudent approach to future research for fear that our eagerness to analyze and theorize may cause us to misidentify deception. After-all, successful deception, which is the kind we seek to detect, is likely to be an elusive and fickle prey.