In cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Twenty-Second International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR), the premier international meeting on research and applications in case-based reasoning (CBR), was held from Monday September 29 to Wednesday October 1, 2014, in Cork, Ireland. ICCBR is the annual meeting of the CBR community and the leading conference on this topic. Started in 1993 as the European Conference on CBR and 1995 as ICCBR, the two conferences alternated biennially until their merger in 2010.

Although Switzerland is a small country, it is home to many internationally renowned universities and scientific institutions. The research landscape in Switzerland is rich, and AI-related themes are investigated by many teams under diverse umbrellas. This column sheds some light on selected developments and trends on AI in Switzerland as perceived by members of the Special Interest group on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (SGAICO) organizational team, which has brought together researchers from Switzerland interested in AI and cognitive science for over 30 years.

The last 10 years have seen the development of novel architectures and technologies for domainfocused, task-specific systems that know many things, such as who (identities, profile, history) they are with (social context) and in what role (responsibility, security, privacy); when and where (event, time, place); why (goals, shared or personal); how are they doing it (methods, applications); and using what resources (device, services, access, and ownership). Smart spaces and devices will increasingly use such contextual knowledge to help users move seamlessly between devices and applications, without having to explicitly carry, transfer, and exchange activity context. Such systems will qualitatively shift our lives both at work and play and significantly change our interactions both with our physical and virtual worlds. This dream of seamlessly interacting with our virtual environment has a long history as can be seen in Apple Inc.'s Knowledge Navigator 1987 concept video. However, the combination of dramatic progress in low-power mobile computing devices and sensors, with advances in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction (HCI) in the last decade, have provided the kind of platforms and algorithms that are enabling context-aware virtual personal assistants that plan activities and recognize intent. This has lead to an increase in work designed to bring these ideas into real world application and address the final technical hurdles that will make such systems a reality.

For humans and automation to effectively collaborate and perform tasks, all participants need access to a common representation of potentially relevant situational information, or context. This article describes a general framework for building context-aware interactive intelligent systems that comprises three major functions: (1) capture human-system interactions and infer implicit context; (2) analyze and predict user intent and goals; and (3) provide effective augmentation or mitigation strategies to improve performance, such as delivering timely, personalized information and recommendations, adjusting levels of automation, or adapting visualizations. Our goal is to develop an approach that enables humans to interact with automation more intuitively and naturally that is reusable across domains by modeling context and algorithms at a higher-level of abstraction. We first provide an operational definition of context and discuss challenges and opportunities for exploiting context. We then describe our current work towards a general platform that supports developing context-aware applications in a variety of domains. We then explore an example use case illustrating how our framework can facilitate personalized collaboration within an information management and decision support tool. Future work includes evaluating our framework.

AAAI's 2015 Workshop Program was held Sunday and Monday, January 25–26, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Austin Hotel in Austion, Texas, USA. The AAAI-15 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. Most workshops were held on a single day. The titles of the workshops included AI and Ethics, AI for Cities, AI for Transportation: Advice, Interactivity and Actor Modeling, Algorithm Configuration, Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments, Beyond the Turing Test, Computational Sustainability, Computer Poker and Imperfect Information, Incentive and Trust in E-Communities, Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination, Planning, Search, and Optimization, Scholarly Big Data: AI Perspectives, Challenges, and Ideas, Trajectory-Based Behaviour Analytics, World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence, Knowledge, Skill, and Behavior Transfer in Autonomous Robots, and Learning for General Competency in Video Games.

Although a number of initiatives provide personalized context-aware guidance for niche use-cases, a standard framework for context awareness remains lacking. This article explains how semantic technology has been exploited to generate a centralized repository of personal activity context. This data drives advanced features such as, personal situation recognition and customizable rules for the context-sensitive management of personal devices and data sharing. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate how an innovative context-aware system has successfully adopted such an infrastructure.

An important research topic in artificial intelligence is automatic sensing and inferencing of contextual information, which is used to build computer models of the user’s activity. One approach to build such activity-aware systems is the notion of activity-based computing (ABC). ABC is a computing paradigm that has been applied in personal information management applications as well as in ubiquitous, multidevice, and interactive surface computing. ABC has emerged as a response to the traditional application- and file-centered computing paradigm, which is oblivious to a notion of a user’s activity context spanning heterogeneous devices, multiple applications, services, and information sources. In this article, we present ABC as an approach to contextualize information, and present our research into designing activity-centric computing technologies.

This article presents new algorithms for inferring users' activities in a class We also show that visualizing students' plans improves their performance on new problems when compared to an alternative visualization that consists of a step-by-step list of actions. Such tools can plan visualization outperformed those students who provide support for teachers and education were presented with the list of activities for all of researchers in analyzing and assessing students' use these measures. These contributions demonstrate the benefit of Students' interactions with ELEs are complex, as applying novel plan-recognition technologies toward we illustrate using concepts from an ELE for teaching intelligent analysis of students' interactions in openended the basics of chemistry. Students can engage in and flexible software. Such technologies can exploratory activities involving trial and error, such potentially support teachers in their understanding as searching for the right pair of chemicals to combine of student behavior as well as students in their problem in order to achieve a desired reaction. They can solving and lead to advances in automatic recognition repeat activities indefinitely in pursuit of a goal or in other exploratory domains.

Knowledge workers perform work on many tasks per day and often switch between tasks. When performing work on a task, a knowledge worker must typically search, navigate and dig through file systems, documents and emails, all of which introduce friction into the flow of work. This friction can be reduced, and productivity improved, by capturing and modeling the context of a knowledge worker’s task based on how the knowledge worker interacts with an information space. Captured task contexts can be used to facilitate switching between tasks, to focus a user interface on just the information needed by a task and to recommend potentially other useful information. We report on the use of task contexts and the effect of context on productivity for a particular kind of knowledge worker, software developers. We also report on qualitative findings of the use of task contexts by a more general population of knowledge workers.

AAAI-16 will also feature the following programs (preliminary list). The deadline for nominations is September Please make a note of the upcoming deadlines (subject to change): 30, 2015.