Diabetes management is a difficult task for patients, who must monitor and control their blood glucose levels in order to avoid serious diabetic complications. It is a difficult task for physicians, who must manually interpret large volumes of blood glucose data to tailor therapy to the needs of each patient. This paper describes three emerging applications that employ AI to ease this task: (1) case-based decision support for diabetes management; (2) machine learning classification of blood glucose plots; and (3) support vector regression for blood glucose prediction. The first application provides decision support by detecting blood glucose control problems and recommending therapeutic adjustments to correct them. The second provides an automated screen for excessive glycemic variability. The third aims to build a hypoglycemia predictor that could alert patients to dangerously low blood glucose levels in time to take preventive action. All are products of the 4 Diabetes Support SystemTM project, which uses AI to promote the health and wellbeing of people with type 1 diabetes. These emerging applications could potentially benefit 20 million patients who are at risk for devastating complications, thereby improving quality of life and reducing health care cost expenditures.

In this article we provide insight into the BodyMedia FIT armband system — a wearable multi-sensor technology that continuously monitors physiological events related to energy expenditure for weight management using machine learning and data modeling methods. Since becoming commercially available in 2001, more than half a million users have used the system to track their physiological parameters and to achieve their individual health goals including weight-loss. We describe several challenges that arise in applying machine learning techniques to the health care domain and present various solutions utilized in the armband system. We demonstrate how machine learning and multi-sensor data fusion techniques are critical to the system’s success.

NewsFinder automates the steps involved in finding, selecting, categorizing, and publishing news stories that meet relevance criteria for the Artificial Intelligence community. The software combines a broad search of online news sources with topic-specific trained models and heuristics. Since August 2010, the program has been used to operate the AI in the News service that is part of the AAAI AITopics website.

From 2008-2010 we built an experimental personalized news system where readers subscribe to organized channels of topical information that are curated by experts. AI technology was employed to efficiently present the right information to each reader and to radically reduce the workload of curators. The system went through three implementation cycles and processed over 20 million news stories from about 12,000 RSS feeds on over 8000 topics organized by 160 curators for over 600 registered readers. This paper describes the approach, engineering and AI technology of the system.

As a result, it is good to read these articles from a practical perspective. Papers that document deployed systems clarify the motivating application constraints, the match (and mismatch) between problems and technology, the innovations required to surmount barriers to deployment, and the impact of technology on application through practical measures of cost and benefit. Other articles describe applications that are almost feasible, drawn from papers in the IAAI emergent applications track. These papers provide a window into the search for viable applications at an earlier stage in the process of mating task with technology. All of the articles supply insight into the core question of what is feasible and why, which is a useful lens for us, as readers, to employ in viewing our own work. This special issue of AI Magazine contains expanded versions of five papers that describe deployed applications and two papers that discuss emergent applications from IAAI-11 (the article by Warrick and colleagues is from IAAI-10).

Learning by demonstration technology has long held the promise to empower non-programmers to customize and extend software. We describe the deployment of a learning by demonstration capability to support user creation of automated procedures in a collaborative planning environment that is used widely by the U.S. Army. This technology, which has been in operational use since the summer of 2010, has helped to reduce user workloads by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. The technology has also provided the unexpected benefit of enabling standardization of products and processes.

In computer experiments, a mathematical model implemented on a computer is used to represent complex physical phenomena. These models, known as computer simulators, enable experimental study of a virtual representation of the complex phenomena. Simulators can be thought of as complex functions that take many inputs and provide an output. Often these simulators are themselves expensive to compute, and may be approximated by "surrogate models" such as statistical regression models. In this paper we consider a new kind of surrogate model, a Bayesian ensemble of trees (Chipman et al. 2010), with the specific goal of learning enough about the simulator that a particular feature of the simulator can be estimated. We focus on identifying the simulator's global minimum. Utilizing the Bayesian version of the Expected Improvement criterion (Jones et al. 1998), we show that this ensemble is particularly effective when the simulator is ill-behaved, exhibiting nonstationarity or abrupt changes in the response. A number of illustrations of the approach are given, including a tidal power application.

The problem of bipartite ranking, where instances are labeled positive or negative and the goal is to learn a scoring function that minimizes the probability of mis-ranking a pair of positive and negative instances (or equivalently, that maximizes the area under the ROC curve), has been widely studied in recent years. A dominant theoretical and algorithmic framework for the problem has been to reduce bipartite ranking to pairwise classification; in particular, it is well known that the bipartite ranking regret can be formulated as a pairwise classification regret, which in turn can be upper bounded using usual regret bounds for classification problems. Recently, Kotlowski et al. (2011) showed regret bounds for bipartite ranking in terms of the regret associated with balanced versions of the standard (non-pairwise) logistic and exponential losses. In this paper, we show that such (non-pairwise) surrogate regret bounds for bipartite ranking can be obtained in terms of a broad class of proper (composite) losses that we term as strongly proper. Our proof technique is much simpler than that of Kotlowski et al. (2011), and relies on properties of proper (composite) losses as elucidated recently by Reid and Williamson (2010, 2011) and others. Our result yields explicit surrogate bounds (with no hidden balancing terms) in terms of a variety of strongly proper losses, including for example logistic, exponential, squared and squared hinge losses as special cases. We also obtain tighter surrogate bounds under certain low-noise conditions via a recent result of Clemencon and Robbiano (2011).

A model of story generation recently proposed by Riedl and Young casts it as planning, with the additional condition that story characters behave intentionally. This means that characters have perceivable motivation for the actions they take. I show that this condition can be compiled away (in more ways than one) to produce a classical planning problem that can be solved by an off-the-shelf classical planner, more efficiently than by Riedl and Young's specialised planner.

Recent work suggests that some auto-encoder variants do a good job of capturing the local manifold structure of the unknown data generating density. This paper contributes to the mathematical understanding of this phenomenon and helps define better justified sampling algorithms for deep learning based on auto-encoder variants. We consider an MCMC where each step samples from a Gaussian whose mean and covariance matrix depend on the previous state, defines through its asymptotic distribution a target density. First, we show that good choices (in the sense of consistency) for these mean and covariance functions are the local expected value and local covariance under that target density. Then we show that an auto-encoder with a contractive penalty captures estimators of these local moments in its reconstruction function and its Jacobian. A contribution of this work is thus a novel alternative to maximum-likelihood density estimation, which we call local moment matching. It also justifies a recently proposed sampling algorithm for the Contractive Auto-Encoder and extends it to the Denoising Auto-Encoder.