IT Service Management deals with managing a broad range of items related to complex system environments. As there is both, a close connection to business interests and IT infrastructure, the application of semantic expressions which are seamlessly integrated within applications for managing ITSM environments, can help to improve transparency and profitability. This paper focuses on the challenges regarding the integration of semantics and ontologies within ITSM environments. It will describe the paradigm of relationships and inheritance within complex service trees and will present an approach of ontologically expressing them. Furthermore, the application of SBVR-based rules as executable SQL triggers will be discussed. Finally, the broad range of topics for further research, derived from the findings, will be presented.

We present a description of the PhD thesis which aims to propose a rule-based query answering method for relational data. In this approach we use an additional knowledge which is represented as a set of rules and describes the source data at concept (ontological) level. Queries are posed in the terms of abstract level. We present two methods. The first one uses hybrid reasoning and the second one exploits only forward chaining. These two methods are demonstrated by the prototypical implementation of the system coupled with the Jess engine. Tests are performed on the knowledge base of the selected economic crimes: fraudulent disbursement and money laundering.

Informledge System (ILS) is a knowledge network with autonomous nodes and intelligent links that integrate and structure the pieces of knowledge. In this paper, we put forward the strategies for knowledge embedding and retrieval in an ILS. ILS is a powerful knowledge network system dealing with logical storage and connectivity of information units to form knowledge using autonomous nodes and multi-lateral links. In ILS, the autonomous nodes known as Knowledge Network Nodes (KNN)s play vital roles which are not only used in storage, parsing and in forming the multi-lateral linkages between knowledge points but also in helping the realization of intelligent retrieval of linked information units in the form of knowledge. Knowledge built in to the ILS forms the shape of sphere. The intelligence incorporated into the links of a KNN helps in retrieving various knowledge threads from a specific set of KNNs. A developed entity of information realized through KNN forms in to the shape of a knowledge cone

Transfer learning aims to solve new learning problems by extracting and making use of the common knowledge found in related domains. A key element of transfer learning is to identify structured knowledge to enable the knowledge transfer. In this article, we describe three of our recent works on transfer learning in a progressively more sophisticated order of the structured knowledge being transferred. We show that optimization methods, and techniques inspired by the concerns of data reuse can be applied to extract and transfer deep structural knowledge between a variety of source and target problems.

Human experts in scientific fields routinely work with evidence that is noisy and untrustworthy, heuristics that are unproven, and possible conclusions that are contradictory. We present a deployed AI system, Calvin, for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with these difficult issues. Calvin solves these problems using an argumentation framework and a system of confidence that uses two-dimensional vectors to express the quality of heuristics and the applicability of evidence. The arguments it produces are strikingly similar to published expert arguments.

In this article, we discuss the problem of transferring search heuristics from one planner to another. More specifically, we demonstrate how to transfer the domain-dependent heuristics acquired by one planner into a second planner. Our motivation is to improve the efficiency and the efficacy of the second planner by allowing it to use the transferred heuristics to capture domain regularities that it would not otherwise recognize. Our experimental results show that the transferred knowledge does improve the second planner's performance on novel tasks over a set of seven benchmark planning domains.

A common problem for companies with strong business growth is that it is hard to find enough experienced staff to support expansion needs. This article is a case study of how one of the largest travel agencies in Hong Kong alleviated this problem by using AI to support decision-making and problem-solving so that their planners and controllers can work more effectively and efficiently to sustain business growth while maintaining consistent quality of service. AI is used in a mission critical fleet management system (FMS) that supports the scheduling and management of a fleet of luxury limousines for business travelers. The AI problem was modeled as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP).

This issue of AI Magazine provides extended versions of several papers that were recently presented at the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-2010). We present three articles reflecting deployed applications of AI, one describing a unique, emerging application, plus an article based on the invited talk by Jay M. Tenenbaum, who was the 2010 Engelmore Award recipient.

From an AI perspective, finding effective treatments for cancer is a high-dimensional search problem characterized by many molecularly distinct cancer subtypes, many potential targets and drug combinations, and a dearth of high quality data to connect molecular subtypes and treatments to responses. The broadening availability of molecular diagnostics and electronic medical records, presents both opportunities and challenges to apply AI techniques to personalize and improve cancer treatment. We discuss these in the context of Cancer Commons, a "rapid learning" community where patients, physicians, and researchers collect and analyze the molecular and clinical data from every cancer patient, and use these results to individualize therapies. Research opportunities include: adaptively-planning and executing individual treatment experiments across the whole patient population, inferring the causal mechanisms of tumors, predicting drug response in individuals, and generalizing these findings to new cases.

TLP and the field as a whole made great strides in each of these dimensions. Indeed, the program has helped TL become a recognized subdiscipline of machine learning. Other articles in this special issue detail the work accomplished in TLP; this article focuses on a broad framing of the research conducted and an assessment of its progress, limitations, and challenges, from an admittedly personal but DARPAinfluenced perspective. Traditionally every DARPA program has focused its research by requiring a precise measure of progress. The DARPA TLP decided to measure transfer by comparing the learning of tasks A and B versus the learning of B alone. In figure 1 the curve labeled B represents a traditional learning curve of the performance on target task B as a function of the number of training instances.