Technology
The Third Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling
Bartak, Roman (Charles University) | Fratini, Simone (Italian National Research Council) | McCluskey, Lee (University of Huddersfield)
We report on the staging of the third competition on knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling systems, held during ICAPS-09 at Thessaloniki, Greece in September 2009. We give an overview of how the competition has developed since its first run in 2005, and its relationship with the AI planning field. This run of the competition focused on translators that when input with some formal description in an application-area-specific language, output solver-ready domain models. Despite a fairly narrow focus within knowledge engineering, seven teams took part in what turned out to be a very interesting and successful competition.
AAAI Conferences Calendar
IEA/AIE-10 will be held June 1-4, 2010, in Cordoba, Spain. AI Twelfth International Conference Magazine also maintains a calendar listing that includes nonaffiliated conferences on Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2010 will be held June 8-12, 2010, in Funchal, Portugal. AAAI-12 and Seventh International Conference Fourth International Conference on IAAI-12 will be held July 22-26, 2012, on Informatics in Control, Automation Weblogs and Social Media. AAAI-10 and IAAI-10 will be held July and Reasoning.
The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge From Observations (STRUCK-09)
Kuter, Ugur (University of Maryland) | Munoz-Avila, Hector (Lehigh University)
These formalisms have in common the use of certain kinds of constructs (for example, objects, goals, skills, and tasks) that represent knowledge of varying degrees of complexity and that are connected through structural relations. In recent years, we have observed increasing interest toward the problem of learning such structural knowledge from observations. These observations range from traces generated by an automated planner to video feeds from a robot performing some actions. The goal of the workshop was to bring researchers together from machine learning, automated planning, case-based reasoning, cognitive science, and other communities that are looking into instances of this problem and to share ideas and perspectives in a common forum.
Robotics: Science and Systems
Trinkle, Jeff (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | Matsuoka, Yoky (University of Washington)
The conference Robotics: Science and Systems was held at the University of Washington in Seattle, from June 28 to July 1, 2009. More than 300 international researchers attended this single‐track conference to learn about the most exciting robotics research and most advanced robotic systems. The program committee selected 39 papers out of 154 submissions. The program also included invited talks. The plenary presentations were complemented by workshops.
Reports of the AAAI 2009 Fall Symposia
Azevedo, Roger (University of Memphis) | Bench-Capon, Trevor (University of Liverpool) | Biswas, Gautam (Vanderbilt University) | Carmichael, Ted (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) | Green, Nancy (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) | Hadzikadic, Mirsad (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) | Koyejo, Oluwasanmi (University of Texas) | Kurup, Unmesh (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | Parsons, Simon (Brooklyn College, City University of New York) | Pirrone, Roberto (University of Pirrone) | Prakken, Henry (Utrecht University) | Samsonovich, Alexei (George Mason University) | Scott, Donia (Open University) | Souvenir, Richard (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, at he Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were as follows: (1) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures Architectures, (2) Cognitive and Metacognitive Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems Educational Systems, (3) Complex Adaptive Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views from the Natural Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views and Social Sciences from the Natural and Social Sciences, (4) Manifold Manifold Learning and Its Applications Learning and Its Applications, (5) Multirepresentational Architectures for Human-Level Multirepresentational Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence Intelligence, (6) The Uses of Computational The Uses of Computational Argumentation Argumentation, and (7) Virtual Healthcare Virtual Healthcare Interaction Interaction. An informal reception was held on Thursday, November 5. A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium were presented, was held on Friday, November 6. The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind requires that we better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. They will behave, variety of disjoined communities and schools of learn, communicate, and "think" as conscious thought that used to speak different languages and beings in general, in addition to being able to perform ignore each other.
An Integrated Modeling Environment to Study the Co-evolution of Networks, Individual Behavior and Epidemics
Barrett, Christopher (Network Dynamics and Sim Science Lab) | Bisset, Keith (Network Dynamics and Sim Science Lab) | Leidig, Jonathan (Network Dynamics and Sim Science Lab) | Marathe, Achla (Network Dynamics and Sim Science Lab) | Marathe, Madhav V. (Network Dynamics and Sim Science Lab)
We discuss an interaction-based approach to study the coevolution between socio-technical networks, individual behaviors, and contagion processes on these networks. We use epidemics in human population as an example of this phenomenon. The methods consist of developing synthetic yet realistic national-scale networks using a first principles approach. Unlike simple random graph techniques, these methods combine real world data sources with behavioral and social theories to synthesize detailed social contact (proximity) networks. Individual-based models of within-host disease progression and inter-host transmission are then used to model the contagion process. Finally, models of individual behaviors are composed with disease progression models to develop a realistic representation of the complex system in which individual behaviors and the social network adapt to the contagion. These methods are embodied within Simdemics – a general purpose modeling environment to support pandemic planning and response. Simdemics is designed specifically to be scalable to networks with 300 million agents – the underlying algorithms and methods in Simdemics are all high-performance computing oriented methods. New advances in network science, machine learning, high performance computing, data mining and behavioral modeling were necessary to develop Simdemics. Simdemics is combined with two other environments, Simfrastructure and Didactic, to form an integrated cyberenvironment. The integrated cyber-environment provides the end-user flexible and seamless Internet based access to Simdemics. Service-oriented architectures play a critical role in delivering the desired services to the end user. Simdemics, in conjunction with the integrated cyber-environment, has been used in over a dozen user defined case studies. These case studies were done to support specific policy questions that arose in the context of planning the response to pandemics (e.g., H1N1, H5N1) and human initiated bio-terrorism events. These studies played a crucial role in the continual development and improvement of the cyber-environment.
RealScape: Metropolitan Fixed Assets Change Judgment by Pixel-by-pixel Stereo Processing of Aerial Photographs
Koizumi, Hirokazu (NEC System Technologies, Ltd.) | Yagyu, Hiroyuki (NEC System Technologies, Ltd.) | Hashizume, Kazuaki (NEC System Technologies, Ltd.) | Kamiya, Toshiyuki (NEC System Technologies, Ltd.) | Kunieda, Kazuo (NEC Corporation) | Shimazu, Hideo (NEC System Technologies, Ltd.)
The Japanese fixed-property tax is imposed by municipalities on the owners of land, buildings, and depreciation assets (all hereinafter referred to as "fixed assets") on January 1 of every year by calculating the tax sum according to current asset values. This identification work is contracted out to survey companies. The identification of such en over a scale that can cover an actual area of 800 changes is entrusted to survey companies who hire by 600 meters or 500 by 600 meters (variable a large number of workers (figure 1, left). However, depending on the municipality), and every municipality reliance on human labor has led to problems has several hundred photographs that must detailed in the following paragraphs. Under these circumstances, the incentives for It takes about 10 hours to read and interpret a single the municipalities to overcome such challenges by photograph, and the average municipality automating or systematizing the photograph-reading must perform this work for several hundred photographs.
Semantics for Digital Engineering Archives Supporting Engineering Design Education
Regli, William C. (Drexel University) | Kopena, Joseph B. (Drexel University) | Grauer, Michael (Drexel University) | Simpson, Timothy W. (Penn State University) | Stone, Robert B. (Oregon State University) | Lewis, Kemper (University at Buffalo - SUNY) | Bohm, Matt R. (Oregon State University) | Wilkie, David (Drexel University) | Piecyk, Martin (Drexel University) | Osecki, Jordan (Drexel University)
This article introduces the challenge of digital preservation in the area of engineering design and manufacturing and presents a methodology to apply knowledge representation and semantic techniques to develop Digital Engineering Archives. This work is part of an ongoing, multiuniversity, effort to create cyber infrastructure-based engineering repositories for undergraduates (CIBER-U) to support engineering design education. The technical approach is to use knowledge representation techniques to create formal models of engineering data elements, workflows and processes. With these formal engineering knowledge and processes can be captured and preserved with some guarantee of long-term interpretability. The article presents examples of how the techniques can be used to encode specific engineering information packages and workflows. These techniques are being integrated into a semantic wiki that supports the CIBER-U engineering education activities across nine universities and involving over 3500 students since 2006.
Lessons Learned from Virtual Humans
Swartout, William (University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies)
Over the past decade, we have been engaged in an extensive research effort to build virtual humans and applications that use them. Building a virtual human might be considered the quintessential AI problem, because it brings together many of the key features, such as autonomy, natural communication, sophisticated reasoning and behavior, that distinguish AI systems. This paper describes major virtual human systems we have built and important lessons we have learned along the way.