Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Technology


Fragment Completion in Humans and Machines

Neural Information Processing Systems

Partial information can trigger a complete memory. At the same time, human memory is not perfect. A cue can contain enough information to specify an item in memory, but fail to trigger that item. In the context of word memory, we present experiments that demonstrate some basic patterns in human memory errors. We use cues that consist of word fragments. Weshow that short and long cues are completed more accurately than medium length ones and study some of the factors that lead to this behavior. We then present a novel computational model that shows some of the flexibility and patterns of errors that occur in human memory.


Modeling Temporal Structure in Classical Conditioning

Neural Information Processing Systems

The Temporal Coding Hypothesis of Miller and colleagues [7] suggests thatanimals integrate related temporal patterns of stimuli into single memory representations. We formalize this concept using quasi-Bayes estimation to update the parameters of a constrained hiddenMarkov model. This approach allows us to account for some surprising temporal effects in the second order conditioning experimentsof Miller et al. [1, 2, 3], which other models are unable to explain. 1 Introduction Animal learning involves more than just predicting reinforcement. The well-known phenomena of latent learning and sensory preconditioning indicate that animals learn about stimuli in their environment before any reinforcement is supplied. More recently, a series of experiments by R. R. Miller and colleagues has demonstrated that in classical conditioning paradigms, animals appear to learn the temporal structure ofthe stimuli [8].


AAAI 2002 Workshops

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) presented the AAAI-02 Workshop Program on Sunday and Monday, 28-29 July 2002 at the Shaw Convention Center in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The AAAI-02 workshop program included 18 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. The workshops were Agent-Based Technologies for B2B Electronic-Commerce; Automation as a Caregiver: The Role of Intelligent Technology in Elder Care; Autonomy, Delegation, and Control: From Interagent to Groups; Coalition Formation in Dynamic Multiagent Environments; Cognitive Robotics; Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents; Intelligent Service Integration; Intelligent Situation-Aware Media and Presentations; Meaning Negotiation; Multiagent Modeling and Simulation of Economic Systems; Ontologies and the Semantic Web; Planning with and for Multiagent Systems; Preferences in AI and CP: Symbolic Approaches; Probabilistic Approaches in Search; Real-Time Decision Support and Diagnosis Systems; Semantic Web Meets Language Resources; and Spatial and Temporal Reasoning.


The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium Series

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding.


Editorial Introduction: The Fifteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-2002)

AI Magazine

The Fourteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-2002) was held from 28 July to 1 August in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in conjunction with the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002). As in past years, papers were solicited in two categories: (1) deployed applications and (2) emerging applications and technologies. Deployed application papers describe systems that have been in use for at least several months by individuals or organizations other than their developers, have measurable benefits, and incorporate AI technologies. Emerging applications are technologies and systems that are close to deployment and clearly show an innovative implementation of AI technologies.


FLAIRS 2002 Conference Report

AI Magazine

The Fifteenth Annual International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) was held in Pensacola Beach, Florida, 14 to 16 May 2002. Spanning a broad spectrum of AI research, the conference was composed of a general track and 14 themed special tracks. Conference highlights included invited talks by James Allen, Randall Beer, Jeff Bradshaw, Bill Clancey, Clark Glymour, and Pat Hayes. Two parallel workshops on causality and categorization and studies of expert knowledge and skill followed the conference.


Staff Scheduling for Inbound Call and Customer Contact Centers

AI Magazine

The staff scheduling problem is a critical problem in the call center (or, more generally, customer contact center) industry. This article describes DIRECTOR, a staff scheduling system for contact centers. DIRECTOR is a constraint-based system that uses AI search techniques to generate schedules that satisfy and optimize a wide range of constraints and service-quality metrics. DIRECTOR has successfully been deployed at more than 800 contact centers, with significant measurable benefits, some of which are documented in case studies included in this article.


Letter to the Editor

AI Magazine

A basic promise of AI research is that what we observe as human intelligence is in fact a computation either directly or as an emergent effect. An attempt at classifying and distinguishing types of AI researchers was to call them all either scruffy (those that wrote code and implemented systems) or neat (those that base AI on some formalism like first order predicate calculus). Out of necessity, researchers tend to focus on a particular aspect of intelligence to simulate. When this is done, the effect is to restrict the class of computations that are being considered.


Information Self-Service with a Knowledge Base That Learns

AI Magazine

Delivering effective customer service over the internet requires attention to many aspects of knowledge management if it is to be both satisfying for customers and economical for the company or other organization. In RightNow ESERVICE CENTER, such management is built into the architecture and supported by automatically gathering metainformation about the documents held in the core knowledge base. A variety of AI techniques are used to facilitate the construction, maintenance, and navigation of the knowledge base. Customers using ESERVICE CENTER report dramatic decreases in support costs and increases in customer satisfaction because of the ease of use provided by the self-learning features of the knowledge base.


Computational Vulnerability Analysis for Information Survivability

AI Magazine

The infrastructure of modern society is controlled by software systems. These systems are vulnerable to attacks; several such attacks, launched by "recreation hackers," have already led to severe disruption. This article is set in the context of self-adaptive survivable systems: software that judges the trustworthiness of the computational resources in its environment and that chooses how to achieve its goals in light of this trust model. Self-adaptive survivable systems contain models of their intended behavior; models of the required computational resources; models of the ways in which these resources can be compromised; and finally, models of the ways in which a system can be attacked and how such attacks can lead to compromises of the computational resources.