A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex sequences of past and future events from a *static snapshot* of a *dynamic scene*, even in situations they have never seen before. In this paper, we model how humans make such rapid and flexible inferences. Building on a long line of work in cognitive science, we offer a Monte Carlo algorithm whose inferences correlate well with human intuitions in a wide variety of domains, while only using a small, cognitively-plausible number of samples. Our key technical insight is a surprising connection between our inference problem and Monte Carlo path tracing, which allows us to apply decades of ideas from the computer graphics community to this seemingly-unrelated theory of mind task.

Recommender systems have found significant commercial success but still struggle with integrating new users. Since users often interact with content in different domains, it is possible to leverage a user's interactions in previous domains to improve that user's recommendations in a new one (multi-domain recommendation). A separate research thread on knowledge graph enhancement uses external knowledge graphs to improve single domain recommendations (knowledge graph enhancement). Both research threads incorporate related information to improve predictions in a new domain. We propose in this work to unify these approaches: Using information from interactions in other domains as well as external knowledge graphs to make predictions in a new domain that would be impossible with either information source alone. We apply these ideas to a dataset derived from millions of users' requests for content across three domains (videos, music, and books) in a live virtual assistant application. We demonstrate the advantage of combining knowledge graph enhancement with previous multi-domain recommendation techniques to provide better overall recommendations as well as for better recommendations on new users of a domain.

Industrial managers, engineers, and technologists have many expectations from artificial intelligence and its application to knowledge-based systems. Although the past decade has witnessed a number of innovative applications of AI in manufacturing, the field is still in its infancy and holds even greater promise for the future. The AAAI Press book Artificial Intelligence Applications in Manufacturing, (from which the following article was selected) presents a number of articles that relate to the enhancement of planning and decision making capabilities in today's automated production environments.

Industrial managers, engineers, and technologists have many expectations from artificial intelligence and its application to knowledge-based systems. Although the past decade has witnessed a number of innovative applications of AI in manufacturing, the field is still in its infancy and holds even greater promise for the future. The AAAI Press book Artificial Intelligence Applications in Manufacturing, (from which the following article was selected) presents a number of articles that relate to the enhancement of planning and decision making capabilities in today's automated production environments.