Recent work has shown impressive localization performance using only images of ground textures taken with a downward facing monocular camera. This provides a reliable navigation method that is robust to feature sparse environments and challenging lighting conditions. However, these localization methods require an existing map for comparison. Our work aims to relax the need for a map by introducing a full simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system. By not requiring an existing map, setup times are minimized and the system is more robust to changing environments. This SLAM system uses a combination of several techniques to accomplish this. Image keypoints are identified and projected into the ground plane. These keypoints, visual bags of words, and several threshold parameters are then used to identify overlapping images and revisited areas. The system then uses robust M-estimators to estimate the transform between robot poses with overlapping images and revisited areas. These optimized estimates make up the map used for navigation. We show, through experimental data, that this system performs reliably on many ground textures, but not all.

Neural network compression methods like pruning and quantization are very effective at efficiently deploying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on edge devices. However, DNNs remain vulnerable to adversarial examples-inconspicuous inputs that are specifically designed to fool these models. In particular, Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs), are a powerful class of adversarial attacks which create adversarial perturbations that can generalize across a large set of inputs. In this work, we analyze the effect of various compression techniques to UAP attacks, including different forms of pruning and quantization. We test the robustness of compressed models to white-box and transfer attacks, comparing them with their uncompressed counterparts on CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets. Our evaluations reveal clear differences between pruning methods, including Soft Filter and Post-training Pruning. We observe that UAP transfer attacks between pruned and full models are limited, suggesting that the systemic vulnerabilities across these models are different. This finding has practical implications as using different compression techniques can blunt the effectiveness of black-box transfer attacks. We show that, in some scenarios, quantization can produce gradient-masking, giving a false sense of security. Finally, our results suggest that conclusions about the robustness of compressed models to UAP attacks is application dependent, observing different phenomena in the two datasets used in our experiments.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the opportunity to revolutionize the way the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) address the challenges of evolving threats, data deluge, and rapid courses of action. Developing an end-to-end artificial intelligence system involves parallel development of different pieces that must work together in order to provide capabilities that can be used by decision makers, warfighters and analysts. These pieces include data collection, data conditioning, algorithms, computing, robust artificial intelligence, and human-machine teaming. While much of the popular press today surrounds advances in algorithms and computing, most modern AI systems leverage advances across numerous different fields. Further, while certain components may not be as visible to end-users as others, our experience has shown that each of these interrelated components play a major role in the success or failure of an AI system. This article is meant to highlight many of these technologies that are involved in an end-to-end AI system. The goal of this article is to provide readers with an overview of terminology, technical details and recent highlights from academia, industry and government. Where possible, we indicate relevant resources that can be used for further reading and understanding.

The AAAI-18 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. Workshops were held Sunday and Monday, February 2–7, 2018, at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. This report contains summaries of the Affective Content Analysis workshop; the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments; the AI and Marketing Science workshop; the Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security workshop; the AI for Imperfect-Information Games; the Declarative Learning Based Programming workshop; the Engineering Dependable and Secure Machine Learning Systems workshop; the Health Intelligence workshop; the Knowledge Extraction from Games workshop; the Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition workshop; the Planning and Inference workshop; the Preference Handling workshop; the Reasoning and Learning for Human-Machine Dialogues workshop; and the the AI Enhanced Internet of Things Data Processing for Intelligent Applications workshop.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus -- providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus — providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals. The AAAI-16 Workshops were an excellent forum for exploring emerging approaches and task areas, for bridging the gaps between AI and other fields or between subfields of AI, for elucidating the results of exploratory research, or for critiquing existing approaches. The fifteen workshops held at AAAI-16 were Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments (WS-16-01), AI, Ethics, and Society (WS-16-02), Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (WS-16-03), Artificial Intelligence for Smart Grids and Smart Buildings (WS-16-04), Beyond NP (WS-16-05), Computer Poker and Imperfect Information Games (WS-16-06), Declarative Learning Based Programming (WS-16-07), Expanding the Boundaries of Health Informatics Using AI (WS-16-08), Incentives and Trust in Electronic Communities (WS-16-09), Knowledge Extraction from Text (WS-16-10), Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination (WS-16-11), Planning for Hybrid Systems (WS-16-12), Scholarly Big Data: AI Perspectives, Challenges, and Ideas (WS-16-13), Symbiotic Cognitive Systems (WS-16-14), and World Wide Web and Population Health Intelligence (WS-16-15).