Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform education with its power of uncovering insights from massive data about student learning patterns. However, ethical and trustworthy concerns of AI have been raised but are unsolved. Prominent ethical issues in high school AI education include data privacy, information leakage, abusive language, and fairness. This paper describes technological components that were built to address ethical and trustworthy concerns in a multi-modal collaborative platform (called ALLURE chatbot) for high school students to collaborate with AI to solve the Rubik's cube. In data privacy, we want to ensure that the informed consent of children, parents, and teachers, is at the center of any data that is managed. Since children are involved, language, whether textual, audio, or visual, is acceptable both from users and AI and the system can steer interaction away from dangerous situations. In information management, we also want to ensure that the system, while learning to improve over time, does not leak information about users from one group to another.

Building teams and promoting collaboration are two very common business activities. An example of these are seen in the TeamingForFunding problem, where research institutions and researchers are interested to identify collaborative opportunities when applying to funding agencies in response to latter's calls for proposals. We describe a novel system to recommend teams using a variety of AI methods, such that (1) each team achieves the highest possible skill coverage that is demanded by the opportunity, and (2) the workload of distributing the opportunities is balanced amongst the candidate members. We address these questions by extracting skills latent in open data of proposal calls (demand) and researcher profiles (supply), normalizing them using taxonomies, and creating efficient algorithms that match demand to supply. We create teams to maximize goodness along a novel metric balancing short- and long-term objectives. We validate the success of our algorithms (1) quantitatively, by evaluating the recommended teams using a goodness score and find that more informed methods lead to recommendations of smaller number of teams but higher goodness, and (2) qualitatively, by conducting a large-scale user study at a college-wide level, and demonstrate that users overall found the tool very useful and relevant. Lastly, we evaluate our system in two diverse settings in US and India (of researchers and proposal calls) to establish generality of our approach, and deploy it at a major US university for routine use.

Automated Planning and Scheduling is among the growing areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) where mention of LLMs has gained popularity. Based on a comprehensive review of 126 papers, this paper investigates eight categories based on the unique applications of LLMs in addressing various aspects of planning problems: language translation, plan generation, model construction, multi-agent planning, interactive planning, heuristics optimization, tool integration, and brain-inspired planning. For each category, we articulate the issues considered and existing gaps. A critical insight resulting from our review is that the true potential of LLMs unfolds when they are integrated with traditional symbolic planners, pointing towards a promising neuro-symbolic approach. This approach effectively combines the generative aspects of LLMs with the precision of classical planning methods. By synthesizing insights from existing literature, we underline the potential of this integration to address complex planning challenges. Our goal is to encourage the ICAPS community to recognize the complementary strengths of LLMs and symbolic planners, advocating for a direction in automated planning that leverages these synergistic capabilities to develop more advanced and intelligent planning systems.

Sentiment Analysis Systems (SASs) are data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that output polarity and emotional intensity when given a piece of text as input. Like other AIs, SASs are also known to have unstable behavior when subjected to changes in data which can make it problematic to trust out of concerns like bias when AI works with humans and data has protected attributes like gender, race, and age. Recently, an approach was introduced to assess SASs in a blackbox setting without training data or code, and rating them for bias using synthetic English data. We augment it by introducing two human-generated chatbot datasets and also consider a round-trip setting of translating the data from one language to the same through an intermediate language. We find that these settings show SASs performance in a more realistic light. Specifically, we find that rating SASs on the chatbot data showed more bias compared to the synthetic data, and round-tripping using Spanish and Danish as intermediate languages reduces the bias (up to 68% reduction) in human-generated data while, in synthetic data, it takes a surprising turn by increasing the bias! Our findings will help researchers and practitioners refine their SAS testing strategies and foster trust as SASs are considered part of more mission-critical applications for global use.

The logical analysis of data, LAD, is a technique that yields two-class classifiers based on Boolean functions having disjunctive normal form (DNF) representation. Although LAD algorithms employ optimization techniques, the resulting binary classifiers or binary rules do not lead to overfitting. We propose a theoretical justification for the absence of overfitting by estimating the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension (VC dimension) for LAD models where hypothesis sets consist of DNFs with a small number of cubic monomials. We illustrate and confirm our observations empirically.

Chatbots, the common moniker for collaborative assistants, are Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that enables people to naturally interact with them to get tasks done. Although chatbots have been studied since the dawn of AI, they have particularly caught the imagination of the public and businesses since the launch of easy-to-use and general-purpose Large Language Model-based chatbots like ChatGPT. As businesses look towards chatbots as a potential technology to engage users, who may be end customers, suppliers, or even their own employees, proper testing of chatbots is important to address and mitigate issues of trust related to service or product performance, user satisfaction and long-term unintended consequences for society. This paper reviews current practices for chatbot testing, identifies gaps as open problems in pursuit of user trust, and outlines a path forward.

Rubik's Cube (RC) is a well-known and computationally challenging puzzle that has motivated AI researchers to explore efficient alternative representations and problem-solving methods. The ideal situation for planning here is that a problem be solved optimally and efficiently represented in a standard notation using a general-purpose solver and heuristics. The fastest solver today for RC is DeepCubeA with a custom representation, and another approach is with Scorpion planner with State-Action-Space+ (SAS+) representation. In this paper, we present the first RC representation in the popular PDDL language so that the domain becomes more accessible to PDDL planners, competitions, and knowledge engineering tools, and is more human-readable. We then bridge across existing approaches and compare performance. We find that in one comparable experiment, DeepCubeA (trained with 12 RC actions) solves all problems with varying complexities, albeit only 78.5% are optimal plans. For the same problem set, Scorpion with SAS+ representation and pattern database heuristics solves 61.50% problems optimally, while FastDownward with PDDL representation and FF heuristic solves 56.50% problems, out of which 79.64% of the plans generated were optimal. Our study provides valuable insights into the trade-offs between representational choice and plan optimality that can help researchers design future strategies for challenging domains combining general-purpose solving methods (planning, reinforcement learning), heuristics, and representations (standard or custom).

Ontologies are known for their ability to organize rich metadata, support the identification of novel insights via semantic queries, and promote reuse. In this paper, we consider the problem of automated planning, where the objective is to find a sequence of actions that will move an agent from an initial state of the world to a desired goal state. We hypothesize that given a large number of available planners and diverse planning domains; they carry essential information that can be leveraged to identify suitable planners and improve their performance for a domain. We use data on planning domains and planners from the International Planning Competition (IPC) to construct a planning ontology and demonstrate via experiments in two use cases that the ontology can lead to the selection of promising planners and improving their performance using macros - a form of action ordering constraints extracted from planning ontology. We also make the planning ontology and associated resources available to the community to promote further research.

Nudging is a behavioral strategy aimed at influencing people's thoughts and actions. Nudging techniques can be found in many situations in our daily lives, and these nudging techniques can targeted at human fast and unconscious thinking, e.g., by using images to generate fear or the more careful and effortful slow thinking, e.g., by releasing information that makes us reflect on our choices. In this paper, we propose and discuss a value-based AI-human collaborative framework where AI systems nudge humans by proposing decision recommendations. Three different nudging modalities, based on when recommendations are presented to the human, are intended to stimulate human fast thinking, slow thinking, or meta-cognition. Values that are relevant to a specific decision scenario are used to decide when and how to use each of these nudging modalities. Examples of values are decision quality, speed, human upskilling and learning, human agency, and privacy. Several values can be present at the same time, and their priorities can vary over time. The framework treats values as parameters to be instantiated in a specific decision environment.

Increasingly powerful Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbots, like ChatGPT and Bard, are becoming available to users that have the potential to revolutionize the quality of decision-making achieved by the public. In this context, we set out to investigate how such systems perform in the personal finance domain, where financial inclusion has been an overarching stated aim of banks for decades. We asked 13 questions representing banking products in personal finance: bank account, credit card, and certificate of deposits and their inter-product interactions, and decisions related to high-value purchases, payment of bank dues, and investment advice, and in different dialects and languages (English, African American Vernacular English, and Telugu). We find that although the outputs of the chatbots are fluent and plausible, there are still critical gaps in providing accurate and reliable financial information using LLM-based chatbots.