We extend chance-constrained path planning with direct method into continuous time. Chance-constrained path planning is a method to obtain the optimal path satisfying a specified risk (or probability of failure) value. Previous work expects trajectories' states as discrete information with respect to time. This discretized encoding makes the conversion from probabilistic path planning to deterministic path planning easy. However, risk guarantees are only produced for the discrete time model. The probability of constraints violation in continuous time could be larger than the discretized risk values. To address this problem, we modified the constraint encoding and risk assessment method. First, we introduce a computationally efficient mean path securing method, which uses fewer binary variables as compared with prior work. Second, we note that the deviation of the actual trajectory from the mean trajectory can be considered as a Brownian motion, for which the reflection principle holds in general. Therefore, we take advantage of the reflection principle to bound the probability of the constraint violation in continuous time. In numerical simulations, we confirmed faster solution generation, and the probability guarantees of the path in the continuous time model, with deterioration in the objective function.

We have conducted a study investigating the use of automated tutors for educating players in the context of serious gaming (i.e., game designed as a professional training tool). Historically, researchers and practitioners have developed automated tutors through a process of manually codifying domain knowledge and translating that into a human-interpretable format. This process is laborious and leaves much to be desired. Instead, we seek to apply novel machine learning techniques to, first, learn a model from domain experts' demonstrations how to solve such problems, and, second, use this model to teach novices how to think like experts. In this work, we present a study comparing the performance of an automated and a traditional, manually-constructed tutor. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation using learning from demonstration techniques to learn from experts and use that knowledge to teach novices.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2016 Spring Symposium Series on Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, 2016 at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) AI and the Mitigation of Human Error: Anomalies, Team Metrics and Thermodynamics; (2) Challenges and Opportunities in Multiagent Learning for the Real World (3) Enabling Computing Research in Socially Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction: A Community-Driven Modular Research Platform; (4) Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents; (5) Intelligent Systems for Supporting Distributed Human Teamwork; (6) Observational Studies through Social Media and Other Human-Generated Content, and (7) Well-Being Computing: AI Meets Health and Happiness Science.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2016 Spring Symposium Series on Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, 2016 at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) AI and the Mitigation of Human Error: Anomalies, Team Metrics and Thermodynamics; (2) Challenges and Opportunities in Multiagent Learning for the Real World (3) Enabling Computing Research in Socially Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction: A Community-Driven Modular Research Platform; (4) Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents; (5) Intelligent Systems for Supporting Distributed Human Teamwork; (6) Observational Studies through Social Media and Other Human-Generated Content, and (7) Well-Being Computing: AI Meets Health and Happiness Science.

Likert items and scales are often used in human subject studies to measure subjective responses of subjects to the treatment levels. In the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), with few widely accepted quantitative metrics, researchers often rely on Likert items and scales to evaluate their systems. However, there is a debate on what is the best statistical method to evaluate the differences between experimental treatments based on Likert item or scale responses. Likert responses are ordinal and not interval, meaning, the differences between consecutive responses to a Likert item are not equally spaced quantitatively. Hence, parametric tests like t-test, which require interval and normally distributed data, are often claimed to be statistically unsound in evaluating Likert response data. The statistical purist would use non-parametric tests, such as the Mann-Whitney U test, to evaluate the differences in ordinal datasets; however, non-parametric tests sacrifice the sensitivity in detecting differences a more conservative specificity -- or false positive rate. Finally, it is common practice in the field of HRI to sum up similar individual Likert items to form a Likert scale and use the t-test or ANOVA on the scale seeking the refuge of the central limit theorem. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the validity of the t-test vs. the Mann-Whitney U test for Likert items and scales. We conduct our investigation via Monte Carlo simulation to quantify sensitivity and specificity of the tests.

Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and a renowned mathematicial and computer scientist, died on Sunday, 24 January 2016 of a cerebral hemmorhage. In this article, AI scientists Kenneth D. Forbus (Northwestern University), Benjamin Kuipers (University of Michigan), and Henry Lieberman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) recall their interactions with Minksy and briefly recount the impact he had on their lives and their research. A remembrance of Marvin Minsky was held at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University on March 22. Video remembrances of Minsky by Danny Bobrow, Benjamin Kuipers, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Waldinger, and others can be on the sentient webpage1 or on youtube.com.

Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and a renowned mathematicial and computer scientist, died on Sunday, 24 January 2016 of a cerebral hemmorhage. He was 88. In this article, AI scientists Kenneth D. Forbus (Northwestern University), Benjamin Kuipers (University of Michigan), and Henry Lieberman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) recall their interactions with Minksy and briefly recount the impact he had on their lives and their research. A remembrance of Marvin Minsky was held at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University on March 22. Video remembrances of Minsky by Danny Bobrow, Benjamin Kuipers, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Waldinger, and others can be on the sentient webpage1 or on youtube.com.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2015 Fall Symposium Series, on Thursday through Saturday, November 12-14, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the six symposia were as follows: AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Embedded Machine Learning, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents. This article contains the reports from four of the symposia.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2015 Fall Symposium Series, on Thursday through Saturday, November 12-14, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the six symposia were as follows: AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Embedded Machine Learning, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents. This article contains the reports from four of the symposia.

With the rise in popularity of public social media and micro-blogging services, most notably Twitter, the people have found a venue to hear and be heard by their peers without an intermediary. As a consequence, and aided by the public nature of Twitter, political scientists now potentially have the means to analyse and understand the narratives that organically form, spread and decline among the public in a political campaign.However, the volume and diversity of the conversation on Twitter, combined with its noisy and idiosyncratic nature, make this a hard task. Thus, advanced data mining and language processing techniques are required to process and analyse the data. In this paper, we present and evaluate a technical framework, based on recent advances in deep neural networks, for identifying and analysing election-related conversation on Twitter on a continuous, longitudinal basis. Our models can detect election-related tweets with an F-score of 0.92 and can categorize these tweets into 22 topics with an F-score of 0.90.