Technical University of Crete
AI in Greece: The Case of Research on Linked Geospa al Data
Koubarakis, Manolis (University of Athens) | Vouros, George (University of Piraeus) | Chalkiadakis, Georgios (Technical University of Crete) | Plagianakos, Vassilis (International Hellenic University) | Tjortjis, Christos (University of the Aegean) | Kavallieratou, Ergina (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) | Vrakas, Dimitris (National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos") | Mavridis, Nikolaos (National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos") | Petasis, Georgios (University of Ioannina) | Blekas, Konstantinos (National Centre for scientific Research "Demokritos") | Krithara, Anastasia
We survey the AI research carried out in Greece recently. A milestone for AI research in Greece came in 1988, when the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN) was founded as a nonprofit scientific organization devoted to organizing and promoting AI research in Greece and abroad. EETN is an affiliated society of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI, formerly known as ECCAI). One of the many roles of EETN is the organization of conferences, workshops, summer schools, and other events, such as the Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN). The first SETN was Science with a team well grounded in KR.
Argumentation-Based Security for Social Good
Karafili, Erisa (Imperial College London) | Kakas, Antonis C. (University of Cyprus) | Spanoudakis, Nikolaos I. (Technical University of Crete) | Lupu, Emil C. (Imperial College London)
The increase of connectivity and the impact it has in every day life is raising new and existing security problems that are becoming important for social good. We introduce two particular problems: cyber attack attribution and regulatory data sharing. For both problems, decisions about which rules to apply, should be taken under incomplete and context dependent information. The solution we propose is based on argumentation reasoning, that is a well suited technique for implementing decision making mechanisms under conflicting and incomplete information. Our proposal permits us to identify the attacker of a cyber attack and decide the regulation rule that should be used while using and sharing data. We illustrate our solution through concrete examples.
Towards Optimal Solar Tracking: A Dynamic Programming Approach
Panagopoulos, Athanasios Aris (University of Southampton, UK) | Chalkiadakis, Georgios (Technical University of Crete) | Jennings, Nicholas Robert (University of Southampton)
The power output of photovoltaic systems (PVS) increases with the use of effective and efficient solar tracking techniques. However, current techniques suffer from several drawbacks in their tracking policy: (i) they usually do not consider the forecasted or prevailing weather conditions; even when they do, they (ii) rely on complex closed-loop controllers and sophisticated instruments; and (iii) typically, they do not take the energy consumption of the trackers into account. In this paper, we propose a policy iteration method (along with specialized variants), which is able to calculate near-optimal trajectories for effective and efficient day-ahead solar tracking, based on weather forecasts coming from on-line providers. To account for the energy needs of the tracking system, the technique employs a novel and generic consumption model. Our simulations show that the proposed methods can increase the power output of a PVS considerably, when compared to standard solar tracking techniques.
Cooperative Virtual Power Plant Formation Using Scoring Rules
Robu, Valentin (University of Southampton) | Kota, Ramachandra (Secure Meters Ltd., Winchester) | Chalkiadakis, Georgios (Technical University of Crete) | Rogers, Alex (University of Southampton) | Jennings, Nicholas R. (University of Southampton)
Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are fast emerging as a suitable means of integrating small and distributed energy resources (DERs), like wind and solar, into the electricity supply network (Grid). VPPs are formed via the aggregation of a large number of such DERs, so that they exhibit the characteristics of a traditional generator in terms of predictability and robustness. In this work, we promote the formation of such "cooperative'' VPPs (CVPPs) using multi-agent technology. In particular, we design a payment mechanism that encourages DERs to join CVPPs with large overall production. Our method is based on strictly proper scoring rules and incentivises the provision of accurate predictions from the CVPPs---and in turn, the member DERs---which aids in the planning of the supply schedule at the Grid. We empirically evaluate our approach using the real-world setting of 16 commercial wind farms in the UK. We show that our mechanism incentivises real DERs to form CVPPs, and outperforms the current state of the art payment mechanism developed for this problem.
Competing with Humans at Fantasy Football: Team Formation in Large Partially-Observable Domains
Matthews, Tim (University of Southampton) | Ramchurn, Sarvapali D. (University of Southampton) | Chalkiadakis, Georgios (Technical University of Crete)
We present the first real-world benchmark for sequentially-optimal team formation, working within the framework of a class of online football prediction games known as Fantasy Football. We model the problem as a Bayesian reinforcement learning one, where the action space is exponential in the number of players and where the decision maker's beliefs are over multiple characteristics of each footballer. We then exploit domain knowledge to construct computationally tractable solution techniques in order to build a competitive automated Fantasy Football manager. Thus, we are able to establish the baseline performance in this domain, even without complete information on footballers' performances (accessible to human managers), showing that our agent is able to rank at around the top percentile when pitched against 2.5M human players.