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 Vanderbilt University


Reports of the AAAI 2010 Fall Symposia

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2010 Fall Symposium Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 11-13, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the eight symposia are as follows: (1) Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems; (2) Commonsense Knowledge; (3) Complex Adaptive Systems: Resilience, Robustness, and Evolvability; (4) Computational Models of Narrative; (5) Dialog with Robots; (6) Manifold Learning and Its Applications; (7) Proactive Assistant Agents ; and (8) Quantum Informatics for Cognitive, Social, and Semantic Processes. The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report.


Preface

AAAI Conferences

AI has provided computational approaches to design processes and the representation of design knowledge. Design of materials, products, buildings and other artifacts have long been a focus of artificial intelligence research and application. Artificial intelligence representations and reasoning models have been influenced and inspired by design cognition resulting in AI methods as the basis for computer-aided design and decision support in many contexts. "Design for X" has become a way of changing design thinking so that downstream concerns are considered early in the design process. Imperatives for environmental and societal sustainability are challenging designers to think beyond Design for X and more broadly to consider factors that had been previously given little attention.


Towards Grammars for Cradle-to-Cradle Design

AAAI Conferences

Figure 1a first illustrates by the oval that a Cradle-to-cradle (C2C) design (McDonough & Braungart, critical problem in traditional design is that a product is designed 2002) recognizes that nothing short of full recycling of materials in isolation. In contrast, the products shown in the with no degradation in material quality is necessary square box of Figure 1b illustrate the concept of a product for long-term planet sustainability. C2C advocates looking family, where multiple products are designed within a system to the natural world as an ideal model of recycling, where of material use and reuse, which flows between product organic materials are continually recycled through processes lines. While there may still be materials that come from of decay and growth. They propose design methodology outside the family and there are materials that are byproducts that separates biological cycles and syntheticmaterial of the family production, a family design would seek cycles, enabling biological material to be reclaimed to minimize these and to exploit them in a still larger context.


Preface

AAAI Conferences

Design of effective health communication systems faces major challenges in terms of accessibility, trust, expert-to-lay knowledge translation, and persuasiveness. It is proposed that some of these challenges can be addressed by use of AI techniques in combination with empirically-based theoretical frameworks from the field of health communication and related areas. This symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to identify possible solutions. AI and health communication topics of interest include communication interventions; games, conversational agents, or dialogue systems for healthy behavior promotion; intelligent interactive monitoring of patient's environment and needs; intelligent interfaces supporting access to healthcare; patient-tailored decision support, explanation for informed consent, and retrieval and summarization of online healthcare information; risk communication and visualization; tailored access to electronic medical records; tailoring health information for low-literacy, low-numeracy, or under-served audiences; virtual healthcare counselors; and virtual patients for training healthcare professionals. Scholars from health communication and related disciplines (sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, etc.) will participate in discussion on the following issues as they pertain to the symposium goals: health literacy; healthcare provider-consumer communication, risk communication, including written and visual formats; and use of behavioral, persuasion, and argumentation theories for healthy behavior promotion. By examining these issues, the symposium is expected to lay down conceptual foundations for guiding future advances in AI healthcare systems.


Modeling and Measuring Self-Regulated Learning in Teachable Agent Environments

AAAI Conferences

Our learning by teaching environment has students take on the role and responsibilities of a teacher to a virtual student named Betty. The environment is structured so that successfully instructing their teachable agent requires the students to learn and understand science topics for themselves. This process is supported by adaptive scaffolding and feedback from the system. This feedback is instantiated through the interactions with the teachable agent and a mentor agent, named Mr. Davis. This paper provides an overview of two studies that were conducted with 5th grade science students and a description of the analysis techniques that we have developed for interpreting studentsโ€™ activities in this learning environment.


Preface: Meta-Cognitive Educational Systems: One Step Forward

AAAI Conferences

The AAAI Fall Symposium on Meta-Cognitive Educational - What are the theoretical foundations and how are they articulated Systems: One Step Forward is the second edition of the successful in CBLEs? MCES implemented as CBLEs are designed to interact with - What are the main aspects of metacognition, selfregulation users, and support their learning and decision-making processes. Can MCES actually foster they need to plan their learning activities, to adapt their learners to be self-regulating agents? How can a MCES learning strategies to meet learning goals, become aware of be autonomous and increase its knowledge to match the changing task conditions, and the dynamic aspects of the learners evolving skills and knowledge? MCES may not be embodied, prior to, during, and after they have been involved in but does it help if they act as intentional agents? the learning environment.


Approximate Coalition Structure Generation

AAAI Conferences

Coalition formation is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems. In characteristic function games (CFGs), each coalition C of agents is assigned a value indicating the joint utility those agents will receive if C is formed. CFGs are an important class of cooperative games; however, determining the optimal coalition structure, partitioning of the agents into a set of coalitions that maximizes the social welfare, currently requires O (3 n ) time for n agents. In light of the high computational complexity of the coalition structure generation problem, a natural approach is to relax the optimality requirement and attempt to find an approximate solution that is guaranteed to be close to optimal. Unfortunately, it has been shown that guaranteeing a solution within any factor of the optimal requires ฮฉ(2 n ) time. Thus, the best that can be hoped for is to find an algorithm that returns solutions that are guaranteed to be as close to the optimal as possible, in as close to O (2 n ) time as possible. This paper contributes to the state-of-the-art by presenting an algorithm that achieves better quality guarantees with lower worst case running times than all currently existing algorithms. Our approach is also the first algorithm to guarantee a constant factor approximation ratio, 1/8, in the optimal time of O (2 n . The previous best ratio obtainable in O (2 n ) was 2/ n .


Reports of the AAAI 2009 Fall Symposia

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2009 Fall Symposium Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 5โ€“7, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The Symposium Series was preceded on Wednesday, November 4 by a one-day AI funding seminar. The titles of the seven symposia were as follows: (1) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, (2) Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems, (3) Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views from the Natural and Social Sciences, (4) Manifold Learning and Its Applications, (5) Multirepresentational Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence, (6) The Uses of Computational Argumentation, and (7) Virtual Healthcare Interaction.


Reports of the AAAI 2009 Fall Symposia

AI Magazine

Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, at he Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were as follows: (1) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures Architectures, (2) Cognitive and Metacognitive Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems Educational Systems, (3) Complex Adaptive Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views from the Natural Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views and Social Sciences from the Natural and Social Sciences, (4) Manifold Manifold Learning and Its Applications Learning and Its Applications, (5) Multirepresentational Architectures for Human-Level Multirepresentational Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence Intelligence, (6) The Uses of Computational The Uses of Computational Argumentation Argumentation, and (7) Virtual Healthcare Virtual Healthcare Interaction Interaction. An informal reception was held on Thursday, November 5. A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium were presented, was held on Friday, November 6. The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind requires that we better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. They will behave, variety of disjoined communities and schools of learn, communicate, and "think" as conscious thought that used to speak different languages and beings in general, in addition to being able to perform ignore each other.


Preface

AAAI Conferences

Artificial learning systems such as e-learning, multimedia Human or artificial tutors have to continuously and dynamically and hypermedia, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) monitor and model all of the students activities are designed to support learning processes in order to facilitate (including problem solving processes, deployment of regulatory the acquisition, development, use, and transfer required processes, and so on), make complicated inferences to solve complex tasks. Besides their trivial duties about them, to ensure that learning is maximized. Students regarding content management, these systems have to interact and tutors need decision support capabilities in terms of social with different users, and support them with several decisional networks analysis, visualization tools of students behaviors processes. One of the most critical decisions includes in relation to the domain knowledge to be explored, those dealing with aspects of self-regulation. A paradigm shift changing task conditions, and dynamic aspects of the instructional is needed in this respect.