This paper addresses the use of unmanned aircraft systems to provide embedded reasoning for atmospheric science. In particular, a specific form of heterogeneous unmanned aircraft system (UAS) is introduced. This UAS is comprised of two classes of aircraft with significantly different, though complementary, attributes: miniature daughterships that provide improved flexibility and spatio-temporal diversity of sensed data and larger motherships that carry and deploy the daughterships while facilitating coordination through increased mobility, computation, and communication. Current efforts designing unmanned aircraft for in situ sensing are described as well as future architectures for embedded reasoning by autonomous systems within complex atmospheric phenomena.

The correct recognition of behaviours based on sensor observations in a smart home is a challenging problem; the sensor observations themselves can be noisy, and the pattern activity seen for a behaviour is rarely identical for different occurrences of the behaviour. For this reason, probabilistic methods such as Hidden Markov Models are preferred over symbolic reasoning approaches. However, these models do not deal well with interleaved behaviours, nor do they allow small variations in behaviour to be detected as abnormal, although this might be useful for the smart home, since changes in ingrained habit could be early signs of illness. We propose methods for using Allen's temporal relations in order to solve these problems, and demonstrate how they can be used to recognise the interleaving of different behaviours, as well as to reason about behaviours that are frequently seen together, and therefore form a behavioural pattern or habit. In this way we have been able to extend our behaviour recognition system to recognise unusual presentations of behaviours.

This paper presents a brief summary of a number of different approaches to the semantic representation and automated interpretation of engineering data. In this context, engineering data is represented as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) files, 3D models or assemblies. Representing and reasoning about these objects is a highly interdisciplinary problem, requiring techniques that can handle the complex interactions and data types that occur in the engineering domain. This paper presents several examples, taken from different problem areas that have occupied engineering and computer science researchers over the past 15 years. Many of the issues raised by these problems remain open, and the experience of past efforts can serve to identify fertile opportunities for investigation today.

Modern web sites provide easy access to large amounts of data via open application programming interfaces. Users interacting with these sites constantly change the underlying data sets, which can be represented in graph-structured form. Nodes in these dynamic graph structures exhibit dependencies over time. Analysing these dependencies is crucial for understanding and predicting the dynamics inherent to temporally changing graph structures on the web. When the graphs become large however, it is not feasible to take into account all properties of the graph and in general it is unclear how to choose the appropriate features. Moreover, comparing two nodes becomes difficult, if the nodes do not share exactly the same features. In this work we propose an algorithm that automatically learns the features that govern temporal dependencies between nodes in large dynamic graph structures. We present preliminary results of applying the algorithm to data collected from the web, discuss potential extensions of the framework and anticipate how a major problem in data mining, sparse data, could be tackled by leveraging Linked Data.

Several solutions exist for semantically describing Web Services (WSs) from the perspective of orchestration but little is known about how semantics benefit WS choreography. The most extreme example of a choreography problem occurs in peer-to-peer systems where shared semantics of data may need to be established via services interactions. We present a solution to this problem by sharing micro-data via interaction models. No pre-unified ontology is required in our approach so peers can make use of existing heterogeneous resources having been described in the RDF data model flexibly and compatibly. The experimental results indicate that our approach semantically enhances WS choreography in a lightweight way which complies with principles of Linked Data and republished Interaction Models (IMs) can further facilitate the progress of the Web of data as well as the formation of peer communities generated through peers' interactions.

This paper describes an online resource designed to aid in the creation of educational robotics programs where teams of mentors work with middle and high school students. This resource, The RoboCupJunior Primer, is based on five years of undergraduate mentoring experience in a local public school. The primary goals of the primer are threefold: first, to expose interested parties to the resources necessary for the creation of a RoboCup team; second, to provide a location for students to communicate with members of other teams and demonstrate specific examples of success; and third, to house an archive of lesson plans as well as tips for creating interesting and efficient lessons.

In this position paper, we argue that the Linked Open Data (LoD) Cloud, in its current form, is only of limited value for furthering the Semantic Web vision. Being merely a weakly linked triple collection, it will only be of very limited benefit for the AI or Semantic Web communities. We describe the corresponding problems with the LoD Cloud and give directions for research to remedy the situation.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs, or simply NNs) are inspired by biological nervous systems and consist of simple processing units (artificial neurons) that are interconnected by weighted connections. Neural networks can be "trained" to solve problems that are difficult to solve by conventional computer algorithms. This paper presents the development and implementation of a generalized back-propagation multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network architecture described in very high speed hardware description language (VHDL). The development of hardware platforms has been complicated by the high hardware cost and quantity of the arithmetic operations required in an online MLP, i.e., one used to solve real-time problems. The challenge is thus to find an architecture that minimizes hardware costs while maximizing performance, accuracy, and parameterization. The paper describes herein a platform that offers a high degree of parameterization while maintaining performance comparable to other hardware based MLP implementations.

Data.gov is a website that provides US Government data to the general public to ensure better accountability and transparency. Our recent work on the Data-gov Wiki, which attempts to integrate the datasets published at Data.gov into the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud (yielding "linked government data"), has produced 5 billion triples – covering a range of topics including: government spending, environmental records, and statistics on the cost and usage of public services. In this paper, we investigate the role of Semantic Web technologies in converting, enhancing and using linked government data. In particular, we show how government data can be (i) inter-linked by sharing the same terms and URIs, (ii) linked to existing data sources ranging from the LOD cloud (e.g. DBpedia) to the conventional web (e.g. the New York Times), and (iii) cross-linked by their knowledge provenance (which captures, among other things, derivation and revision histories).

We explore the prospect of inferring the epicenter and influences of seismic activity from changes in background phone communication activities logged at cell towers. In particular, we explore the perturbations in Rwandan call data invoked by an earthquake in February 2008 centered in the Lac Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beyond the initial seismic event, we investigate the challenge of assessing the distribution of the persistence of needs over geographic regions, using the persistence of call anomalies after the earthquake as a proxy for lasting influences and the potential need for assistance. We also infer uncertainties in the inferences and consider the prospect of identifying the value of surveying the areas so that surveillance resources can be best triaged.