(ABRIDGED) In previous work, two platforms have been developed for testing computer-vision algorithms for robotic planetary exploration (McGuire et al. 2004b,2005; Bartolo et al. 2007). The wearable-computer platform has been tested at geological and astrobiological field sites in Spain (Rivas Vaciamadrid and Riba de Santiuste), and the phone-camera has been tested at a geological field site in Malta. In this work, we (i) apply a Hopfield neural-network algorithm for novelty detection based upon color, (ii) integrate a field-capable digital microscope on the wearable computer platform, (iii) test this novelty detection with the digital microscope at Rivas Vaciamadrid, (iv) develop a Bluetooth communication mode for the phone-camera platform, in order to allow access to a mobile processing computer at the field sites, and (v) test the novelty detection on the Bluetooth-enabled phone-camera connected to a netbook computer at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. This systems engineering and field testing have together allowed us to develop a real-time computer-vision system that is capable, for example, of identifying lichens as novel within a series of images acquired in semi-arid desert environments. We acquired sequences of images of geologic outcrops in Utah and Spain consisting of various rock types and colors to test this algorithm. The algorithm robustly recognized previously-observed units by their color, while requiring only a single image or a few images to learn colors as familiar, demonstrating its fast learning capability.

The Dendritic Cell algorithm (DCA) is inspired by recent work in innate immunity. In this paper a formal description of the DCA is given. The DCA is described in detail, and its use as an anomaly detector is illustrated within the context of computer security. A port scan detection task is performed to substantiate the influence of signal selection on the behaviour of the algorithm. Experimental results provide a comparison of differing input signal mappings.

The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self-cells or non-self cells. It does this with the help of a distributed task force that has the intelligence to take action from a local and also a global perspective using its network of chemical messengers for communication. There are two major branches of the immune system. The innate immune system is an unchanging mechanism that detects and destroys certain invading organisms, whilst the adaptive immune system responds to previously unknown foreign cells and builds a response to them that can remain in the body over a long period of time. This remarkable information processing biological system has caught the attention of computer science in recent years. A novel computational intelligence technique, inspired by immunology, has emerged, called Artificial Immune Systems. Several concepts from the immune have been extracted and applied for solution to real world science and engineering problems. In this tutorial, we briefly describe the immune system metaphors that are relevant to existing Artificial Immune Systems methods. We will then show illustrative real-world problems suitable for Artificial Immune Systems and give a step-by-step algorithm walkthrough for one such problem. A comparison of the Artificial Immune Systems to other well-known algorithms, areas for future work, tips & tricks and a list of resources will round this tutorial off. It should be noted that as Artificial Immune Systems is still a young and evolving field, there is not yet a fixed algorithm template and hence actual implementations might differ somewhat from time to time and from those examples given here.

We consider directed graphs over a set of n agents, where an edge (i,j) is taken to mean that agent i supports or trusts agent j. Given such a graph and an integer k\leq n, we wish to select a subset of k agents that maximizes the sum of indegrees, i.e., a subset of k most popular or most trusted agents. At the same time we assume that each individual agent is only interested in being selected, and may misreport its outgoing edges to this end. This problem formulation captures realistic scenarios where agents choose among themselves, which can be found in the context of Internet search, social networks like Twitter, or reputation systems like Epinions. Our goal is to design mechanisms without payments that map each graph to a k-subset of agents to be selected and satisfy the following two constraints: strategyproofness, i.e., agents cannot benefit from misreporting their outgoing edges, and approximate optimality, i.e., the sum of indegrees of the selected subset of agents is always close to optimal. Our first main result is a surprising impossibility: for k \in {1,...,n-1}, no deterministic strategyproof mechanism can provide a finite approximation ratio. Our second main result is a randomized strategyproof mechanism with an approximation ratio that is bounded from above by four for any value of k, and approaches one as k grows.

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been applied to the field of combinatorial optimization widely. But the study of convergence theory of ACO is rare under general condition. In this paper, the authors try to find the evidence to prove that entropy is related to the convergence of ACO, especially to the estimation of the minimum iteration number of convergence. Entropy is a new view point possibly to studying the ACO convergence under general condition. Key Words: Ant Colony Optimization, Convergence of ACO, Entropy

The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle states that the optimal model for a given data set is that which compresses it best. Due to practial limitations the model can be restricted to a class such as linear regression models, which we address in this study. As in other formulations such as the LASSO and forward step-wise regression we are interested in sparsifying the feature set while preserving generalization ability. We derive a well-principled set of codes for both parameters and error residuals along with smooth approximations to lengths of these codes as to allow gradient descent optimization of description length, and go on to show that sparsification and feature selection using our approach is faster than the LASSO on several datasets from the UCI and StatLib repositories, with favorable generalization accuracy, while being fully automatic, requiring neither cross-validation nor tuning of regularization hyper-parameters, allowing even for a nonlinear expansion of the feature set followed by sparsification.

When configuring customizable software, it is useful to provide interactive tool-support that ensures that the configuration does not breach given constraints. But, when is a configuration complete and how can the tool help the user to complete it? We formalize this problem and relate it to concepts from non-monotonic reasoning well researched in Artificial Intelligence. The results are interesting for both practitioners and theoreticians. Practitioners will find a technique facilitating an interactive configuration process and experiments supporting feasibility of the approach. Theoreticians will find links between well-known formal concepts and a concrete practical application.

Many databases store data in relational format, with different types of entities and information about links between the entities. The field of statistical-relational learning (SRL) has developed a number of new statistical models for such data. In this paper we focus on learning class-level or first-order dependencies, which model the general database statistics over attributes of linked objects and links (e.g., the percentage of A grades given in computer science classes). Class-level statistical relationships are important in themselves, and they support applications like policy making, strategic planning, and query optimization. Most current SRL methods find class-level dependencies, but their main task is to support instance-level predictions about the attributes or links of specific entities. We focus only on class-level prediction, and describe algorithms for learning class-level models that are orders of magnitude faster for this task. Our algorithms learn Bayes nets with relational structure, leveraging the efficiency of single-table nonrelational Bayes net learners. An evaluation of our methods on three data sets shows that they are computationally feasible for realistic table sizes, and that the learned structures represent the statistical information in the databases well. After learning compiles the database statistics into a Bayes net, querying these statistics via Bayes net inference is faster than with SQL queries, and does not depend on the size of the database.

Creativity isn’t magical. It’s an aspect of normal human intelligence, not a special faculty granted to a tiny elite. There are three forms: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. All three can be modeled by AI—in some cases, with impressive results. AI techniques underlie various types of computer art. Whether computers could “really” be creative isn’t a scientific question but a philosophical one, to which there’s no clear answer. But we do have the beginnings of a scientific understanding of creativity.

AAAI-10 will also include several special tracks, including the Nectar and Senior Member tracks, as well as specific research areas. Call for Papers for the main technical track and other tracks are available at www.aaai.org/aaai10.