Plotting

 Country


The AAAI-2002 Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition

AI Magazine

Usually those attendees with names any of the events (YSC, an Iranian team, took beginning AL are encouraged to line up behind top honors in the Rescue event). Some robots at the 2002 American Association In 2002, the event was organized by Holly for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Yanco of the University of Massachusetts at Robot Competition and Exhibition actually Lowell and Tucker Balch of the Georgia Institute registered for the conference on their of Technology. The Robot Challenge was own. Robot annual competition and exhibition, making it Host was cochaired by David Gustafson of the oldest AIcentric mobile robot competition. Kansas State University and Francois Michaud The event included three competitions of Universite de Sherbrooke.


The AAAI-2002 Robot Exhibition

AI Magazine

Many of these systems were works The remainder of this article provides, in alphabetical in progress, providing the audience an opportunity order, brief discussions of each of to see snapshots of research programs in the entries based on text provided by their respective midphase. Contributors ranged from independent designers. The reader should assume undergraduate projects to large multilab that anything smart in the following pages is efforts. It there were nonetheless a number of recurring should also be mentioned that in the twentyfirst themes worth noting. Robotic systems for urban century, we not only have the problem of search and rescue (USAR), an area of growing what pronoun to use for individuals of unspecified interest for several years, have continued to gender (he, she, or they) but of what pronoun develop.


The Fifth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA-2002)

AI Magazine

The Fifth International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA-2002) was held from 2 to 4 August 2002 in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. This interdisciplinary conference brought together researchers from around the world to present recent progress on, and exchange ideas about, how abstraction, reformulation, and approximation techniques can be used in areas such as automatic programming, constraint satisfaction, design, diagnosis, machine learning, search, planning, reasoning, game playing, scheduling, and theorem proving.


The Robot Host Competition at the AAAI-2002 Mobile Robot Competition

AI Magazine

The entry from Kansas State University used minimal hardware sensors but used a conversation utility with a limited database to engage in conversation with users. Both tasks required moving carefully among The entry from Kansas State University (figure people, politely offering them information or 1) was developed by three exchange students hors d'oeuvres, recognizing when the people from the Czech Republic. Their entry consisted are making a request, and answering the request. of a The robot had sonar Celebrating the sixth year for the Robot Host sensors to provide obstacle avoidance and an competition, a new task, the robot information infrared sensor to sense the presence of people kiosk, was added. Three entries took on the by their temperature. Navigation was random challenge of creating host robots who can both and limited by xy bounds.


Intelligent Control of a Water-Recovery System: Three Years in the Trenches

AI Magazine

This article discusses our experience building and running an intelligent control system during a three-year period for a National Aeronautics and Space Administration advanced life support (ALS) system. The system under test was known as the Integrated Water-Recovery System (IWRS). We used the 3T intelligent control architecture to produce software that operated autonomously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 16 months. The article details our development approach, the successes and failures of the system, and our lessons learned. We conclude with a summary of spin-off benefits to the AI community and areas of AI research that can be useful for future ALS systems.


The 2002 Trading Agent Competition: An Overview of Agent Strategies

AI Magazine

In TAC-00, agent designs were primarily centered around designing algorithms a tripod are sometimes bundled with the camera to solve an NPcomplete optimization and sometimes auctioned separately. However, by the second year, it for the next generation of trading agents, became common knowledge that this problem autonomous bidding in simultaneous auctions was tractable for the TAC travel game parameters. During the second year, agent designs focused Simultaneous auctions, which characterize on estimating clearing prices, and some internet sites such as eBay.com, Agent design in and substitutable goods are on offer. Complementary TAC-02, however, cannot be described so succinctly.


AI in the News

AI Magazine

This eclectic keepsake provides a sampling of what can be found (with links to the full articles) on the AI Topics web site. Please keep in mind that (1) the mere mention of anything here does not imply any endorsement whatsoever; (2) the excerpt might not reflect the overall tenor of the article; (3) although the articles were initially available online and without charge, few things that good last forever; and (4) the AI in the News collection -- updated, hyperlinked, and archived -- can be found by going to www.aaai.org/aitopics/ html/current.php.


Interactive Execution Monitoring of Agent Teams

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

There is an increasing need for automated support for humans monitoring the activity of distributed teams of cooperating agents, both human and machine. We characterize the domain-independent challenges posed by this problem, and describe how properties of domains influence the challenges and their solutions. We will concentrate on dynamic, data-rich domains where humans are ultimately responsible for team behavior. Thus, the automated aid should interactively support effective and timely decision making by the human. We present a domain-independent categorization of the types of alerts a plan-based monitoring system might issue to a user, where each type generally requires different monitoring techniques. We describe a monitoring framework for integrating many domain-specific and task-specific monitoring techniques and then using the concept of value of an alert to avoid operator overload. We use this framework to describe an execution monitoring approach we have used to implement Execution Assistants (EAs) in two different dynamic, data-rich, real-world domains to assist a human in monitoring team behavior. One domain (Army small unit operations) has hundreds of mobile, geographically distributed agents, a combination of humans, robots, and vehicles. The other domain (teams of unmanned ground and air vehicles) has a handful of cooperating robots. Both domains involve unpredictable adversaries in the vicinity. Our approach customizes monitoring behavior for each specific task, plan, and situation, as well as for user preferences. Our EAs alert the human controller when reported events threaten plan execution or physically threaten team members. Alerts were generated in a timely manner without inundating the user with too many alerts (less than 10 percent of alerts are unwanted, as judged by domain experts).


An Evolutionary Algorithm with Advanced Goal and Priority Specification for Multi-objective Optimization

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

This paper presents an evolutionary algorithm with a new goal-sequence domination scheme for better decision support in multi-objective optimization. The approach allows the inclusion of advanced hard/soft priority and constraint information on each objective component, and is capable of incorporating multiple specifications with overlapping or non-overlapping objective functions via logical "OR" and "AND" connectives to drive the search towards multiple regions of trade-off. In addition, we propose a dynamic sharing scheme that is simple and adaptively estimated according to the on-line population distribution without needing any a priori parameter setting. Each feature in the proposed algorithm is examined to show its respective contribution, and the performance of the algorithm is compared with other evolutionary optimization methods. It is shown that the proposed algorithm has performed well in the diversity of evolutionary search and uniform distribution of non-dominated individuals along the final trade-offs, without significant computational effort. The algorithm is also applied to the design optimization of a practical servo control system for hard disk drives with a single voice-coil-motor actuator. Results of the evolutionary designed servo control system show a superior closed-loop performance compared to classical PID or RPT approaches.


Wrapper Maintenance: A Machine Learning Approach

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

The proliferation of online information sources has led to an increased use of wrappers for extracting data from Web sources. While most of the previous research has focused on quick and efficient generation of wrappers, the development of tools for wrapper maintenance has received less attention. This is an important research problem because Web sources often change in ways that prevent the wrappers from extracting data correctly. We present an efficient algorithm that learns structural information about data from positive examples alone. We describe how this information can be used for two wrapper maintenance applications: wrapper verification and reinduction. The wrapper verification system detects when a wrapper is not extracting correct data, usually because the Web source has changed its format. The reinduction algorithm automatically recovers from changes in the Web source by identifying data on Web pages so that a new wrapper may be generated for this source. To validate our approach, we monitored 27 wrappers over a period of a year. The verification algorithm correctly discovered 35 of the 37 wrapper changes, and made 16 mistakes, resulting in precision of 0.73 and recall of 0.95. We validated the reinduction algorithm on ten Web sources. We were able to successfully reinduce the wrappers, obtaining precision and recall values of 0.90 and 0.80 on the data extraction task.