Plotting

 Government


The Seventeenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-07)

AI Magazine

The Seventeenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-07) was held in Providence, Rhode Island in September 2007. It covered the latest theoretical and practical advances in planning and scheduling. The conference was co-located with the Thirteenth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-07). The program consisted of tutorials, workshops, system demonstrations, a doctoral consortium, and three days of technical presentations mostly in parallel sessions. ICAPS-07 also hosted the second edition of the International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling. This report describes the conference in more detail.



Networks and Natural Language Processing

AI Magazine

Over the last few years, a number of areas of natural language processing have begun applying graph-based techniques. These include, among others, text summarization, syntactic parsing, word-sense disambiguation, ontology construction, sentiment and subjectivity analysis, and text clustering. In this paper, we present some of the most successful graph-based representations and algorithms used in language processing and try to explain how and why they work.


Agent Models of Political Interactions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Looks at state interactions from an agent based AI perspective to see state interactions as an example of emergent intelligent behavior. Exposes basic principles of game theory.


AceWiki: A Natural and Expressive Semantic Wiki

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present AceWiki, a prototype of a new kind of semantic wiki using the controlled natural language Attempto Controlled English (ACE) for representing its content. ACE is a subset of English with a restricted grammar and a formal semantics. The use of ACE has two important advantages over existing semantic wikis. First, we can improve the usability and achieve a shallow learning curve. Second, ACE is more expressive than the formal languages of existing semantic wikis. Our evaluation shows that people who are not familiar with the formal foundations of the Semantic Web are able to deal with AceWiki after a very short learning phase and without the help of an expert.


Beyond the Elves: Making Intelligent Agents Intelligent

AI Magazine

In fact, DARPA, which funded the project, ways. Elves) (Scerri, Pynadath, and Tambe 2002; Finally, we will present some lessons Pynadath and Tambe 2003) and required learned and recent research that was motivated detailed information about the calendars by our experiences in deploying the of people using the system. Thus, we decided to deploy a new application of the Electric The Travel Elves introduced two major Elves, called the Travel Elves. This application advantages over traditional approaches to appeared to be ideal for wider deployment travel planning. First, the Travel Elves provided since it could be hosted entirely outside an interactive approach to making an organization and communication travel plans in which all of the data could be performed over wireless devices, required to make informed choices is such as cellular telephones. For example, when The mission of the Travel Elves (Ambite deciding whether to park at the airport or et al. 2002, Knoblock 2004) was to facilitate take a taxi, the system compares the cost planning a trip and to ensure that the of parking and the cost of a taxi given other resulting travel plan would execute selections, such as the airport, the specific smoothly. Initial deployment of the Travel parking lot, and the starting location Elves at DARPA went smoothly.


The Voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?

AI Magazine

On March 27, 2006, I gave a light-hearted and occasionally bittersweet presentation on “Whatever Happened to AI?” at the Stanford Spring Symposium presentation – to a lively audience of active AI researchers and formerly-active ones (whose current inaction could be variously ascribed to their having aged, reformed, given up, redefined the problem, etc.)  This article is a brief chronicling of that talk, and I entreat the reader to take it in that spirit: a textual snapshot of a discussion with friends and colleagues, rather than a scholarly article. I begin by whining about the Turing Test, but only for a thankfully brief bit, and then get down to my top-10 list of factors that have retarded progress in our field, that have delayed the emergence of a true strong AI.


Electric Elves: What Went Wrong and Why

AI Magazine

Software personal assistants continue to be a topic of significant research interest. This article outlines some of the important lessons learned from a successfully-deployed team of personal assistant agents (Electric Elves) in an office environment. In the Electric Elves project, a team of almost a dozen personal assistant agents were continually active for seven months. Each elf (agent) represented one person and assisted in daily activities in an actual office environment. This project led to several important observations about privacy, adjustable autonomy, and social norms in office environments. In addition to outlining some of the key lessons learned we outline our continued research to address some of the concerns raised.


Three Anecdotes from the DARPA Autonomous Land Vehicle Project

AI Magazine

This was a large applied research effort that presented many opportunities for unusual experiences. In one such experience, I was called in, at the last minute, to help improve our ALV proposal. The proposal was a 300-page document that segued smoothly from problem description to corporate capabilities and managerial plan, omitting any mention of technical approach. This taught me a rule of thumb I have seen validated many times: the larger the project (in dollars and scope), the poorer the technical proposal. In a second experience, I was demonstrating a dynamic programming algorithm at a quarterly review.


The Role of Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Crisis Response

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Crisis response poses many of the most difficult information technology in crisis management. It requires information and communication-intensive efforts, utilized for reducing uncertainty, calculating and comparing costs and benefits, and managing resources in a fashion beyond those regularly available to handle routine problems. In this paper, we explore the benefits of artificial intelligence technologies in crisis response. This paper discusses the role of artificial intelligence technologies; namely, robotics, ontology and semantic web, and multi-agent systems in crisis response.