Total: 12
We argue that it is crucial to the future of AI that our students be trained in multiple complementary modes of ethical reasoning, so that they may make ethical design and implementation choices, ethical career decisions, and that their software will be programmed to take into account the complexities of acting ethically in the world.
The generality of decision and game theory has enabled domain-independent progress in AI research. For example, a better algorithm for finding good policies in (PO)MDPs can be instantly used in a variety of applications. But such a general theory is lacking when it comes to moral decision making. For AI applications with a moral component, are we then forced to build systems based on many ad-hoc rules? In this paper we discuss possible ways to avoid this conclusion.
Sci-fi narratives permeating the collective consciousness endow AI Rebellion with ample negative connotations. However, for AI agents, as for humans, attitudes of protest, objection, and rejection have many potential benefits in support of ethics, safety, self-actualization, solidarity, and social justice, and are necessary in a wide variety of contexts. We launch a conversation on constructive AI rebellion and describe a framework meant to support discussion, implementation, and deployment of AI Rebel Agents as protagonists of positive narratives.
How can individuals and communities protect their privacy against social network analysis tools? How do criminals or terrorists organizations evade detection by such tools? Under which conditions can these tools be made strategy proof? These fundamental questions have attracted little attention in the literature to date, as most social network analysis tools are built around the assumption that individuals or groups in a network do not act strategically to evade such tools. With this in mind, we outline in this paper a new paradigm for social network analysis, whereby the strategic behaviour of network actors is explicitly modeled. Addressing this research challenge has various implications. For instance, it may allow two individuals to keep their relationship secret or private. It may also allow members of an activist group to conceal their membership, or even conceal the existence of their group from authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, it may assist security agencies and counter terrorism units in understanding the strategies that covert organizations use to escape detection, and give rise to new strategy-proof countermeasures.
To solve combinatorial problems, Constraint Programming builds high-level models that expose much of the structure of the problem. The distinctive driving force of Constraint Programming has been this direct access to problem structure. This has been key to the design of powerful filtering algorihms but we could do much more. Considering the set of solutions to each constraint as a multivariate discrete distribution opens the door to more structure-revealing computations that may significantly change this solving paradigm. As a result we could improve our ability to solve combinatorial problems and our understanding of the structure of practical problems.
Latent tree analysis seeks to model the correlations amonga set of random variables using a tree of latent variables. It was proposed as an improvement to latent class analysis—a method widely used in social sciences and medicine to identify homogeneous subgroups in a population. It provides new and fruitful perspectives on a number of machine learningareas, including cluster analysis, topic detection, and deep probabilistic modeling. This paper gives an overview of the research on latent tree analysis and various ways it is used inpractice.
Task allocation is ubiquitous in computer science and robotics, yet some problems have received limited attention in the computer science and AI community. Specifically, we will focus on multi-robot task allocation problems when tasks have time windows or ordering constraints. We will outline the main lines ofresearch and open problems.
Machine Learning and Inference methods have become ubiquitous in our attempt to induce more abstract representations of natural language text, visual scenes, and other messy, naturally occurring data, and support decisions that depend on it. However, learning models for these tasks is difficult partly because generating the necessary supervision signals for it is costly and does not scale. This paper describes several learning paradigms that are designed to alleviate the supervision bottleneck. It will illustrate their benefit in the context of multiple problems, all pertaining to inducing various levels of semantic representations from text. In particular, we discuss (i) esponse Driven Learning of models, a learning protocol that supports inducing meaning representations simply by observing the model's behavior in its environment, (ii) the exploitation of Incidental Supervision signals that exist in the data, independently of the task at hand, to learn models that identify and classify semantic predicates, and (iii) the use of weak supervision to combine simple models to support global decisions where joint supervision is not available.
Human-aware AI is increasingly important as AI becomes more powerful and ubiquitous. A good foundation for human-awareness should enable ourselves and our "AIs" to "explain ourselves" naturally to each other. Constraint reasoning offers particular opportunities and challenges in this regard. This paper takes note of the history of work in this area and encourages increased attention, laying out a rough research agenda.
This paper and summary talk broadly survey computational sustainability research. Rather than a detailed treatment of the research projects in the area, which is beyond the scope of the paper and talk, the paper includes a meta-survey, pointing to edited collections and overviews in the literature for the interested reader. Computational sustainability research has been broadly characterized by AI methods employed, sustainability areas addressed, and contributions made to (typically, human) decision-making. The paper addresses these characterizations as well, which will facilitate a deeper synthesis later, to include the potential for developing sophisticated and holistic AI decision-making and advisory agents.
Though extensively investigated since the 1960s, entity coreference resolution, a core task in natural language understanding, is far from being solved. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made on learning-based coreference research since its inception two decades ago. This paper provides an overview of the major milestones made in learning-based coreference research and discusses a hard entity coreference task, the Winograd Schema Challenge, which has recently received a lot of attention in the AI community.
Research on cognitive architectures attempts to develop unified theories of the mind. This paradigm incorporates many ideas from other parts of AI, but it differs enough in its aims and methods that it merits separate treatment. In this paper, we review the notion of cognitive architectures and some recurring themes in their study. Next we examine the substantial progress made by the subfield over the past 40 years, after which we turn to some topics that have received little attention and that pose challenges for the research community.