Machine learning

Planning is the branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that seeks to automate reasoning about plans, most importantly the reasoning that goes into formulating a plan to achieve a given goal in a given situation. AI planning is model-based: a planning system takes as input a description (or model) of the initial situation, the actions available to change it, and the goal condition to output a plan composed of those actions that will accomplish the goal when executed from the initial situation.The Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) is a formal knowledge representation language designed to express planning models. Developed by the planning research community as a means of facilitating systems comparison, it has become a de-facto standard input language of many planning systems, although it is not the only modelling language for planning. Several variants of PDDL have emerged that capture planning problems of different natures and complexities, with a focus on deterministic problems.The purpose of this book is two-fold. First, we present a unified and current account of PDDL, covering the subsets of PDDL that express discrete, numeric, temporal, and hybrid planning. Second, we want to introduce readers to the art of modelling planning problems in this language, through educational examples that demonstrate how PDDL is used to model realistic planning problems. The book is intended for advanced students and researchers in AI who want to dive into the mechanics of AI planning, as well as those who want to be able to use AI planning systems without an in-depth explanation of the algorithms and implementation techniques they use.

This book provides a tutorial introduction to modern techniques for representing and reasoning about qualitative preferences with respect to a set of alternatives. The syntax and semantics of several languages for representing preference languages, including CP-nets, TCP-nets, CI-nets, and CP-theories, are reviewed. Some key problems in reasoning about preferences are introduced, including determining whether one alternative is preferred to another, or whether they are equivalent, with respect to a given set of preferences. These tasks can be reduced to model checking in temporal logic. Specifically, an induced preference graph that represents a given set of preferences can be efficiently encoded using a Kripke Structure for Computational Tree Logic (CTL). One can translate preference queries with respect to a set of preferences into an equivalent set of formulae in CTL, such that the CTL formula is satisfied whenever the preference query holds. This allows us to use a model checker to reason about preferences, i.e., answer preference queries, and to obtain a justification as to why a preference query is satisfied (or not) with respect to a set of preferences. This book defines the notions of the equivalence of two sets of preferences, including what it means for one set of preferences to subsume another, and shows how to answer preferential equivalence and subsumption queries using model checking. Furthermore, this book demontrates how to generate alternatives ordered by preference, along with providing ways to deal with inconsistent preference specifications. A description of CRISNER-an open source software implementation of the model checking approach to qualitative preference reasoning in CP-nets, TCP-nets, and CP-theories is included, as well as examples illustrating its use.

The increasing abundance of large high-quality datasets, combined with significant technical advances over the last several decades have made machine learning into a major tool employed across a broad array of tasks including vision, language, finance, and security. However, success has been accompanied with important new challenges: many applications of machine learning are adversarial in nature. Some are adversarial because they are safety critical, such as autonomous driving. An adversary in these applications can be a malicious party aimed at causing congestion or accidents, or may even model unusual situations that expose vulnerabilities in the prediction engine. Other applications are adversarial because their task and/or the data they use are. For example, an important class of problems in security involves detection, such as malware, spam, and intrusion detection. The use of machine learning for detecting malicious entities creates an incentive among adversaries to evade detection by changing their behavior or the content of malicius objects they develop.The field of adversarial machine learning has emerged to study vulnerabilities of machine learning approaches in adversarial settings and to develop techniques to make learning robust to adversarial manipulation. This book provides a technical overview of this field. After reviewing machine learning concepts and approaches, as well as common use cases of these in adversarial settings, we present a general categorization of attacks on machine learning. We then address two major categories of attacks and associated defenses: decision-time attacks, in which an adversary changes the nature of instances seen by a learned model at the time of prediction in order to cause errors, and poisoning or training time attacks, in which the actual training dataset is maliciously modified. In our final chapter devoted to technical content, we discuss recent techniques for attacks on deep learning, as well as approaches for improving robustness of deep neural networks. We conclude with a discussion of several important issues in the area of adversarial learning that in our view warrant further research.Given the increasing interest in the area of adversarial machine learning, we hope this book provides readers with the tools necessary to successfully engage in research and practice of machine learning in adversarial settings.

Similarity between objects plays an important role in both human cognitive processes and artificial systems for recognition and categorization. How to appropriately measure such similarities for a given task is crucial to the performance of many machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining methods. This book is devoted to metric learning, a set of techniques to automatically learn similarity and distance functions from data that has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields in the past ten years. In this book, we provide a thorough review of the metric learning literature that covers algorithms, theory and applications for both numerical and structured data. We first introduce relevant definitions and classic metric functions, as well as examples of their use in machine learning and data mining. We then review a wide range of metric learning algorithms, starting with the simple setting of linear distance and similarity learning. We show how one may scale-up these methods to very large amounts of training data. To go beyond the linear case, we discuss methods that learn nonlinear metrics or multiple linear metrics throughout the feature space, and review methods for more complex settings such as multi-task and semi-supervised learning. Although most of the existing work has focused on numerical data, we cover the literature on metric learning for structured data like strings, trees, graphs and time series. In the more technical part of the book, we present some recent statistical frameworks for analyzing the generalization performance in metric learning and derive results for some of the algorithms presented earlier. Finally, we illustrate the relevance of metric learning in real-world problems through a series of successful applications to computer vision, bioinformatics and information retrieval. Table of Contents: Introduction / Metrics / Properties of Metric Learning Algorithms / Linear Metric Learning / Nonlinear and Local Metric Learning / Metric Learning for Special Settings / Metric Learning for Structured Data / Generalization Guarantees for Metric Learning / Applications / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

heterogeneous graphs. Further, the book introduces different applications of NE such as recommendation and information diffusion prediction. Finally, the book concludes the methods and applications and looks forward to the future directions.

Plan recognition, activity recognition, and goal recognition all involve making inferences about other actors based on observations of their interactions with the environment and other agents. This synergistic area of research combines, unites, and makes use of techniques and research from a wide range of areas including user modeling, machine vision, automated planning, intelligent user interfaces, human-computer interaction, autonomous and multi-agent systems, natural language understanding, and machine learning. It plays a crucial role in a wide variety of applications including assistive technology, software assistants, computer and network security, human-robot collaboration, natural language processing, video games, and many more.This wide range of applications and disciplines has produced a wealth of ideas, models, tools, and results in the recognition literature. However, it has also contributed to fragmentation in the field, with researchers publishing relevant results in a wide spectrum of journals and conferences.This book seeks to address this fragmentation by providing a high-level introduction and historical overview of the plan and goal recognition literature. It provides a description of the core elements that comprise these recognition problems and practical advice for modeling them. In particular, we define and distinguish the different recognition tasks. We formalize the major approaches to modeling these problems using a single motivating example. Finally, we describe a number of state-of-the-art systems and their extensions, future challenges, and some potential applications.

How is it possible to allow multiple data owners to collaboratively train and use a shared prediction model while keeping all the local training data private?Traditional machine learning approaches need to combine all data at one location, typically a data center, which may very well violate the laws on user privacy and data confidentiality. Today, many parts of the world demand that technology companies treat user data carefully according to user-privacy laws. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a prime example. In this book, we describe how federated machine learning addresses this problem with novel solutions combining distributed machine learning, cryptography and security, and incentive mechanism design based on economic principles and game theory. We explain different types of privacy-preserving machine learning solutions and their technological backgrounds, and highlight some representative practical use cases. We show how federated learning can become the foundation of next-generation machine learning that caters to technological and societal needs for responsible AI development and application.

Graphical models (e.g., Bayesian and constraint networks, influence diagrams, and Markov decision processes) have become a central paradigm for knowledge representation and reasoning in both artificial intelligence and computer science in general. These models are used to perform many reasoning tasks, such as scheduling, planning and learning, diagnosis and prediction, design, hardware and software verification, and bioinformatics. These problems can be stated as the formal tasks of constraint satisfaction and satisfiability, combinatorial optimization, and probabilistic inference. It is well known that the tasks are computationally hard, but research during the past three decades has yielded a variety of principles and techniques that significantly advanced the state of the art.This book provides comprehensive coverage of the primary exact algorithms for reasoning with such models. The main feature exploited by the algorithms is the model's graph. We present inference-based, message-passing schemes (e.g., variable-elimination) and search-based, conditioning schemes (e.g., cycle-cutset conditioning and AND/OR search). Each class possesses distinguished characteristics and in particular has different time vs. space behavior. We emphasize the dependence of both schemes on few graph parameters such as the treewidth, cycle-cutset, and (the pseudo-tree) height. The new edition includes the notion of influence diagrams, which focus on sequential decision making under uncertainty. We believe the principles outlined in the book would serve well in moving forward to approximation and anytime-based schemes. The target audience of this book is researchers and students in the artificial intelligence and machine learning area, and beyond.

Many real-world decision problems have multiple objectives. For example, when choosing a medical treatment plan, we want to maximize the efficacy of the treatment, but also minimize the side effects. These objectives typically conflict, e.g., we can often increase the efficacy of the treatment, but at the cost of more severe side effects. In this book, we outline how to deal with multiple objectives in decision-theoretic planning and reinforcement learning algorithms. To illustrate this, we employ the popular problem classes of multi-objective Markov decision processes (MOMDPs) and multi-objective coordination graphs (MO-CoGs).First, we discuss different use cases for multi-objective decision making, and why they often necessitate explicitly multi-objective algorithms. We advocate a utility-based approach to multi-objective decision making, i.e., that what constitutes an optimal solution to a multi-objective decision problem should be derived from the available information about user utility. We show how different assumptions about user utility and what types of policies are allowed lead to different solution concepts, which we outline in a taxonomy of multi-objective decision problems.Second, we show how to create new methods for multi-objective decision making using existing single-objective methods as a basis. Focusing on planning, we describe two ways to creating multi-objective algorithms: in the inner loop approach, the inner workings of a single-objective method are adapted to work with multi-objective solution concepts; in the outer loop approach, a wrapper is created around a single-objective method that solves the multi-objective problem as a series of single-objective problems. After discussing the creation of such methods for the planning setting, we discuss how these approaches apply to the learning setting.Next, we discuss three promising application domains for multi-objective decision making algorithms: energy, health, and infrastructure and transportation. Finally, we conclude by outlining important open problems and promising future directions.

Graphs are useful data structures in complex real-life applications such as modeling physical systems, learning molecular fingerprints, controlling traffic networks, and recommending friends in social networks. However, these tasks require dealing with non-Euclidean graph data that contains rich relational information between elements and cannot be well handled by traditional deep learning models (e.g., convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or recurrent neural networks (RNNs)). Nodes in graphs usually contain useful feature information that cannot be well addressed in most unsupervised representation learning methods (e.g., network embedding methods). Graph neural networks (GNNs) are proposed to combine the feature information and the graph structure to learn better representations on graphs via feature propagation and aggregation. Due to its convincing performance and high interpretability, GNN has recently become a widely applied graph analysis tool.This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the basic concepts, models, and applications of graph neural networks. It starts with the introduction of the vanilla GNN model. Then several variants of the vanilla model are introduced such as graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent networks, graph attention networks, graph residual networks, and several general frameworks. Variants for different graph types and advanced training methods are also included. As for the applications of GNNs, the book categorizes them into structural, non-structural, and other scenarios, and then it introduces several typical models on solving these tasks. Finally, the closing chapters provide GNN open resources and the outlook of several future directions.

Lifelong Machine Learning, Second Edition is an introduction to an advanced machine learning paradigm that continuously learns by accumulating past knowledge that it then uses in future learning and problem solving. In contrast, the current dominant machine learning paradigm learns in isolation: given a training dataset, it runs a machine learning algorithm on the dataset to produce a model that is then used in its intended application. It makes no attempt to retain the learned knowledge and use it in subsequent learning. Unlike this isolated system, humans learn effectively with only a few examples precisely because our learning is very knowledge-driven: the knowledge learned in the past helps us learn new things with little data or effort. Lifelong learning aims to emulate this capability, because without it, an AI system cannot be considered truly intelligent.Research in lifelong learning has developed significantly in the relatively short time since the first edition of this book was published. The purpose of this second edition is to expand the definition of lifelong learning, update the content of several chapters, and add a new chapter about continual learning in deep neural networks-which has been actively researched over the past two or three years. A few chapters have also been reorganized to make each of them more coherent for the reader. Moreover, the authors want to propose a unified framework for the research area. Currently, there are several research topics in machine learning that are closely related to lifelong learning-most notably, multi-task learning, transfer learning, and meta-learning-because they also employ the idea of knowledge sharing and transfer. This book brings all these topics under one roof and discusses their similarities and differences. Its goal is to introduce this emerging machine learning paradigm and present a comprehensive survey and review of the important research results and latest ideas in the area. This book is thus suitable for students, researchers, and practitioners who are interested in machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, or pattern recognition. Lecturers can readily use the book for courses in any of these related fields.

General game players are computer systems able to play strategy games based solely on formal game descriptions supplied at "e;runtime"e; (n other words, they don't know the rules until the game starts). Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, general game players cannot rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games; they must discover such algorithms themselves. General game playing expertise depends on intelligence on the part of the game player and not just intelligence of the programmer of the game player. GGP is an interesting application in its own right. It is intellectually engaging and more than a little fun. But it is much more than that. It provides a theoretical framework for modeling discrete dynamic systems and defining rationality in a way that takes into account problem representation and complexities like incompleteness of information and resource bounds. It has practical applications in areas where these features are important, e.g., in business and law. More fundamentally, it raises questions about the nature of intelligence and serves as a laboratory in which to evaluate competing approaches to artificial intelligence. This book is an elementary introduction to General Game Playing (GGP). (1) It presents the theory of General Game Playing and leading GGP technologies. (2) It shows how to create GGP programs capable of competing against other programs and humans. (3) It offers a glimpse of some of the real-world applications of General Game Playing.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) explores techniques for learning a task policy from examples provided by a human teacher. The field of LfD has grown into an extensive body of literature over the past 30 years, with a wide variety of approaches for encoding human demonstrations and modeling skills and tasks. Additionally, we have recently seen a focus on gathering data from non-expert human teachers (i.e., domain experts but not robotics experts). In this book, we provide an introduction to the field with a focus on the unique technical challenges associated with designing robots that learn from naive human teachers. We begin, in the introduction, with a unification of the various terminology seen in the literature as well as an outline of the design choices one has in designing an LfD system. Chapter 2 gives a brief survey of the psychology literature that provides insights from human social learning that are relevant to designing robotic social learners. Chapter 3 walks through an LfD interaction, surveying the design choices one makes and state of the art approaches in prior work. First, is the choice of input, how the human teacher interacts with the robot to provide demonstrations. Next, is the choice of modeling technique. Currently, there is a dichotomy in the field between approaches that model low-level motor skills and those that model high-level tasks composed of primitive actions. We devote a chapter to each of these. Chapter 7 is devoted to interactive and active learning approaches that allow the robot to refine an existing task model. And finally, Chapter 8 provides best practices for evaluation of LfD systems, with a focus on how to approach experiments with human subjects in this domain.

The ubiquitous challenge of learning and decision-making from rank data arises in situations where intelligent systems collect preference and behavior data from humans, learn from the data, and then use the data to help humans make efficient, effective, and timely decisions. Often, such data are represented by rankings.This book surveys some recent progress toward addressing the challenge from the considerations of statistics, computation, and socio-economics. We will cover classical statistical models for rank data, including random utility models, distance-based models, and mixture models. We will discuss and compare classical and state-of-the-art algorithms, such as algorithms based on Minorize-Majorization (MM), Expectation-Maximization (EM), Generalized Method-of-Moments (GMM), rank breaking, and tensor decomposition. We will also introduce principled Bayesian preference elicitation frameworks for collecting rank data. Finally, we will examine socio-economic aspects of statistically desirable decision-making mechanisms, such as Bayesian estimators.This book can be useful in three ways: (1) for theoreticians in statistics and machine learning to better understand the considerations and caveats of learning from rank data, compared to learning from other types of data, especially cardinal data; (2) for practitioners to apply algorithms covered by the book for sampling, learning, and aggregation; and (3) as a textbook for graduate students or advanced undergraduate students to learn about the field.This book requires that the reader has basic knowledge in probability, statistics, and algorithms. Knowledge in social choice would also help but is not required.

Logic Programming is a style of programming in which programs take the form of sets of sentences in the language of Symbolic Logic. Over the years, there has been growing interest in Logic Programming due to applications in deductive databases, automated worksheets, Enterprise Management (business rules), Computational Law, and General Game Playing. This book introduces Logic Programming theory, current technology, and popular applications. In this volume, we take an innovative, model-theoretic approach to logic programming. We begin with the fundamental notion of datasets, i.e., sets of ground atoms. Given this fundamental notion, we introduce views, i.e., virtual relations; and we define classical logic programs as sets of view definitions, written using traditional Prolog-like notation but with semantics given in terms of datasets rather than implementation. We then introduce actions, i.e., additions and deletions of ground atoms; and we define dynamic logic programs as sets of action definitions. In addition to the printed book, there is an online version of the text with an interpreter and a compiler for the language used in the text and an integrated development environment for use in developing and deploying practical logic programs.

While labeled data is expensive to prepare, ever increasing amounts of unlabeled data is becoming widely available. In order to adapt to this phenomenon, several semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms, which learn from labeled as well as unlabeled data, have been developed. In a separate line of work, researchers have started to realize that graphs provide a natural way to represent data in a variety of domains. Graph-based SSL algorithms, which bring together these two lines of work, have been shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in many applications in speech processing, computer vision, natural language processing, and other areas of Artificial Intelligence. Recognizing this promising and emerging area of research, this synthesis lecture focuses on graph-based SSL algorithms (e.g., label propagation methods). Our hope is that after reading this book, the reader will walk away with the following: (1) an in-depth knowledge of the current state-of-the-art in graph-based SSL algorithms, and the ability to implement them; (2) the ability to decide on the suitability of graph-based SSL methods for a problem; and (3) familiarity with different applications where graph-based SSL methods have been successfully applied. Table of Contents: Introduction / Graph Construction / Learning and Inference / Scalability / Applications / Future Work / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

Learning to solve sequential decision-making tasks is difficult. Humans take years exploring the environment essentially in a random way until they are able to reason, solve difficult tasks, and collaborate with other humans towards a common goal. Artificial Intelligent agents are like humans in this aspect. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a well-known technique to train autonomous agents through interactions with the environment. Unfortunately, the learning process has a high sample complexity to infer an effective actuation policy, especially when multiple agents are simultaneously actuating in the environment.However, previous knowledge can be leveraged to accelerate learning and enable solving harder tasks. In the same way humans build skills and reuse them by relating different tasks, RL agents might reuse knowledge from previously solved tasks and from the exchange of knowledge with other agents in the environment. In fact, virtually all of the most challenging tasks currently solved by RL rely on embedded knowledge reuse techniques, such as Imitation Learning, Learning from Demonstration, and Curriculum Learning.This book surveys the literature on knowledge reuse in multiagent RL. The authors define a unifying taxonomy of state-of-the-art solutions for reusing knowledge, providing a comprehensive discussion of recent progress in the area. In this book, readers will find a comprehensive discussion of the many ways in which knowledge can be reused in multiagent sequential decision-making tasks, as well as in which scenarios each of the approaches is more efficient. The authors also provide their view of the current low-hanging fruit developments of the area, as well as the still-open big questions that could result in breakthrough developments. Finally, the book provides resources to researchers who intend to join this area or leverage those techniques, including a list of conferences, journals, and implementation tools.This book will be useful for a wide audience; and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.

Solving challenging computational problems involving time has been a critical component in the development of artificial intelligence systems almost since the inception of the field. This book provides a concise introduction to the core computational elements of temporal reasoning for use in AI systems for planning and scheduling, as well as systems that extract temporal information from data. It presents a survey of temporal frameworks based on constraints, both qualitative and quantitative, as well as of major temporal consistency techniques. The book also introduces the reader to more recent extensions to the core model that allow AI systems to explicitly represent temporal preferences and temporal uncertainty. This book is intended for students and researchers interested in constraint-based temporal reasoning. It provides a self-contained guide to the different representations of time, as well as examples of recent applications of time in AI systems.

The key idea behind active learning is that a machine learning algorithm can perform better with less training if it is allowed to choose the data from which it learns. An active learner may pose "e;queries,"e; usually in the form of unlabeled data instances to be labeled by an "e;oracle"e; (e.g., a human annotator) that already understands the nature of the problem. This sort of approach is well-motivated in many modern machine learning and data mining applications, where unlabeled data may be abundant or easy to come by, but training labels are difficult, time-consuming, or expensive to obtain. This book is a general introduction to active learning. It outlines several scenarios in which queries might be formulated, and details many query selection algorithms which have been organized into four broad categories, or "e;query selection frameworks."e; We also touch on some of the theoretical foundations of active learning, and conclude with an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in practice, including a summary of ongoing work to address these open challenges and opportunities. Table of Contents: Automating Inquiry / Uncertainty Sampling / Searching Through the Hypothesis Space / Minimizing Expected Error and Variance / Exploiting Structure in Data / Theory / Practical Considerations

Artificial systems that think and behave intelligently are one of the most exciting and challenging goals of Artificial Intelligence. Action Programming is the art and science of devising high-level control strategies for autonomous systems which employ a mental model of their environment and which reason about their actions as a means to achieve their goals. Applications of this programming paradigm include autonomous software agents, mobile robots with high-level reasoning capabilities, and General Game Playing. These lecture notes give an in-depth introduction to the current state-of-the-art in action programming. The main topics are knowledge representation for actions, procedural action programming, planning, agent logic programs, and reactive, behavior-based agents. The only prerequisite for understanding the material in these lecture notes is some general programming experience and basic knowledge of classical first-order logic. Table of Contents: Introduction / Mathematical Preliminaries / Procedural Action Programs / Action Programs and Planning / Declarative Action Programs / Reactive Action Programs / Suggested Further Reading

Judgment aggregation is a mathematical theory of collective decision-making. It concerns the methods whereby individual opinions about logically interconnected issues of interest can, or cannot, be aggregated into one collective stance. Aggregation problems have traditionally been of interest for disciplines like economics and the political sciences, as well as philosophy, where judgment aggregation itself originates from, but have recently captured the attention of disciplines like computer science, artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Judgment aggregation has emerged in the last decade as a unifying paradigm for the formalization and understanding of aggregation problems. Still, no comprehensive presentation of the theory is available to date. This Synthesis Lecture aims at filling this gap presenting the key motivations, results, abstractions and techniques underpinning it. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Logic Meets Social Choice Theory / Basic Concepts / Impossibility / Coping with Impossibility / Manipulability / Aggregation Rules / Deliberation / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index

Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the Web to perform complex computation. There are various genres of human computation applications that exist today. Games with a purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) specifically target online gamers who generate useful data (e.g., image tags) while playing an enjoyable game. Crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) are human computation systems that coordinate workers to perform tasks in exchange for monetary rewards. In identity verification tasks, users perform computation in order to gain access to some online content; an example is reCAPTCHA, which leverages millions of users who solve CAPTCHAs every day to correct words in books that optical character recognition (OCR) programs fail to recognize with certainty. This book is aimed at achieving four goals: (1) defining human computation as a research area; (2) providing a comprehensive review of existing work; (3) drawing connections to a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, Machine Learning, HCI, Mechanism/Market Design and Psychology, and capturing their unique perspectives on the core research questions in human computation; and (4) suggesting promising research directions for the future. Table of Contents: Introduction / Human Computation Algorithms / Aggregating Outputs / Task Routing / Understanding Workers and Requesters / The Art of Asking Questions / The Future of Human Computation

The visual recognition problem is central to computer vision research. From robotics to information retrieval, many desired applications demand the ability to identify and localize categories, places, and objects. This tutorial overviews computer vision algorithms for visual object recognition and image classification. We introduce primary representations and learning approaches, with an emphasis on recent advances in the field. The target audience consists of researchers or students working in AI, robotics, or vision who would like to understand what methods and representations are available for these problems. This lecture summarizes what is and isn't possible to do reliably today, and overviews key concepts that could be employed in systems requiring visual categorization. Table of Contents: Introduction / Overview: Recognition of Specific Objects / Local Features: Detection and Description / Matching Local Features / Geometric Verification of Matched Features / Example Systems: Specific-Object Recognition / Overview: Recognition of Generic Object Categories / Representations for Object Categories / Generic Object Detection: Finding and Scoring Candidates / Learning Generic Object Category Models / Example Systems: Generic Object Recognition / Other Considerations and Current Challenges / Conclusions

Semi-supervised learning is a learning paradigm concerned with the study of how computers and natural systems such as humans learn in the presence of both labeled and unlabeled data. Traditionally, learning has been studied either in the unsupervised paradigm (e.g., clustering, outlier detection) where all the data are unlabeled, or in the supervised paradigm (e.g., classification, regression) where all the data are labeled. The goal of semi-supervised learning is to understand how combining labeled and unlabeled data may change the learning behavior, and design algorithms that take advantage of such a combination. Semi-supervised learning is of great interest in machine learning and data mining because it can use readily available unlabeled data to improve supervised learning tasks when the labeled data are scarce or expensive. Semi-supervised learning also shows potential as a quantitative tool to understand human category learning, where most of the input is self-evidently unlabeled. In this introductory book, we present some popular semi-supervised learning models, including self-training, mixture models, co-training and multiview learning, graph-based methods, and semi-supervised support vector machines. For each model, we discuss its basic mathematical formulation. The success of semi-supervised learning depends critically on some underlying assumptions. We emphasize the assumptions made by each model and give counterexamples when appropriate to demonstrate the limitations of the different models. In addition, we discuss semi-supervised learning for cognitive psychology. Finally, we give a computational learning theoretic perspective on semi-supervised learning, and we conclude the book with a brief discussion of open questions in the field. Table of Contents: Introduction to Statistical Machine Learning / Overview of Semi-Supervised Learning / Mixture Models and EM / Co-Training / Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Learning / Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines / Human Semi-Supervised Learning / Theory and Outlook

Urban mobility is not only one of the pillars of modern economic systems, but also a key issue in the quest for equality of opportunity, once it can improve access to other services. Currently, however, there are a number of negative issues related to traffic, especially in mega-cities, such as economical issues (cost of opportunity caused by delays), environmental (externalities related to emissions of pollutants), and social (traffic accidents). Solutions to these issues are more and more closely tied to information and communication technology. Indeed, a search in the technical literature (using the keyword ``urban traffic" to filter out articles on data network traffic) retrieved the following number of articles (as of December 3, 2013): 9,443 (ACM Digital Library), 26,054 (Scopus), and 1,730,000 (Google Scholar). Moreover, articles listed in the ACM query relate to conferences as diverse as MobiCom, CHI, PADS, and AAMAS. This means that there is a big and diverse community of computer scientists and computer engineers who tackle research that is connected to the development of intelligent traffic and transportation systems. It is also possible to see that this community is growing, and that research projects are getting more and more interdisciplinary. To foster the cooperation among the involved communities, this book aims at giving a broad introduction into the basic but relevant concepts related to transportation systems, targeting researchers and practitioners from computer science and information technology. In addition, the second part of the book gives a panorama of some of the most exciting and newest technologies, originating in computer science and computer engineering, that are now being employed in projects related to car-to-car communication, interconnected vehicles, car navigation, platooning, crowd sensing and sensor networks, among others. This material will also be of interest to engineers and researchers from the traffic and transportation community.

Cooperative game theory is a branch of (micro-)economics that studies the behavior of self-interested agents in strategic settings where binding agreements among agents are possible. Our aim in this book is to present a survey of work on the computational aspects of cooperative game theory. We begin by formally defining transferable utility games in characteristic function form, and introducing key solution concepts such as the core and the Shapley value. We then discuss two major issues that arise when considering such games from a computational perspective: identifying compact representations for games, and the closely related problem of efficiently computing solution concepts for games. We survey several formalisms for cooperative games that have been proposed in the literature, including, for example, cooperative games defined on networks, as well as general compact representation schemes such as MC-nets and skill games. As a detailed case study, we consider weighted voting games: a widely-used and practically important class of cooperative games that inherently have a natural compact representation. We investigate the complexity of solution concepts for such games, and generalizations of them. We briefly discuss games with non-transferable utility and partition function games. We then overview algorithms for identifying welfare-maximizing coalition structures and methods used by rational agents to form coalitions (even under uncertainty), including bargaining algorithms. We conclude by considering some developing topics, applications, and future research directions.

Planning is the model-based approach to autonomous behavior where the agent behavior is derived automatically from a model of the actions, sensors, and goals. The main challenges in planning are computational as all models, whether featuring uncertainty and feedback or not, are intractable in the worst case when represented in compact form. In this book, we look at a variety of models used in AI planning, and at the methods that have been developed for solving them. The goal is to provide a modern and coherent view of planning that is precise, concise, and mostly self-contained, without being shallow. For this, we make no attempt at covering the whole variety of planning approaches, ideas, and applications, and focus on the essentials. The target audience of the book are students and researchers interested in autonomous behavior and planning from an AI, engineering, or cognitive science perspective. Table of Contents: Preface / Planning and Autonomous Behavior / Classical Planning: Full Information and Deterministic Actions / Classical Planning: Variations and Extensions / Beyond Classical Planning: Transformations / Planning with Sensing: Logical Models / MDP Planning: Stochastic Actions and Full Feedback / POMDP Planning: Stochastic Actions and Partial Feedback / Discussion / Bibliography / Author's Biography

Case-based reasoning is a methodology with a long tradition in artificial intelligence that brings together reasoning and machine learning techniques to solve problems based on past experiences or cases. Given a problem to be solved, reasoning involves the use of methods to retrieve similar past cases in order to reuse their solution for the problem at hand. Once the problem has been solved, learning methods can be applied to improve the knowledge based on past experiences. In spite of being a broad methodology applied in industry and services, case-based reasoning has often been forgotten in both artificial intelligence and machine learning books. The aim of this book is to present a concise introduction to case-based reasoning providing the essential building blocks for the design of case-based reasoning systems, as well as to bring together the main research lines in this field to encourage students to solve current CBR challenges.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving approach, initially tailored to modeling problems in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). More recently, its attractive combination of a rich yet simple modeling language with high-performance solving capacities has sparked interest in many other areas even beyond KRR. This book presents a practical introduction to ASP, aiming at using ASP languages and systems for solving application problems. Starting from the essential formal foundations, it introduces ASP's solving technology, modeling language and methodology, while illustrating the overall solving process by practical examples. Table of Contents: List of Figures / List of Tables / Motivation / Introduction / Basic modeling / Grounding / Characterizations / Solving / Systems / Advanced modeling / Conclusions

Data integration is a critical problem in our increasingly interconnected but inevitably heterogeneous world. There are numerous data sources available in organizational databases and on public information systems like the World Wide Web. Not surprisingly, the sources often use different vocabularies and different data structures, being created, as they are, by different people, at different times, for different purposes. The goal of data integration is to provide programmatic and human users with integrated access to multiple, heterogeneous data sources, giving each user the illusion of a single, homogeneous database designed for his or her specific need. The good news is that, in many cases, the data integration process can be automated. This book is an introduction to the problem of data integration and a rigorous account of one of the leading approaches to solving this problem, viz., the relational logic approach. Relational logic provides a theoretical framework for discussing data integration. Moreover, in many important cases, it provides algorithms for solving the problem in a computationally practical way. In many respects, relational logic does for data integration what relational algebra did for database theory several decades ago. A companion web site provides interactive demonstrations of the algorithms. Table of Contents: Preface / Interactive Edition / Introduction / Basic Concepts / Query Folding / Query Planning / Master Schema Management / Appendix / References / Index / Author BiographyDon't have access? Recommend our Synthesis Digital Library to your library or purchase a personal subscription. Email info@morganclaypool.com for details.