AAAI-05 Blog

Still more AAAI-05 photos

2005-07-18T05:35:00.000-04:00

Barney Pell has 70 pictures from AAAI-05 on his Flickr site.

The future is bright

2005-07-18T01:09:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post to say thanks to everyone who helped make this conference an especially fascinating and enjoyable experience for me. I feel I have a broader outlook on the academic community in general, as well as a great deal of excitement about the future of both human and artificial

More pictures from AAAI

2005-07-17T09:48:00.000-04:00

There are several nice sets of photos from AAAI-05 on Flickr: Lorda has a set of 22 AAAI-05 photos. Phauly has a set of 166 AAAI-05 photos. If you have photos you want to share, please submit them to our blog using the link on our page or send us a pointer to them.

Churches and Cathedrals

2005-07-16T13:05:00.000-04:00

What a week! After the Demo on Tuesday my whole team was pretty tapped. We went to the Church Brew Works to recover... What better way than enjoying a beer at church : ) After the couple talks on Wednesday we met up with professor Yang Cai at his lab at CMU. One of his students showed us around the

Comparing with last year's AAAI

2005-07-16T09:01:00.000-04:00

I attended last year's AAAI conference (San Jose) as well, so let me try to compare the two. I saw some great research at both, although I think what I saw last year was slightly better overall (although that may just have been due to the sample that I got). Nevertheless, I felt that this conference was much more lively than the previous one. While the Westin at some points gave us perhaps a

AAAI robot movies

2005-07-14T17:30:00.000-04:00

For those of you who were not present at the conference and thus did not get to see some of the cool robots in action, here is your chance: robot1 & robot2 [Note: You may have to tilt your head slightly (where slightly = by 90 deg) to watch the second video]

Highlight: Doctoral Consortium + Poster session

2005-07-14T11:29:00.000-04:00

I agree with Mykel, the doctoral consortium was also one of the highlights for me this year at AAAI! It provided a great forum of top researchers and current Ph.D. students to present, discuss and exchange research ideas! I was an unique opportunity, were the students were able to get feedback in a

Doctoral Consortium

2005-07-14T07:04:00.000-04:00

The highlight of AAAI this year was the Doctoral Consortium. I had a great time meeting other Ph.D. students and learning about their work. I gave my presentation on the first day, and I got some valuable feedback. Suggestions from Michael Littman, Marie desJardins, and Kiri Wagstaff were particularly helpful. During the Doctoral Consortium dinner, I was talking with Michael Littman how getting

Final thoughts

2005-07-14T03:13:00.000-04:00

The photos will have to wait for tomorrow when my camera's charged, but I just wanted to thank the organizers of the conference for putting this all together. Despite the criticism in that post the other day, it's still been a tremendously exciting and positive experience overall. The invited talks

Running a Demo Two: The Segway Reloaded

2005-07-13T14:47:00.000-04:00

After technical difficulties eliminated the possibility of a true demonstration on Sunday night, the Segway team and I ventured forth on Tuesday night, fiercely determined to show the world the kicking abilities of our 'bot. We were spared the transportation difficulties by having the foresight to keep our Segways at the hotel. Brett, Brenna and Yang worked quickly and efficiently, supplying the

Jim Hendler: knowledge is power

2005-07-13T10:10:00.000-04:00

Jim Hendler’s presentation on the semantic web is fully attended as the “Web 2.0” talk given by Tanenbaum. He used lots of demos, e.g. RDF in PDF, swoop, and swoogle, to justify the practical aspect of the semantic web -- “You are here”. The simple semantic web is less expressive than any existing KR languages; however it does have significant amount of knowledge (million of documents and

Tucker Balch's invited talk

2005-07-13T09:41:00.000-04:00

I thought Tucker Balch's invited talk yesterday was one of the high points of the conference. It was a great example of how to convince a large group of people that your research is important and interesting while remaining accessable to a larger audience. Most of Tucker's earlier work, or at

Participating in an experiment

2005-07-13T08:54:00.000-04:00

The "hall of robots" is a fun aspect of the conference. Whether or not they do interesting things or represent scientific advancement is beside the point, The point is that the hall is filled with beeping, twitching pieces of machinery covered with blinking lights, raising the chaos and geek-joy levels all around. Back in one corner, however, there was something special going on, however: a

Jeff Hawkins' Talk on a Biologically-Inspired Intelligent Architecture

2005-07-13T08:36:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I was particularly impressed by Jeff Hawkins’ dynamic talk on building an intelligent architecture based on the current theory of the neocortex. For those who missed the talk, he proposed a hierarchical temporal memory system with a Bayesian construction that is motivated by the current

Cold dinner

2005-07-13T01:42:00.000-04:00

Tonight was incredible. I had a great time presenting at the Intelligent Systems Demonstrations (my first time), and we got some great suggestions from everyone. We started nearly an hour early, were busy the entire time, and went long past the scheduled end. When it was my turn to duck away from

Google's conference break game

2005-07-12T16:18:00.000-04:00

Google had played an interesting game for collecting people during conference break: they handed out numbered tags to people around without tell them what will happen then. Very soon, several tens of people stopped and clustered in front of Google's table. About 50 people had got tags, including me. Finally, there are around 100 people squeezed in a small area waiting for the final result, which

Not the talk I expected

2005-07-12T16:06:00.000-04:00

If I had to pick just one talk to attend today, I would go to "Networked Distributed POMDPs" by R. Patrascu, C. Boutilier, R. Das, J. Kephart, G. Tesauro, and W. Walsh. After all, I work on distributed POMDPs, and Craig Boutilier is an awfully smart guy. I was really looking forward to this talk. So

General conference thoughts

2005-07-12T12:09:00.000-04:00

Some conference attendees have expressed an interest in an open thread for commenting on conference infrastructure and making suggestions for future improvements. Have at it!

Minsky on philosophy of consciousness

2005-07-12T08:33:00.000-04:00

Although I enjoyed many parts of Minsky's talk, and wasn't all that bothered by the technical problems, I have to agree with Shimon that Minsky was perhaps a little too dismissive of philosophers of consciousness/mind. He is certainly right that the word "consciousness" has come to have too many meanings. But I believe that there *is* something mysterious about the problem of "qualia," or what "

A Little Story

2005-07-12T01:02:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I blogged that the Sherbrooke robot Spartacus needed to use the elevators in the hotel to move between floors, as part of the Robot Challenge. While I haven't heard how that part of the Challenge went, I had a rather didactic experience myself with the elevator today that lead me into

Ether Dancing

2005-07-12T00:11:00.000-04:00

Today I heard the best response yet to Dr Veloso's charge that softbots aren't real agents: "Well, look at all these robots, don't they belong in an autoshow?" I saw several good talks today, however one that I enjoyed slightly more was Deepak Ramachandran's presentation of "Compact

Minksy disappoints

2005-07-11T21:04:00.000-04:00

I made a point of getting up early enough today to catch Marvin Minsky's keynote address. I was more than a little disappointed. He spent the first ten minutes playing with the formatting on his computer. For some reason, he prepared his talk using Microsoft Word and seemed unfamiliar with the

So, What's AI Research, Anyways?

2005-07-11T19:25:00.001-04:00

Hi everyone, I am Priyang Rathod. I am a PhD student at UMBC, working with Marie desJardins. I have been meaning to blog since the day of my arrival here, but could not, because I am staying at the student housing at Duquesne University :(. On the opening day of ASAMAS, Gal Kaminka of Bar Ilan University gave an Introduction to Agents and Multiagent Systems. At the beginning of his speech, he

Ruffled feathers

2005-07-11T18:57:00.000-04:00

I'm a bit surprised no one's posted anything about Minsky's keynote this morning, or his new book that he talked about. I expect more than a few people's feathers were a little ruffled by it, but I'm curious to hear what others thought.

Internet at Duquesne University

2005-07-11T15:51:00.000-04:00

I finally got a hold of the computer center at the university and got the story on internet access for anyone interested. The gentleman told me that he was receiving a lot of calls on this subject. The conference organizers never requested internet access for us, so they won't allow us to connect

[summary] sister conference highlights (monday morning)

2005-07-11T14:38:00.000-04:00

The sister conference session is a convenient path to access relevant and interesting researches in the conferences you have missed in the past. I'm a little bit surprised that this session is not well attended. KDD 04: Tutorials reflects current interests in Data Mining: date steam, time series, data quality and data cleaning, junk mail filtering, and graph analysis. This conference has an

Intelligent UIs

2005-07-11T10:20:00.000-04:00

During the second tutorial session yesterday, I attended the one on Intelligent User Interfaces by Mark Maybury. Let me just say, that was a tutorial done right. Of the four tutorials I attended, this was the best. He gave an excellent overview of the field, provided demonstrations of key

Murphy's Law of Demoes

2005-07-11T09:52:00.000-04:00

My name is Reid Van Lehn (I'm the guy showing Minsky how to ride a Segway in the picture below) and I am currently a summer intern working on the CM-Balance (i.e. Segway soccer) project at the CMU Robotics Institute. This fall, I will begin my freshman year at MIT, though I am currently undecided

Experiment

2005-07-11T00:26:00.000-04:00

As already noted in the entries and comments below, this morning Paul Cohen gave a rock solid statistics overview/review for data and experiment analysis. One of the things it started me thinking about is the claim you see every now and then along the lines of "Experimental science is dead!"

My experience at the Doctoral Consortium

2005-07-10T23:54:00.000-04:00

Although I will come up with a more detailed summary about my experience at DC05, here is a short version as a blog post: 1. The way the DC went through was much nicer and way more comfortable than I expected before I came here! To be frank, I had some worries on the top of my head, like "what if the panelist tries to crush me?", "What if I didn't convey the ideas clearly", "what if my work is

Agents Don't Need to be "Super Intelligent" to be Helpful

2005-07-10T23:35:00.000-04:00

I had another great day attending tutorial sessions. The morning was Paul Cohen's excellent "Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence", which I believe should be required material for nearly anyone in AI - as he describes, there are big benefits (in terms of the advancement of the field) when

I have networked, and it was good.

2005-07-10T21:26:00.000-04:00

The opening reception is finally trailing off, after we were all shooed out of the ballroom (the hotel staff were rather pointed about the fact that it was time to go), and I've just met a whole bunch of neat people. One of the reasons I wanted to come to AAAI is to get a feel for the community of researchers who identify as AI people, and try to figure out how we relate to one another. A big

Moving Minsky

2005-07-10T20:28:00.000-04:00

wow... Michael, Geoff and I were just playing around with the Segway at the opening reception, when Marvin Minsky hopped on! Check out the pic I got : )

Using wifi at AAAI (with GNU/Linux)

2005-07-10T11:51:00.000-04:00

Crossposted from my Blog: I thought I might share this information with you. If you are at AAAI05, you know there is free wifi connection. If you use GNU/Linux, the instructions ("just open the browser and everything will be fine") don't work. Instead you have to do something like that: 1. iwconfig

Stats review

2005-07-10T10:46:00.000-04:00

While I'm waiting for the coffee break to end, and my tea to cool to a drinkable temperature, I may as well post a brief update. So far, the empirical methods tutorial has been review for me, but since it's been a few years, and I need to doing this myself later this summer, I suppose a refresher

Plastic mattress

2005-07-10T09:49:00.000-04:00

I'm staying at the student housing at Duquesne University and sleeping on a plastic mattress. It's been a long time since I lived in a dorm and I guess I had forgotten how much they resemble white-collar prisons. At least the sheets are clean. My main complaint is that the internet access we

Systems

2005-07-10T00:53:00.000-04:00

Glutton for free stuff that I am, this morning I picked up one of the issues of IEEE Intelligent Systems laying around by registration. The only piece I've found time to read so far is the letter from the editor, James Hendler. It talked a lot about what a "system" is, why we should build them,

A good start

2005-07-10T00:31:00.000-04:00

After reading Eric's complaints about the student housing, I'm especially glad I chose to share a room at the Westin instead; the facilities here are great, and aside from some difficulties with the wireless access earlier today, I've no complaints. Even better, since we're splitting a room, the

AAAI Doctor consortium summary (day one)

2005-07-09T22:41:00.000-04:00

Kiri, the chair, gave a welcome speech and 8 PhD students presented their theses work focusing on a leaning and planning. (thanks Mykel for helping me revising this post) Jennifer Neville (UMass) -- Structure Learning for Statistical Relational Models Motivation: latent groups could be detected from graph structure as well as node attributes. Subjects: graph analysis, clustering Issues

Flat Beer

2005-07-09T22:06:00.000-04:00

Wow, what a long day! We arrived last night from Vancouver after a day of travel. Today I attended two 4-hour tutorials, Word Sense Disambiguation and Pyro; both were very enjoyable, but long. I am especially interested in the first subject as I am currently working on a project to assign

The Web as a Collective Mind

2005-07-09T21:36:00.000-04:00

After experiencing the veritable wonder of the Westin's "heavenly" showers, I headed up to the 3rd floor registration, where the friendly staff quickly decked me out with assorted conference memorabilia. This is fun, I thought! Then I trooped over to Westmoreland East for Rada Mihalcea and Ted

Student Housing, Feature Selection, and the Robotics Toolkit Pyro

2005-07-09T21:26:00.000-04:00

Hello, everyone! First a short introduction and then on to discussing day 1 of the conference. I'm a second year Ph.D. student at UMBC, currently working with Marie desJardins and Tim Oates. My research interests center on life-long learning, but I'm also working on a number of clustering projects.

Howdy Bloggers

2005-07-09T17:32:00.000-04:00

I'm Mark Carman. I come from Adelaide, Australia. I'm doing a Ph.D. in Trento, Italy. And I'm currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Confusing hey. I'm in the doctoral consortium at AAAI and haven't introduced myself till now, because I just got back from a honeymoon in the south

Yet another introduction

2005-07-09T01:15:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone, I'm Bhaskara Marthi, a Phd student from UC Berkeley working on reinforcement learning. I will be attending the doctoral consortium this weekend, and have just been doing some last-minute preparation for my talk there, but I thought I'd post a quick hello before getting to sleep. Some of the other posts on the agent school seem interesting and I look forward to reading them in more

Energy

2005-07-08T23:59:00.000-04:00

I think everyone would agree that today at the agent school was much less controversial than yesterday, although no less energized. Several speakers were seen to be visibly sweating from jumping around and getting worked up with excitement about their topics, most notably Michael Littman (learning & planning in Markov environments) and Sven Koenig (auction-based agent coordination). It's clear

Model Airplanes

2005-07-08T00:15:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about this all day. If the morning session of this first day of the Agent School had a byword, it'd be "situated." A close contender would be "embodied." It started with Jay Modi presenting one view of agents as being "situated AI," intelligence in a context. The thing that happens

The men on the poster, robot soccer and a grand challenge...

2005-07-07T20:55:00.000-04:00

Manuela Veloso opened her ASAMS talk today by asking how many of us knew whom the men playing chess on the conference poster were. The audience seemed mostly blank on this point, though I imagine the sizable contingent of CMU students did know the answer, but were keeping quiet. The men of course

Another Hello (this time from Paolo)

2005-07-07T18:01:00.000-04:00

I'm Paolo Massa, a PhD student at University of Trento, Italy. I'm coming to AAAI to present a paper "Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community" (pdf) and to share ideas. I'm really looking forward for this conference, if you happen to be interested in trust, reputation, recommender systems, social software, don't hesitate to contact me!

AAAI-05 Word Search Puzzle

2005-07-07T13:47:00.000-04:00

Jim Mayfield has created a special edition word search puzzle to commemorate AAAI-05. The AAAI-05 Word Search Puzzle was generated by a fairly sophisticated program that uses heuristic search and a language model to make the puzzle both compact and challenging. A limited premium edition printed on parchment paper stock with a gold foil border is available for an additional charge.

So, what’s an agent, anyways?

2005-07-07T12:10:00.000-04:00

I spent the morning thinking about this question. The second speaker at ASAMAS, Gal Kaminka of Bar Ilan University, started his talk with the claim that robots are agents. I immediately objected. “Well,” I thought, “it’s certainly true that some robots are agents. But just like you wouldn’t

Hello [AAAI] World! (from Li Ding)

2005-07-07T11:04:00.000-04:00

I am Li DING, a 4th year PhD student advised by Tim Finin from the eBiquity group at UMBC . I am originally from Beijing, China. My research focus is on representing and sharing knowledge using semantic web technologies. I maintain the Swoogle search engine for semantic web data. I have a FOAF file with a list of my friends, and AAAI 05 is surely a great place for augmenting this list. See you

A Spotlight Descending on Pittsburgh

2005-07-07T08:35:00.000-04:00

So said the radio on my alarm clock as it was waking me up this morning. I don’t really know what that means, and I don’t think spotlights descend, per se, but in my grogginess, I did wonder if they were talking about AAAI. Of course, then I hit the snooze button so I never found out. Can I

Hello from Liz

2005-07-06T22:14:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone, my name is Liz Crawford and I just finished my 2nd year in the PhD program at CMU. My advisor is Manuela Veloso and I work on multiagent stuff. I am going to try and blog about the Agent School which is starting tomorrow. There is a very interesting line-up of talks and I am hoping to

Greetings from Tom

2005-07-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Hello everyone, I am Tom Armstrong. Come September I will be entering my fourth year in the Ph.D. program at UMBC working with Tim Oates. My research interests have primarily been in child language acquisition and grammar induction. This will be my second time at AAAI (last Summer I lived in

I should really get some sleep now

2005-07-06T05:48:00.000-04:00

But instead I'll take a minute to introduce myself. I'm Michael Schwartz, a Computing Science student at Simon Fraser University. As Caroline and Geoff already mentioned, and as I will now shamelessly plug again, we will be demonstrating our Song Search and Retrieval by Tapping project at the

Hello from Caroline

2005-07-05T13:17:00.000-04:00

Hi. I'm a Cognitive Science student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I'm currently working with Maite Taboada on an NLP project to analyze text sentiment. I also work with Geoff Peters and Michael Schwartz on Song Search and Retrieval by Tapping which we will present

Hello from Jake

2005-07-05T12:27:00.000-04:00

My name is Jake Beal, and I'm a 5th year grad student at MIT. Despite being mostly an AI researcher, this is my first time at AAAI, and like many of the other blogger, I'm coming to the Doctoral Consortium. My thesis supervisor is Gerry Sussman, and the AI half of my work is looking at how learning and reasoning can take place as a byproduct of translating between different perspectives. The

Hello All!

2005-07-03T22:38:00.000-04:00

Hello Everybody! My name is Wolfgang (Wolf) Ketter and I am originally from Germany where I received an MS in Electrical Engineering. Afterwards I went to the University of St. Thomas where I was an adjunct faculty member in the CS undergrad department and I received an MS in Software Engineering. In 2001 I started my Ph.D. in CS with the concentration in AI. Specifically I am interested in

Hello from Ani

2005-07-03T13:24:00.000-04:00

Hi! My name is Ani Nenkova and I am a graduate student at the natural language processing group at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, I studied AI and logic at Sofia University, Bulgaria. I am very excited to be attending AAAI, especially because in the past couple of years I have been attending mostly specialized NLP conferences and lost touch with people in other AI areas. I am now

Hello from Geoff

2005-07-03T02:48:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone! I'm an undergrad student from Simon Fraser University in computing science and business. I'm really looking forward to participating in this conference, both as a student volunteer blogger, and a presenter at the Intelligent Systems Demonstrations that are happening on Tuesday evening

Hello from Ellen

2005-07-02T00:53:00.000-04:00

Hi! I'm also participating in the AAAI Doctoral Consortium. I'm a 5th-year (or is it 6th already?) Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester. I'm actually a student of 2 departments: Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science. I'm interested in human factors and spoken dialogue systems, specifically in developing better empirical user tests that can help us make informed design

Hello from Xin Li

2005-07-01T19:09:00.000-04:00

Hello, everyone! My name is Xin Li. I am Ph.D student (going to the fifth year) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, working in the area of Evolutionary Computation (EC). My thesis advisor is professor Peter Nelson from the group of Artificial Intelligence. I also got one more industrial co-advisor, Chi Zhou, from the Physical Realization Research Center of Motorola labs. EC is still a

About myself

2005-07-01T16:35:00.000-04:00

My name is Mykel Kochenderfer and I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh participating in the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium. I do my research at the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour under the supervision of Gillian Hayes in the general area of model-based reinforcement learning. I grew up in Tracy, California and went to Stanford University for my B.S. and M.S. degrees

Hello

2005-07-01T13:52:00.000-04:00

Hello, my name is Shimon Whiteson. I'm a 5th year PhD student and doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. I'm working with Peter Stone and my research is about reinforcement learning. In particular, I'm interested in removing barriers to its practical application by improving

blog hard to use

2005-06-30T11:27:00.000-04:00

Btw. I find this site pretty difficult to use, with pages in all types of different formats and no clear links back to where you started from... Maybe that's why nobody else has posted anything yet? Or am I not looking in the right spot?

Introducing myself

2005-06-30T11:18:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone, My name is Vincent Conitzer, I'm a Ph.D. student at CMU (just finished my 4th year) working with Tuomas Sandholm, so I actually live in Pittsburgh. Nevertheless I'll still get a trip out of it as I'm at IBM Research (Yorktown Heights) for the summer. AAAI will be very busy for me with the Doctoral Consortium and various papers to present (and my girlfriend will probably want to

About AAAI05blog

2005-06-11T17:20:00.000-04:00

AAAI05blog is a student group blog about the the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) and the 17th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-05) held 9-13 July 2005 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.The idea is to have a small group of students attending the conference post daily blog items to AAAI05Blog describing their observations, experiencing,