Advancing Computational Models of Narrative

Report of a Workshop held at the Wylie Center, Beverly, MA, Oct 8-10 2009Sponsored by the AFOSR under MIT-MURI contract #FA9550-05-1-032

How much of commonsense and legal reasoning is formalizable? A review of conceptual obstacles

Fifty years of effort in artificial intelligence (AI) and the formalization of legal reasoning have produced both successes and failures. Considerable success in organizing and displaying evidence and its interrelationships has been accompanied by failure to achieve the original ambition of AI as applied to law: fully automated legal decision-making. The obstacles to formalizing legal reasoning have proved to be the same ones that make the formalization of commonsense reasoning so difficult, and are most evident where legal reasoning has to meld with the vast web of ordinary human knowledge of the world. Underlying many of the problems is the mismatch between the discreteness of symbol manipulation and the continuous nature of imprecise natural language, of degrees of similarity and analogy, and of probabilities

Naval Integration into Joint Data Strategies and Architectures in JADC2

NPS NRP Technical ReportAs Joint capabilities mature and shape into the Joint All Domain C2 Concept, Services, COCOMs and Coalition Partners will need to invest into efforts that would seamlessly integrate into Joint capabilities. The objective for the Navy is to study the options for Navy, including Naval Special Warfare Command under SOCOM, on how to integrate Navy's data strategy and architecture under the unifying JADC2 umbrella. The other objectives are to explore alternatives considered by the SOCOM and the Air Force, which are responsible for JADC2 Information Advantage and Digital Mission Command & Control. A major purpose of Joint, Services/COCOMs, agencies and Coalition Partners capabilities is to provide shared core of integrated canonical services for data, information, and knowledge with representations for vertical interoperability across all command levels and JADC2, lateral interoperability between Naval Service/COCOMs, and any combination of JADC2 constituents, agencies, and coalition partners. Our research plan is to explore available data strategy options by leveraging previous NRP work (NPS-20-N313-A). We will participate in emerging data strategy by Navy JADC2 project Overmatch. By working with MITRE our team will explore Air Force JADC2 data strategy implemented in ABMS DataOne component. Our goal is to find a seamless integration between Naval Data Strategy and data strategies behind JADC2 Information Advantage and Digital Mission Command & Control capabilities. Our plan includes studying Service-to-Service and Service-to-COCOM interoperability options required for Joint operations with a goal to minimize OODA's loop latency across sensing, situation discovery & monitoring, and knowledge understanding-for-planning, deciding, and acting. Our team realizes JADC2 requires virtual model allowing interoperability between subordinate C2 for services, agencies, and partner. Without such flexible 'joint' intersection organizational principal hierarchical structure it would be impossible to define necessary temporal and spatial fidelities for each level of organizational command required for implanting JADC2. Research deliverables will document the results of the exploration of Joint, COCOM, Agency and Partner Data Strategies approaches as JADC2 interoperability options to the emerging JADC2. We strive for standard JADC2 interface. Keywords: JADC2, ABMS, DataOne, Information Advantage, Digital Mission Command, IntegrationN2/N6 - Information WarfareThis research is supported by funding from the Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Program (PE 0605853N/2098). https://nps.edu/nrpChief of Naval Operations (CNO)Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

Embracing Background Knowledge in the Analysis of Actual Causality: An Answer Set Programming Approach

This paper presents a rich knowledge representation language aimed at formalizing causal knowledge. This language is used for accurately and directly formalizing common benchmark examples from the literature of actual causality. A definition of cause is presented and used to analyze the actual causes of changes with respect to sequences of actions representing those examples.Comment: Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin