Flexibly Instructable Agents

This paper presents an approach to learning from situated, interactive tutorial instruction within an ongoing agent. Tutorial instruction is a flexible (and thus powerful) paradigm for teaching tasks because it allows an instructor to communicate whatever types of knowledge an agent might need in whatever situations might arise. To support this flexibility, however, the agent must be able to learn multiple kinds of knowledge from a broad range of instructional interactions. Our approach, called situated explanation, achieves such learning through a combination of analytic and inductive techniques. It combines a form of explanation-based learning that is situated for each instruction with a full suite of contextually guided responses to incomplete explanations. The approach is implemented in an agent called Instructo-Soar that learns hierarchies of new tasks and other domain knowledge from interactive natural language instructions. Instructo-Soar meets three key requirements of flexible instructability that distinguish it from previous systems: (1) it can take known or unknown commands at any instruction point; (2) it can handle instructions that apply to either its current situation or to a hypothetical situation specified in language (as in, for instance, conditional instructions); and (3) it can learn, from instructions, each class of knowledge it uses to perform tasks.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Agents: a distributed client/server system for leaf cell generation

The Agents system generates the mask level layout of full custom CMOS, BICMOS, bipolar and mixed digital/analogue leaf cells. Leaf cells are subcircuits of a complexity comparable with SSI (Small Scale Integration) components such as small adders, counters or multiplexers. The system is formed by four server programs: the Placer, Router, Database and Broker. The Placer places components in a cell, the Router wires the circuits sent to it, the Database keeps all the information that is dependent upon the fabrication process, such as the design rules, and the Broker makes the services of the other servers available. These servers communicate over a computer network using the TCP/IP Internet Proto­col. The Placer server receives from its client the description and netlist of the circuit to be generated using EDIF (Electronic Design Interchange Format). The output to its client is the layout of the circuit (no virtual grid is used), again codified in EDIF. The concept of agents as software components which have the ability to communicate and cooperate with each other is at the heart of the Agents system. This concept is not only used at the higher level, for the four servers Placer, Router, Broker and Database, but as well at a lower level, inside the Router and Placer servers, where small rela­tively simple agents work together to accomplish complex tasks. These small agents are responsible for all the reasoning carried out by the two servers as they hold the basic inference routines and the knowledge needed by the servers. The key concept is that competence emerges out of the collective behaviour of a large number of rela­tively simple agents. In addition and integrated with these small agents, the system uses a genetic algorithm to improve components’ placement before routing

Künstliche Intelligenz und Gesundheit

Der Einsatz von künstlicher Intelligenz im Gesundheitsbereich verspricht besonders großen Nutzen durch eine bessere Versorgung sowie effizientere Abläufe und bietet damit letztlich auch ökonomische Vorteile. Dem stehen unter anderem Befürchtungen entgegen, dass sich durch den Einsatz von künstlicher Intelligenz das Arzt-Patienten-Verhältnis verändern könnte, Arbeitsplätze gefährdet seien oder die Ökonomisierung des Gesundheitswesens einen weiteren Schub erfahren könnte. Zuweilen wird die Debatte um diese Technologie, zumal in der Öffentlichkeit, emotional und fern sachlicher Argumente geführt. Die Autorinnen und Autoren untersuchen die Geschichte des KI-Einsatzes in der Medizin, deren öffentliche Wahrnehmung, Governance der KI, die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Technik sowie Einsatzgebiete, die bisher noch nicht oder nur wenig im Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit waren. Dabei erweist sich die KI als leistungsfähiges Werkzeug, das zahlreiche ethische und soziale Fragen aufwirft, die bei der Einführung anderer Technologien bereits gestellt wurden; allerdings gibt es auch neue Herausforderungen, denen sich Professionen, Politik und Gesellschaft stellen müssen

Assessment of applications for the house renovations grants system : an IT support framework

This thesis describes the development of a knowledge-based framework for supportinghuman experts from the Department of Environmental and Consumer Services of theSalford City Council in assessing applications for the current house renovation grant system(HRGS).The resulting system implements an architecture which integrates case-based reasoningprocesses with other problem solving methods. In addition, the system's architectureintegrates different types of knowledge which are required by the problem solving methods.Some of the main features of the system's architecture are its modularity and itsindependence from the implementation shell. The system was implemented using Kappa-PC which is a shell designed for implementing knowledge-based systems.The implementation followed the Client Centred Approach method. A number of lessonswere learned from the implementation process. The implementation was carried outtogether with the verification and validation of the system. The verification and validationmethods employed allowed the author to focus the evaluation on different features andcomponents of the system. A number of test cases were employed during the validation.Client's experts and other independent experts were involved in the validation of thesystem. Each validation step was followed by refinement of the main system's components.This research has demonstrated that various problem solving methods are required forperforming the different tasks of the assessment of applications for the HRGS. Theimplemented system has been reasonably successful in demonstrating that a singleframework which integrates various methods can be used for supporting human experts inassessing applications for the FIRGS. Therefore, the system has proved to perform asaccurately as human experts do for all of the tasks. The system has been described as verypromising by the Client's experts