Personal Universes: A Solution to the Multi-Agent Value Alignment Problem

AI Safety researchers attempting to align values of highly capable intelligent systems with those of humanity face a number of challenges including personal value extraction, multi-agent value merger and finally in-silico encoding. State-of-the-art research in value alignment shows difficulties in every stage in this process, but merger of incompatible preferences is a particularly difficult challenge to overcome. In this paper we assume that the value extraction problem will be solved and propose a possible way to implement an AI solution which optimally aligns with individual preferences of each user. We conclude by analyzing benefits and limitations of the proposed approach

Unmonitorability of Artificial Intelligence

Artificially Intelligent (AI) systems have ushered in a transformative era across various domains, yet their inherent traits of unpredictability, unexplainability, and uncontrollability have given rise to concerns surrounding AI safety. This paper aims to demonstrate the infeasibility of accurately monitoring advanced AI systems to predict the emergence of certain capabilities prior to their manifestation. Through an analysis of the intricacies of AI systems, the boundaries of human comprehension, and the elusive nature of emergent behaviors, we argue for the impossibility of reliably foreseeing some capabilities. By investigating these impossibility results, we shed light on their potential implications for AI safety research and propose potential strategies to overcome these limitations

A transfer learning approach for sentiment classification.

The idea of developing machine learning systems or Artificial Intelligence agents that would learn from different tasks and be able to accumulate that knowledge with time so that it functions successfully on a new task that it has not seen before is an idea and a research area that is still being explored. In this work, we will lay out an algorithm that allows a machine learning system or an AI agent to learn from k different domains then uses some or no data from the new task for the system to perform strongly on that new task. In order to test our algorithm, we chose an AI task that falls under the Natural Language Processing domain and that is sentiment analysis. The idea was to combine sentiment classifiers trained on different source domains to test them on a new domain. The algorithm was tested on two benchmark datasets. The results recorded were compared against the results reported on these two datasets in 2017 and 2018. In order to combine these classifiers’ predictions, we had to assign these classifiers weights. The algorithm made use of the similarity between domains when inferring the weights for the classifiers trained on the source domains by measuring the similarity between these source domains and the domain of the new task concluding, that domain similarity could be used in computing weights for classifiers trained on previous tasks/domains

at the 14th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA 2011)

Technical Report TR-2011/1, Department of Languages and Computation. University of Almeria November 2011. Joaquín Cañadas, Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Joachim Baumeister (Editors)The seventh workshop on Knowledge Engineering and Software Engineering (KESE7) was held at the Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA-2011) in La Laguna (Tenerife), Spain, and brought together researchers and practitioners from both fields of software engineering and artificial intelligence. The intention was to give ample space for exchanging latest research results as well as knowledge about practical experience.University of Almería, Almería, Spain. AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland. University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Study of gene regulatory networks inference methods from gene expression data

A cell is a the basic structural and functional unit of every living thing, it is protein-based an that regulates itself. The cell eats to stay alive, it grows and develops; reacting to the environment, while subjected to evolution. It also makes copies of itself. These processes are governed by chain of chemical reactions, creating a complex system. The scientific community has proposed to model the whole process with Gene Regulatory Networks (GRN). The understanding of these networks allows gaining a systems-level acknowledgment of biological organisms and also to genetically related diseases. This thesis focused on network inference from gene expression data, will contribute to this field of knowledge by studying different techniques that allows a better reconstruction of GRN. Gene expression datasets, are characterised by having thousands of noisy variables measured only with tens of samples. Moreover, these variables presents non-linear dependencies between them. Therefore, recovering a model that is capable of capturing the relationships contained in this data, constitutes a major challenge. The main contribution of this thesis is a set of fair and sound studies of different GRN inference methods and post-processing algorithms. First, we present a novel approach for inferring gene networks and we compare it with other methods. It is inspired by the concept of "variable importance" in feature selection. However, many algorithms can be proposed to infer GRNs, so there is a need to assess the quality of these algorithms. Secondly, and motivated by the fact that the previous comparison was not informative enough, we introduce a new framework for in silico performance assessment of GRN inference methods. This work has led to an open source R/Bioconductor package called NetBenchmark. Finally, and thanks to this tool we have corroborated that inferring gene regulatory networks from expression data is a tough problem. The different algorithms have some particular biases and strengths, and none of them is the best across all types of data and datasets. Therefore, we present a framework for evaluating and standardising network consensus methods to aggregate various network inferencesUna célula es es la unidad estructural y funcional básica de todo ser viviente capaz de autoregularse mediante proteínas. La célula come para mantenerse viva, crece y se desarrolla; Reaccionando al medio ambiente y está sometida a la evolución. También hace copias de sí misma. Estos procesos se rigen por una cadena de reacciones químicas, creando un sistema complejo. La comunidad científica ha propuesto modelar todo el proceso con las redes reguladoras de genes (GRN). La comprensión de estas redes permite entender los sistemas de los organismos biológicos y también las enfermedades genéticas. Esta tesis se centra en la inferencia de GRN a partir de datos de expresión génica, contribuye a este campo de conocimiento mediante el estudio de diferentes técnicas que permiten una mejor reconstrucción de GRN. Los conjuntos de datos de expresión génica se caracterizan por tener miles de variables ruidosas de las que sólo se disponen decenas de muestras. Además, estas variables presentan dependencias no lineales entre ellas. Por lo tanto, recuperar un modelo capaz de capturar las relaciones contenidas en estos datos, constituye un reto importante. La principal contribución de esta tesis es un conjunto de estudios de los diferentes métodos de inferencia de GRN y algoritmos de posprocesamiento. En primer lugar, presentamos un nuevo enfoque para inferir redes de genes y lo comparamos con otros métodos del estado del arte. Se inspira en el concepto de "importancia de variable" propio de la selección de características (feature selection). Sin embargo, muchos algoritmos pueden ser propuestos para inferir GRNs, por lo que hay una necesidad de evaluar la calidad de estos algoritmos. En segundo lugar, y motivado por el hecho de que la comparación anterior no era lo suficientemente informativa, introducimos un nuevo marco para la evaluación en bases de datos sintéticas de los métodos de inferencia GRN. Este trabajo ha llevado a un paquete de código abierto de R / Bioconductor llamado NetBenchmark. Finalmente, y gracias a esta herramienta hemos corroborado que inferir las redes reguladoras de genes a partir de los datos de expresión es un problema difícil. Los diferentes algoritmos tienen algunos sesgos y fortalezas particulares, y ninguno de ellos es el mejor en todos los tipos de datos y conjuntos de datos. Por lo tanto, presentamos un marco para evaluar y estandarizar los métodos de consenso de redes para agregar varias inferencias de red.Postprint (published version

Operational Research: Methods and Applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes

PLATFORM-DRIVEN CROWDSOURCED MANUFACTURING FOR MANUFACTURING AS A SERVICE

Platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing is an emerging manufacturing paradigm to instantiate the adoption of the open business model in the context of achieving Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS). It has attracted attention from both industries and academia as a powerful way of searching for manufacturing solutions extensively in a smart manufacturing era. In this regard, this work examines the origination and evolution of the open business model and highlights the trends towards platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing as a solution for MaaS. Platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing has a full function of value capturing, creation, and delivery approach, which is fulfilled by the cooperation among manufacturers, open innovators, and platforms. The platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing workflow is proposed to organize these three decision agents by specifying the domains and interactions, following a functional, behavioral, and structural mapping model. A MaaS reference model is proposed to outline the critical functions and inter-relationships. A series of quantitative, qualitative, and computational solutions are developed for fulfilling the outlined functions. The case studies demonstrate the proposed methodologies and can pace the way towards a service-oriented product fulfillment process. This dissertation initially proposes a manufacturing theory and decision models by integrating manufacturer crowds through a cyber platform. This dissertation reveals the elementary conceptual framework based on stakeholder analysis, including dichotomy analysis of industrial applicability, decision agent identification, workflow, and holistic framework of platform-driven crowdsourced manufacturing. Three stakeholders require three essential service fields, and their cooperation requires an information service system as a kernel. These essential functions include contracting evaluation services for open innovators, manufacturers' task execution services, and platforms' management services. This research tackles these research challenges to provide a technology implementation roadmap and transition guidebook for industries towards crowdsourcing.Ph.D

Recommending places blased on the wisdom-of-the-crowd

The collective opinion of a great number of users, popularly known as wisdom of the crowd, has been seen as powerful tool for solving problems. As suggested by Surowiecki in his books [134], large groups of people are now considered smarter than an elite few, regardless of how brilliant at solving problems or coming to wise decisions they are. This phenomenon together with the availability of a huge amount of data on the Web has propitiated the development of solutions which employ the wisdom-of-the-crowd to solve a variety of problems in different domains, such as recommender systems [128], social networks [100] and combinatorial problems [152, 151]. The vast majority of data on the Web has been generated in the last few years by billions of users around the globe using their mobile devices and web applications, mainly on social networks. This information carries astonishing details of daily activities ranging from urban mobility and tourism behavior, to emotions and interests. The largest social network nowadays is Facebook, which in December 2015 had incredible 1.31 billion mobile active users, 4.5 billion “likes” generated daily. In addition, every 60 seconds 510 comments are posted, 293, 000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded1. This flood of data has brought great opportunities to discover individual and collective preferences, and use this information to offer services to meet people’s needs, such as recommending relevant and interesting items (e.g. news, places, movies). Furthermore, it is now possible to exploit the experiences of groups of people as a collective behavior so as to augment the experience of other. This latter illustrates the important scenario where the discovery of collective behavioral patterns, the wisdom-of-the-crowd, may enrich the experience of individual users. In this light, this thesis has the objective of taking advantage of the wisdom of the crowd in order to better understand human mobility behavior so as to achieve the final purpose of supporting users (e.g. people) by providing intelligent and effective recommendations. We accomplish this objective by following three main lines of investigation as discussed below. In the first line of investigation we conduct a study of human mobility using the wisdom-of- the-crowd, culminating in the development of an analytical framework that offers a methodology to understand how the points of interest (PoIs) in a city are related to each other on the basis of the displacement of people. We experimented our methodology by using the PoI network topology to identify new classes of points of interest based on visiting patterns, spatial displacement from one PoI to another as well as popularity of the PoIs. Important relationships between PoIs are mined by discovering communities (groups) of PoIs that are closely related to each other based on user movements, where different analytical metrics are proposed to better understand such a perspective. The second line of investigation exploits the wisdom-of-the-crowd collected through user-generated content to recommend itineraries in tourist cities. To this end, we propose an unsupervised framework, called TripBuilder, that leverages large collections of Flickr photos, as the wisdom-of- the-crowd, and points of interest from Wikipedia in order to support tourists in planning their visits to the cities. We extensively experimented our framework using real data, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposal. Based on the theoretical framework, we designed and developed a platform encompassing the main features required to create personalized sightseeing tours. This platform has received significant interest within the research community, since it is recognized as crucial to understand the needs of tourists when they are planning a visit to a new city. Consequently this led to outstanding scientific results. In the third line of investigation, we exploit the wisdom-of-the-crowd to leverage recommendations of groups of people (e.g. friends) who can enjoy an item (e.g. restaurant) together. We propose GroupFinder to address the novel user-item group formation problem aimed at recommending the best group of friends for a pair. The proposal combines user-item relevance information with the user’s social network (ego network), while trying to balance the satisfaction of all the members of the group for the item with the intra-group relationships. Algorithmic solutions are proposed and experimented in the location-based recommendation domain by using four publicly available Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) datasets, showing that our solution is effective and outperforms strong baselines

An Approach Based on Particle Swarm Optimization for Inspection of Spacecraft Hulls by a Swarm of Miniaturized Robots

The remoteness and hazards that are inherent to the operating environments of space infrastructures promote their need for automated robotic inspection. In particular, micrometeoroid and orbital debris impact and structural fatigue are common sources of damage to spacecraft hulls. Vibration sensing has been used to detect structural damage in spacecraft hulls as well as in structural health monitoring practices in industry by deploying static sensors. In this paper, we propose using a swarm of miniaturized vibration-sensing mobile robots realizing a network of mobile sensors. We present a distributed inspection algorithm based on the bio-inspired particle swarm optimization and evolutionary algorithm niching techniques to deliver the task of enumeration and localization of an a priori unknown number of vibration sources on a simplified 2.5D spacecraft surface. Our algorithm is deployed on a swarm of simulated cm-scale wheeled robots. These are guided in their inspection task by sensing vibrations arising from failure points on the surface which are detected by on-board accelerometers. We study three performance metrics: (1) proximity of the localized sources to the ground truth locations, (2) time to localize each source, and (3) time to finish the inspection task given a 75% inspection coverage threshold. We find that our swarm is able to successfully localize the present so