CAPTCHA has been widely deployed by commercial web sites as a security technology for purposes such as anti-spam. A common approach to evaluating the robustness of CAPTCHA is the use of machine learning techniques. Critical to this approach is the ...

In this paper, we present a method that uses web photos for measuring frame interestingness of a travel video. Web photo collections, such as those on Flickr, tend to contain interesting images because their images are more carefully taken, composed, ...

We present a novel reasoning procedure for Horn SHIQ ontologies--SHIQ ontologies that can be translated to the Horn fragment of first-order logic. In contrast to traditional reasoning procedures for ontologies, our procedure does not build models or ...

Effective communication in open environments relies on the ability of agents to reach a mutual understanding of the exchanged message by reconciling the vocabulary (ontology) used. Various approaches have considered how mutually acceptable mappings ...

We investigate the problem of eliciting CP-nets in the well-known model of exact learning with equivalence and membership queries. The goal is to identify a preference ordering with a binary-valued CP-net by guiding the user through a sequence of ...

CP-networks have been proposed as a simple and intuitive graphical tool for representing conditional ceteris paribus preference statements over the values of a set of variables. While the problem of reasoning with CP-networks has been receiving some ...

The ultimate goal of human-robot interaction is to enable the robot to seamlessly communicate with a human in a natural human-like fashion. Most work in this field concentrates on the speech interpretation and gesture recognition side assuming that a ...

Many robotic path planning applications, such as search and rescue, involve uncertain environments with complex dynamics that can be only partially observed. When selecting the best subset of observation locations subject to constrained resources (such ...

Road network information simplifies autonomous driving by providing strong priors about environments. It informs a robotic vehicle with where it can drive, models of what can be expected, and contextual cues that influence driving behaviors. Currently, ...

We present a human-robot dialogue system that enables a robot to work together with a human user to build wooden construction toys. We then describe a study which assessed the responses of naïve users to output that varied along two dimensions: the ...

To apply hierarchical task network (HTN) planning to real-world planning problems, one needs to encode the HTN schemata and action models beforehand. However, acquiring such domain knowledge is difficult and time-consuming because the HTN domain ...

In this paper we address the problem of generating preferred plans by combining the procedural control knowledge specified by Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) with rich user preferences. To this end, we extend the popular Planning Domain Definition ...

In this work we aim to narrow the gap between plan recognition and planning by exploiting the power and generality of recent planning algorithms for recognizing the set G* of goals G that explain a sequence of observations given a domain theory. After ...

In many real-world planning scenarios, the users are interested in optimizing multiple objectives (such as makespan and execution cost), but are unable to express their exact tradeoff between those objectives. When a planner encounters such partial ...

This paper considers the execution of a Multi-Agent Plan in a partially observable environment, and faces the problem of recovering from action failures.

The paper formalizes a local plan repair strategy, where each agent in the system is responsible ...

Heuristic search using heuristics extracted from the delete relaxation is one of the most effective methods in planning. Since finding the optimal solution of the delete relaxation is intractable, various heuristics introduce independence assumptions, ...

Planning landmarks are facts that must be true at some point in every solution plan. Previous work has very successfully exploited planning landmarks in satisficing (non-optimal) planning. We propose a methodology for deriving admissible heuristic ...

In many real world planning domains, some observation information is optional and useless to the execution of a plan; on the other hand, information acquisition may require some kind of cost. The problem of observation reduction for strong plans has ...

Detecting abnormal activities from sensor readings is an important research problem in activity recognition. A number of different algorithms have been proposed in the past to tackle this problem. Many of the previous state-based approaches suffer from ...

This paper describes how to learn Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) in nondeterministic planning domains, where actions may have multiple possible outcomes. We discuss several desired properties that guarantee that the resulting HTNs will correctly ...