AAAI-12 Subarea Spotlights Track

AAAI-12 Subarea Spotlights Track

AAAI-12 will include a new Subarea Spotlights Track, featuring three talk categories:

1. “What’s hot in …” talks, summarizing the state of the art in a particular area. Talks will explain the main research trends of the last 5-10 years.
2. Best-paper talks from a broad cross-section of area conferences, highlighting recent strong research results in each area.
3. “Challenges in …” talks, summarizing important challenges in a particular area. Talks will outline a vision on where the area should evolve.

AAAI is pleased to announce the line-up of speakers for the Subarea Spotlight track, representing each of the following areas of research: Constraint programming, games, human-computer interaction, knowledge representation, multiagent systems, planning, robotics, SAT, search, the semantic web, and vision.

Constraint Programming

What’s Hot:
Symmetry Breaking Constraints: Recent Results
Toby Walsh

Best Paper:
Systematically Identifying and Exploiting Dominance Relations (Best Paper CP-12)
Geoffrey Chu and Peter Stuckey

Challenges:
Opportunities and Challenges for Constraint Programming
Barry O’Sullivan

Games

What’s Hot:
What’s Hot in Games from the AIIDE Perspective
Mark Riedl and Vadim Bulitko

Best Paper:
Goal Recognition with Markov Logic Networks for Player-Adaptive Games (Best Paper AIIDE-11)
Eun Ha, Jonathan Rowe, Bradford Mott, James Lester

Human-Computer Interaction

What’s Hot:
Progress and Hot Trends in Human-Computer Interaction Research
Joseph Konstan

Best Paper:
Communitysourcing: Engaging Local Crowds to Perform Expert Work Via Physical Kiosks (Awarded Paper at CHI-12)
Kurtis Heimerl, Brian Gawalt, Tapan Parikh, Bjoern Hartmann

Challenges:
Challenges in HCI: The Next 30 Years
Joseph Konstan

Knowledge Representation

What’s Hot:
What’s Hot in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
Sheila McIlraith

Best Paper:
Optimal Value of Information in Graphical Models (JAIR Best Paper Prize runner-up 2012)
Carlos Guestrin and Andreas Krause

Best Paper:
Ambiguous Language and Differences in Beliefs (KR-12 Ray Reiter Best Paper Prize)
Joseph Halpern and Willemien Kets

Machine Learning

What’s Hot:
Recent Advances in Polyphonic Music Generation and Transcription
Nicolas Boulanger-Lewandowski

Best Paper:
On the Partition Function and Random Maximum A-Posteriori Perturbations (Best Paper Shortlist ICML-12)
Tamir Hazan and Tommi Jaakkola

Best Paper:
Bayesian Posterior Sampling via Stochastic Gradient Fisher Scoring (Best Paper Shortlist ICML-12)
Sungjin Ahn, Anoop Korattikara, Max Welling

Best Paper:
A Production Rule-based Framework for Causal and Epistemic Reasoning (Best Paper RuleML-12)
Theodore Patkos, Abdelghani Chibani, Dimitris Plexousakis, Yacine Amirat

Challenges:
Challenges for Machine Learning Impact on the Real World
Kiri Wagstaff

Multiagent Systems

What’s Hot:
Computing Game-Theoretic Solutions and Applications to Security
Vincent Conitzer

Best Paper:
PROTECT: An Application of Computational Game Theory for the Security of the Ports of the United States (Best Paper Shortlist AAMAS-12)
Eric Shieh, Bo An, Rong Yang, Milind Tambe, Craig Baldwin, Joseph DiRenzo, Ben Maule, Garrett Meyer

Best Paper:
Optimal Manipulation of Voting Rules (Best Paper Shortlist AAMAS-12)
Svetlana Obraztsova and Edith Elkind

Best Paper:
Predicting Your Own Effort (Best Paper Shortlist AAMAS-12)
David F. Bacon, Yiling Chen, Ian Kash, David C. Parkes, Malvika Rao, Manu Sridharan

Challenges:
Challenges in Delivering the Smart Grid, and How Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Can Help
Alex Rogers

Planning

Best Paper:
Semi-Relaxed Plan Heuristics (Best Paper ICAPS-12)
Emil Keyder, Jörg Hoffmann, Patrik Haslum

What’s Hot:
Standing on the Shoulders of Classical Planners
Ronen Brafman

Best Paper:
Compiling Uncertainty Away in Conformant Planning Problems with Bounded Width (JAIR Best Paper Prize 2012)
Hector Palacios and Hector Geffner

Challenges:
Planning as an Iterative Process
David Smith

Robotics

What’s Hot:
Advances at the Intersection of Machine Learning and Robotics
Drew Bagnell

Best Paper:
Identification and Representation of Homotopy Classes of Trajectories for Search-Based Path Planning in 3D (Best Paper RSS-11)
Subhrajit Bhattacharya, Maxim Likhachev, Vijay Kumar

Challenges:
Combining Machine Intelligence with Mechanical Intelligence in Manipulation
Lael Odhner

SAT

What’s Hot:
SMT-Based Verification of Hybrid Systems
Alessandro Cimatti, Sergio Mover, and Stefano Tonetta

Best Paper:
On Freezing and Reactivating Learnt Clauses (SAT-11 Best Paper Award)
Gilles Audemard, Jean-Marie Lagniez, Bertrand Mazure, and Lakhdar Sais

Challenges:
Seven Challenges in Parallel SAT Solving
Youssef Hammadi and Christoph Wintersteiger

Search

What’s Hot:
Heuristic Search Comes of Age
Nathan Sturtevant, Ariel Felner, Maxim Likhachev, and Wheeler Ruml

Best Paper:
New Approaches for Optimally Solving the Multi-Agent Path Finding Problem (Best Paper SOCS-12)
Guni Sharon, Roni Stern, Ariel Felner, Nathan Sturtevant

Challenges:
Research Challenges in Heuristic Search
Rich Korf

Semantic Web

What’s Hot:
What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Semantic Web
Chris Welty

Best Paper:
Usage-Centric Benchmarking of RDF Triple Stores (Best Research Paper ISWC-11)
Mohamed Morsey, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo

Vision

What’s Hot:
The Rise of Applied Vision
John Tsotsos

Best Paper:
Relative Attributes for Enhanced Human-Machine Communication (David Marr Prize ICCV-11)
Devi Parikh and Kristen Grauman

Challenges:
The Main Challenges Facing Object Categorization: Perceptual Grouping and Image Abstraction
Sven Dickinson