International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools

This is a survey of recent domain-specific applications involving IoT (Internet of Things) and various areas of artificial intelligence. The domains and problems include malthouse, zoo management, protection of humans in hot working conditions, factory-floor scheduling, prediction of tool-wear-compensation offset, forecasting flooding, reduction in traffic congestion, prediction of flight delays, alcohol-consumption monitoring, recognition of activities at home, prediction of consumption of hot water, search and rescue, steel manufacturing, stroke-survivor monitoring, preventing overcrowding on beaches, and identifying people who are at risk for falls at homes. These applications show the depth, breadth, and diversity of the synergistic combination of AI and IoT.

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a very competitive linear classifier based on convex optimization problem, were support vectors fully describe decision boundary. Hence, SVM is sensitive to data spread and does not take into account the existence of class subclasses, nor minimizes data dispersion for classification performance improvement. Thus, Kernel subclass SVM (KSSVM) was proposed to handle multimodal data and to minimize data dispersion. Nevertheless, KSSVM has difficulties in classifying sequentially obtained data and handling large scale datasets, since it is based on batch learning. For this reason, we propose a novel incremental KSSVM (iKSSVM) which handles dynamic and large data in a proper manner. The iKSSVM is still based on convex optimization problem and minimizes data dispersion within and between data subclasses incrementally, in order to improve discriminative power and classification performance. An extensive comparative evaluation of the iKSSVM to batch KSSVM, as well as, other contemporary incremental classifiers, on real world datasets, has shown clearly its superiority in terms of classification accuracy.

Question Answering is most likely one of the toughest tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing. It aims at directly returning accurate and short answers to questions asked by users in human language over a huge collection of documents or database. Recently, the continuously exponential rise of digital information has imposed the need for more direct access to relevant answers. Thus, question answering has been the subject of a widespread attention and has been extensively explored over the last few years. Retrieving passages remains a crucial but also a challenging task in question answering. Although there has been an abundance of work on this task, this latter still implies non-trivial endeavor. In this paper, we propose an ad-hoc passage retrieval approach for Question Answering using n-grams. This approach relies on a new measure of similarity between a passage and a question for the extraction and ranking of the different passages based on n-gram overlapping. More concretely, our measure is based on the dependency degree of n-gram words of the question in the passage. We validate our approach by the development of the “SysPex” system that automatically returns the most relevant passages to a given question.

One of the emerging research opportunities in machine learning is to develop computing systems that learn many tasks continuously and improve the performance of learned tasks incrementally over time. In real world, learners have to adapt to labeled and unlabeled samples from various tasks which arrive randomly. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm called Efficient Perpetual Learning Algorithm (EPLA) which is suitable for learning multiple tasks in both offline and online settings. The algorithm, which is an extension of ELLA,4 is part of what we call perpetual learning that can learn new tasks or refine knowledge of learned tasks for improved performance with newly arrived labeled samples in an incremental fashion. Several salient features exist for EPLA. The learning episodes are triggered via either extrinsic or intrinsic stimuli. Agent systems based on the proposed algorithm can be engaged in an open-ended and alternating sequence of learning episodes and working episodes. Unlabeled samples can be used to self-train the learner in small data setting. Compared with ELLA, EPLA shows almost equivalent performance without memorizing any labeled samples learned previously.

Ontology authoring is a complex process, where commonly the automated reasoner is invoked for verification of newly introduced changes, therewith amounting to a time-consuming test-last approach. Test-Driven Development (TDD) for ontology authoring is a recent test-first approach that aims to reduce authoring time and increase authoring efficiency. Current TDD testing falls short on coverage of OWL features and possible test outcomes, the rigorous foundation thereof, and evaluations to ascertain its effectiveness. We aim to address these issues in one instantiation of TDD for ontology authoring. We first propose a succinct, logic-based specification of TDD testing and present novel TDD algorithms so as to cover also any OWL 2 class expression for the TBox and for the principal ABox assertions, and prove their correctness. The algorithms use methods from the OWL API directly such that reclassification is not necessary for test execution, therewith reducing ontology authoring time. The algorithms were implemented in TDDonto2, a Protégé plugin. TDDonto2 was evaluated by users, which demonstrated that modellers make significantly fewer errors with TDDonto2 compared to the standard Protégé interface and complete their tasks better using less time. Thus, the results indicate that TDD is a promising approach in an ontology development methodology.

Location-Routing Problem (LRP) is a challenging problem in logistics, which combines two types of decision: facility location and vehicle routing. In this paper, we focus on LRP with multiple capacitated depots and one uncapacitated vehicle per depot, which has practical applications such as mail delivery and waste collection. We propose a simple iterated variable neighborhood search with an effective perturbation strategy to solve the LRP variant. The experiments show that the algorithm is efficient and can compute better solutions than previous algorithms on tested instances.