bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Programa nacional de biodiesel e agricultura familiar em Mato Grosso
Authors: Rodrigues Marcos , Zavala Arturo Alejandro Zavala
Published: July 2017

O Programa Nacional de Produção e Uso de Biodiesel não somente marcou o início da produção de biodiesel no Brasil, como também introduziu a participação da agricultura familiar no processo. O Mato Grosso hoje é o principal produtor de biodiesel no país e, a partir deste ponto, este trabalho buscou verificar como o Programa foi capaz de integrar a agricultura familiar no estado. Através da pesquisa com produtores rurais no Norte do estado de Mato Grosso foi estimado um modelo econométrico por MQO para verificar quais fatores contribuem para a geração de renda na agricultura familiar. Observou-se que a produção de soja é predominante e possui maiores rendimentos principalmente com a área disponível para cultivo, enquanto que fatores como experiência e crédito não influenciam significativamente, mas mesmo com as limitações existentes para a soja na agricultura familiar, é possível atingir o objetivo do programa de geração de renda, mas não vem sendo eficiente em facilitar o acesso a este mercado pela agricultura familiar.
Análise heurística do isomorfismo institucional na escolha dos artefatos de contabilidade gerencial
Authors: Barros Guimarães Aucione Aparecida , Pimentel Fully Roberto Miranda , Freitas Deise , Silva Elenice Maria da
Published: July 2017

Este trabalho teve como objetivo investigar a influência do isomorfismo institucional na adoção dos artefatos de contabilidade gerencial. Através de um estudo de caso, os dados foram coletados por meio de uma entrevista realizada em uma Cooperativa de Crédito do município de Caratinga, Minas Gerais. Procurou-se entender até onde a necessidade de se assemelhar com uma outra cooperativa interfere na adoção dos artefatos gerenciais. Padrões ditados tem sido geralmente copiados, esses fatores podem estar entrelaçados a pressões isomórficas. Diante do objetivo proposto, o trabalho caracteriza-se como descritivo e utiliza o procedimento de survey. A resposta esperada é a de reafirmar a suposição da teoria institucional e entender se o método já utilizado se aplica a outras organizações. Quanto ao objetivo específico, foi identificado que a Cooperativa de Crédito utiliza doze dos vinte artefatos apresentados. Com relação aos Métodos e Sistemas de Custeio, utiliza o ABC, Custo Meta, Custeio por Absorção e Custeio Variável. Entre os Métodos de Avaliação e Medidas de Desempenho apresentados, utiliza o Benchmarking, Valor Presente, Análise do Ponto de Equilíbrio e Moeda Constante. Das Filosofias e Modelos de Gestão, utiliza o Orçamento, Simulações, Descentralização, Teoria das Restrições e o Balanced Scorecard. Quanto à influência do isomorfismo institucional na adoção dos artefatos gerenciais, a partir dos resultados, pode-se concluir que existem traços de isomorfismo normativo decorrente da profissionalização, contudo esta forma de pressão isomórfica não é determinante na adoção dos artefatos de contabilidade gerencial. O que na verdade pode-se observar em relação aos artefatos, é que eles não sofrem com fatores isomórficos, considerando que existe uma incerteza entre os representantes de qual método é utilizado. Os testes mostraram tendências de isomorfismo normativo em relação à formação dos presentes, entretanto, dada a não apresentação clara dos artefatos gerenciais pela Cooperativa de Crédito, não foi possível confirmar o isomorfismo nas técnicas.
Deus Ex Machina—A Higher Creative Species in the Game of Chess
Authors: Bushinsky Shay
Published: July 2017

Computers and human beings play chess differently. The basic paradigm that computer programs employ is known as “search and evaluate.” Their static evaluation is arguably more primitive than the perceptual one of humans. Yet the intelligence emerging from them is phenomenal. A human spectator is not able to tell the difference between a brilliant computer game and one played by Kasparov. Chess played by today's machines looks extraordinary, full of imagination and creativity. Such elements may be the reason that computers are superior to humans in the sport of kings, at least for the moment. This article is about how roles have changed: humans play chess like machines, and machines play chess the way humans used to play.
Design Space and Evaluation Challenges of Adaptive Graphical User Interfaces
Authors: Findlater Leah , Gajos Krzysztof Z.
Published: July 2017

Adaptive graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have the potential to improve performance and user satisfaction by automatically tailoring the presentation of functionality to each individual user. In practice, however, many challenges exist, and evaluation results of adaptive GUIs have been mixed. To guide researchers and designers in developing effective adaptive GUIs, we outline a design space and discuss three important aspects to consider when conducting user evaluations of these types of interfaces: the control and reporting of adaptive algorithm characteristics, the impact of task choice and user characteristics on the overall effectiveness of a design, and evaluation measures that are appropriate for adaptive interaction.
Usability Engineering Methods for Interactive Intelligent Systems
Authors: Spaulding Aaron , Weber Julie S.
Published: July 2017

The field of human‐computer interaction (HCI) offers designers and developers of interactive systems a large repertoire of methods for ensuring that their systems will be both usable and useful. This article offers a brief introduction to these methods, focusing on the ways in which they may need to be adapted and extended to take into account the characteristic properties of systems that include some sort of AI. The discussion is organized around three types of activity: understanding users' needs, interaction design, and evaluation.
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)
Authors: Trinkle Jeff , Matsuoka Yoky
Published: July 2017

The conference Robotics: Science and Systems was held at the University of Washington in Seattle, from June 28 to July 1, 2009. More than 300 international researchers attended this single‐track conference to learn about the most exciting robotics research and most advanced robotic systems. The program committee selected 39 papers out of 154 submissions. The program also included invited talks. The plenary presentations were complemented by workshops.
Exceptional Data Quality Using Intelligent Matching and Retrieval
Authors: Bidlack Clint , Wellman Michael P.
Published: July 2017

Recent advances in enterprise web‐based software have created a need for sophisticated yet user‐friendly data‐quality solutions. A new category of data‐quality solutions that fill this need using intelligent matching and retrieval algorithms is discussed. Solutions are focused on customer and sales data and include realtime inexact search, batch processing, and data migration. Users are empowered to maintain higher quality data resulting in more efficient sales and marketing operations. Sales managers spend more time with customers and less time managing data.
Recap of the 2010 AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference
Authors: Youngblood G. Michael , Bulitko Vadim , Weber Ben
Published: July 2017

On October 11–13, 2010, AAAI hosted the sixth annual international AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) Conference at Stanford University. The report briefly summarizes the conference.
If You Like Radiohead, You Might Like This Article
Authors: Celma Òscar , Lamere Paul
Published: July 2017

With the recent dramatic transformations in the world of digital music, a music listener is now just a couple of clicks away from being able to listen to nearly any song that has ever been recorded. With so much music readily available, tools that help a user find new, interesting music that matches his or her taste become increasingly important. In this article we explore one such tool: music recommendation. We describe common music recommendation use cases such as finding new artists, finding others with similar listening tastes, and generating interesting music playlists. We describe the various approaches currently being explored by practitioners to satisfy these use cases. Finally, we show how results of three different music recommendation technologies compare when applied to the task of finding similar artists to a seed artist.
Reports of the AAAI 2011 Spring Symposia
Authors: Buller Mark , Cuddihy Paul , Davis Ernest , Doherty Patrick , Doshi‐Velez Finale , Erdem Esra , Fisher Douglas , Green Nancy , Hinkelmann Knut , McLurkin James , Maher Mary Lou , Maheswaran Rajiv , Rubinelli Sara , Schurr Nathan , Scott Donia , Shell Dylan , Szekely Pedro , Thönssen Barbara , Urken Arnold B.
Published: July 2017

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2011 Spring Symposium Series Monday through Wednesday, March 21–23, 2011, at Stanford University. This report summarizes the eight symposia.
Recommendation in the Social Web
Authors: Burke Robin , Gemmell Jonathan , Hotho Andreas , Jäschke Robert
Published: July 2017

Recommender systems are a means of personalizing the presentation of information to ensure that users see the items most relevant to them. The social web has added new dimensions to the way people interact on the Internet, placing the emphasis on user‐generated content. Users in social networks create photos, videos, and other artifacts, collaborate with other users, socialize with their friends, and share their opinions online. This outpouring of material has brought increased attention to recommender systems as a means of managing this vast universe of content. At the same time, the diversity and complexity of the data has meant new challenges for researchers in recommendation. This article describes the nature of recommendation research in social web applications and provides some illustrative examples of current research directions and techniques.
Turn Taking Based on Information Flow for Fluent Human‐Robot Interaction
Authors: Thomaz Andrea L. , Chao Crystal
Published: July 2017

Turn taking is a fundamental part of human communication. Our goal is to devise a turn‐taking framework for human‐robot interaction that, like the human skill, represents something fundamental about interaction, generic to context or domain. We propose a model of turn taking, and conduct an experiment with human subjects to inform this model. Our findings from this study suggest that information flow is an integral part of human floor‐passing behavior. Following this, we implement autonomous floor relinquishing on a robot and discuss our insights into the nature of a general turn‐taking model for human‐robot interaction.
Crowd‐Sourcing Real‐World Human‐Robot Dialogue and Teamwork through Online Multiplayer Games
Authors: Chernova Sonia , DePalma Nick , Breazeal Cynthia
Published: July 2017

We present an innovative approach for large‐scale data collection in human‐robot interaction research through the use of online multi‐player games. By casting a robotic task as a collaborative game, we gather thousands of examples of human‐human interactions online, and then leverage this corpus of action and dialogue data to create contextually relevant social and task‐oriented behaviors for human‐robot interaction in the real world. We demonstrate our work in a collaborative search and retrieval task requiring dialogue, action synchronization, and action sequencing between the human and robot partners. A user study performed at the Boston Museum of Science shows that the autonomous robot exhibits many of the same patterns of behavior that were observed in the online data set and survey results rate the robot similarly to human partners in several critical measures.
A Perspective on AI Research in India
Authors: Khemani Deepak
Published: July 2017

India is a multilingual and multicultural country that came together less than a century ago. The populace spans wide extremes of wealth and education. The artificial intelligence community, which gained in strength in the 1980s, has had a major focus on research directed toward societal goals of bridging the linguistic and educational divide, and delivers the fruits of information technology to all people. In this article we look at a brief history followed by two examples of research aimed at crossing the language barriers.
Reports of the AAAI 2012 Spring Symposia
Authors: Alani Harith , An Bo , Jain Manish , Kido Takashi , Konidaris George , Lawless William , Martin David , Pantofaru Caroline , Sofge Donald , Takadama Keiki , Tambe Milind , Vitvar Tomas
Published: July 2017

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2012 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 26–28, 2012, at Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. The six symposia held were AI, the Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self‐Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series.
2011 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award: Playing with Cases: Rendering Expressive Music with Case‐Based Reasoning
Authors: de Mantaras Ramon Lopez , Arcos Josep Lluís
Published: July 2017

This article surveys long‐term research on the problem of rendering expressive music by means of AI techniques with an emphasis on case‐based reasoning (CBR). Following a brief overview discussing why people prefer listening to expressive music instead of nonexpressive synthesized music, we examine a representative selection of well‐known approaches to expressive computer music performance with an emphasis on AI‐related approaches. In the main part of the article we focus on the existing CBR approaches to the problem of synthesizing expressive music, and particularly on Tempo‐Express, a case‐based reasoning system developed at our Institute, for applying musically acceptable tempo transformations to mono‐phonic audio recordings of musical performances. Finally we briefly describe an ongoing extension of our previous work consisting of complementing audio information with information about the gestures of the musician. Music is played through our bodies, therefore capturing the gesture of the performer is a fun‐ damental aspect that has to be taken into account in future expressive music renderings. This article is based on the “2011 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture” given by the first author at AAAI/IAAI 2011.
New Potentials for Data‐Driven Intelligent Tutoring System Development and Optimization
Authors: Koedinger Kenneth R. , Brunskill Emma , Baker Ryan S. J. d. , McLaughlin Elizabeth A. , Stamper John
Published: July 2017

Increasing widespread use of educational technologies is producing vast amounts of data. Such data can be used to help advance our understanding of student learning and enable more intelligent, interactive, engaging, and effective education. In this article, we discuss the status and prospects of this new and powerful opportunity for data‐driven development and optimization of educational technologies, focusing on intelligent tutoring systems. We provide examples of use of a variety of techniques to develop or optimize the select, evaluate, suggest, and update functions of intelligent tutors, including probabilistic grammar learning, rule induction, Markov decision process, classification, and integrations of symbolic search and statistical inference.
On-Line Reconfigurable Machines
Authors: Crawford Lara S.
Published: July 2017

A recent trend in intelligent machines and manufacturing has been toward reconfigurable manufacturing systems, which move away from the idea of a fixed factory line executing an unchanging set of operations, and toward the goal of an adaptable factory structure. The logical next challenge in this area is that of on-line reconfigurability. With this capability, machines can reconfigure while running, enable or disable capabilities in real time, and respond quickly to changes in the system or the environment (including faults). We propose an approach to achieving on-line reconfigurability based on a high level of system modularity supported by integrated, model-based planning and control software. Our software capitalizes on many advanced techniques from the artificial intelligence research community, particularly in model-based domain-independent planning and scheduling, heuristic search, and temporal resource reasoning. We describe the implementation of this design in a prototype highly modular, parallel printing system.
AI Challenge Problem: Scalable Models for Patterns of Life
Authors: Folsom‐Kovarik J. T. , Schatz Sae , Jones Randolph M. , Bartlett Kathleen , Wray Robert E.
Published: July 2017

The patterns of life (POL) present a unique challenge for computational modeling because systems must produce both meaningful regularities throughout a large population and also believable behaviors at the level of each individual. We describe how computational POL modeling integrates diverse artificial intelligence research areas and provides interesting challenges in multiple fields.
The Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE): A Report
Authors: Sukthankar Gita , Horswill Ian
Published: July 2017

The Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 14–18, 2013, at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The mission of the AIIDE conference is to provide a forum for researchers and game developers to discuss ways that AI can enhance games and other forms of interactive entertainment. In addition to presentations on adapting standard AI techniques such as search, planning, and machine learning for use within games, key topic areas include creating realistic autonomous characters, interactive narrative, procedural content generation, and integrating AI into game design and production tools.
Science Autonomy for Rover Subsurface Exploration of the Atacama Desert
Authors: Wettergreen David , Foil Greydon , Furlong Michael , Thompson David R.
Published: July 2017

As planetary rovers expand their capabilities, traveling longer distances, deploying complex tools, and collecting voluminous scientific data, the requirements for intelligent guidance and control also grow. This, coupled with limited bandwidth and latencies, motivates on‐board autonomy that ensures the quality of the science data return. Increasing quality of the data requires better sample selection, data validation, and data reduction. Robotic studies in Mars‐like desert terrain have advanced autonomy for long‐distance exploration and seeded technologies for planetary rover missions. In these field experiments the remote science team uses a novel control strategy that intersperses preplanned activities with autonomous decision making. The robot performs automatic data collection, interpretation, and response at multiple spatial scales. Specific capabilities include instrument calibration, visual targeting of selected features, an on‐board database of collected data, and a long‐range path planner that guides the robot using analysis of current surface and prior satellite data. Field experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile over the past decade demonstrate these capabilities and illustrate current challenges and future directions.
Exploiting Semantics for Big Data Integration
Authors: Knoblock Craig A. , Szekely Pedro
Published: July 2017

There is a great deal of interest in big data, focusing mostly on data set size. An equally important dimension of big data is variety, where the focus is to process highly heterogeneous data sets. We describe how we use semantics to address the problem of big data variety. We also describe Karma, a system that implements our approach and show how Karma can be applied to integrate data in the cultural heritage domain. In this use case, Karma integrates data across many museums even though the data sets from different museums are highly heterogeneous.
Entity Type Recognition for Heterogeneous Semantic Graphs
Authors: Sleeman Jennifer , Finin Tim , Joshi Anupam
Published: July 2017

We describe an approach for identifying fine‐grained entity types in heterogeneous data graphs that is effective for unstructured data or when the underlying ontologies or semantic schemas are unknown. Identifying fine‐grained entity types, rather than a few high‐level types, supports coreference resolution in heterogeneous graphs by reducing the number of possible coreference relations that must be considered. Big data problems that involve integrating data from multiple sources can benefit from our approach when the data's ontologies are unknown, inaccessible, or semantically trivial. For such cases, we use supervised machine learning to map entity attributes and relations to a known set of attributes and relations from appropriate background knowledge bases to predict instance entity types. We evaluated this approach in experiments on data from DBpedia, Freebase, and Arnetminer using DBpedia as the background knowledge base.
The Angry Birds AI Competition
Authors: Renz Jochen , Ge Xiaoyu , Gould Stephen , Zhang Peng
Published: July 2017

The aim of the Angry Birds AI competition (AIBIRDS) is to build intelligent agents that can play new Angry Birds levels better than the best human players. This is surprisingly difficult for AI as it requires similar capabilities to what humans need for successfully interacting with the physical world, one of the grand challenges of AI. As such the competition offers a simplified and controlled environment for developing and testing the necessary AI technologies, a seamless integration of computer vision, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, reasoning under uncertainty, planning, and heuristic search, among others. Over the past three years there have been significant improvements, but we are still a long way from reaching the ultimate aim, and thus, there are great opportunities for participants in this competition.
The 2014 International Planning Competition: Progress and Trends
Authors: Vallati Mauro , Chrpa Lukáš , Grześ Marek , McCluskey Thomas L. , Roberts Mark , Sanner Scott
Published: July 2017

This article reviews the 2014 International Planning Competition (IPC‐2014), the eighth in a series of competitions starting in 1998. IPC‐2014 was held in three separate parts to assess the state of the art in three prominent areas of planning research: the deterministic (classical) part (IPCD), the learning part (IPCL), and the probabilistic part (IPPC). Each part evaluated planning systems in ways that pushed the edge of existing planner performance by introducing new challenges, novel tasks, or both. The competition surpassed again the number of competitors that participated in its predecessor, highlighting the competition's central role in shaping the landscape of ongoing developments in evaluating planning systems.
Human‐Centered Design of Wearable Neuroprostheses and Exoskeletons
Authors: Contreras‐Vidal Jose L. , Kilicarslan Atilla , Huang He (Helen) , Grossman Robert G.
Published: July 2017

Human‐centered design of wearable robots involves the development of innovative science and technologies that minimize the mismatch between humans' and machines' capabilities, leading to their intuitive integration and confluent interaction. Here, we summarize our human‐centered approach to the design of closed‐loop brain‐machine interfaces powered prostheses and exoskeletons that allow people to act beyond their impaired or diminished physical or sensorimotor capabilities. The goal is to develop multifunctional human‐machine interfaces with integrated diagnostic, assistive, and therapeutic functions. Moreover, these complex human‐machine systems should be effective, reliable, safe, and engaging and support the patient in performing intended actions with minimal effort and errors with adequate interaction time. To illustrate our approach, we review an example of a user‐in‐the‐loop, patient‐centered, noninvasive BMI system to a powered exoskeleton for persons with paraplegia. We conclude with a summary of challenges to the translation of these complex human‐machine systems to the end user.
A Report on the Ninth International Web Rule Symposium
Authors: Paschke Adrian
Published: July 2017

The annual International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) is an international conference on research, applications, languages, and standards for rule technologies. RuleML is a leading conference to build bridges between academe and industry in the field of rules and its applications, especially as part of the semantic technology stack. It is devoted to rule‐based programming and rule‐based systems including production rules systems, logic programming rule engines, and business rule engines/business rule management systems; semantic web rule languages and rule standards; rule‐based event‐processing languages (EPLs) and technologies; and research on inference rules, transformation rules, decision rules, production rules, and ECA rules. The Ninth International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML 2015) was held in Berlin, Germany, August 2–5. This report summarizes the events of that conference.
Planning, Executing, and Evaluating the Winograd Schema Challenge
Authors: Morgenstern Leora , Davis Ernest , Ortiz Charles L.
Published: July 2017

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) was proposed by Hector Levesque in 2011 as an alternative to the Turing test. Chief among its features is a simple question format that can span many commonsense knowledge domains. Questions are chosen so that they do not require specialized knoweldge or training and are easy for humans to answer. This article details our plans to run the WSC and evaluate results.
Software Social Organisms: Implications for Measuring AI Progress
Authors: Forbus Kenneth D.
Published: July 2017

In this article I argue that achieving human‐level AI is equivalent to learning how to create sufficiently smart software social organisms. This implies that no single test will be sufficient to measure progress. Instead, evaluations should be organized around showing increasing abilities to participate in our culture, as apprentices. This provides multiple dimensions within which progress can be measured, including how well different interaction modalities can be used, what range of domains can be tackled, what human‐normed levels of knowledge they are able to acquire, as well as others. I begin by motivating the idea of software social organisms, drawing on ideas from other areas of cognitive science, and provide an analysis of the substrate capabilities that are needed in social organisms in terms closer to what is needed for computational modeling. Finally, the implications for evaluation are discussed.
Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2015
Authors: Gunning David , Yeh Peter Z.
Published: July 2017

This issue features expanded versions of articles selected from the 2015 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held in Austin, Texas. We present a selection of three articles describing deployed applications plus two more articles that discuss work on emerging applications.
Helping Novices Avoid the Hazards of Data: Leveraging Ontologies to Improve Model Generalization Automatically with Online Data Sources
Authors: Janpuangtong Sasin , Shell Dylan A.
Published: July 2017

The infrastructure and tools necessary for large‐scale data analytics, formerly the exclusive purview of experts, are increasingly available. Whereas a knowledgeable data miner or domain expert can rightly be expected to exercise caution when required (for example, around misleading conclusions supposedly supported by the data), the nonexpert may benefit from some judicious assistance. This article describes an end‐to‐end learning framework that allows a novice to create models from data easily by helping structure the model‐building process and capturing extended aspects of domain knowledge. By treating the whole modeling process interactively and exploiting high‐level knowledge in the form of an ontology, the framework is able to aid the user in a number of ways, including in helping to avoid pitfalls such as data dredging. Prudence must be exercised to avoid these hazards as certain conclusions may only be supported if, for example, there is extra knowledge that gives reason to trust a narrower set of hypotheses. This article adopts the solution of using higher‐level knowledge to allow this sort of domain knowledge to be used automatically, selecting relevant input attributes, and thence constraining the hypothesis space. We describe how the framework automatically exploits structured knowledge in an ontology to identify relevant concepts, and how a data extraction component can make use of online data sources to find measurements of those concepts so that their relevance can be evaluated. To validate our approach, models of four different problem domains were built using our implementation of the framework. Prediction error on unseen examples of these models show that our framework, making use of the ontology, helps to improve model generalization.
Capturing Planned Protests from Open Source Indicators
Authors: Muthiah Sathappan , Huang Bert , Arredondo Jaime , Mares David , Getoor Lise , Katz Graham , Ramakrishnan Naren
Published: July 2017

Civil unrest events (protests, strikes, and “occupy” events) are common occurrences in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. The study of civil unrest is a key topic for political scientists as it helps capture an important mechanism by which citizens express themselves. In countries where civil unrest is lawful, qualitative analysis has revealed that more than 75 percent of the protests are planned, organized, or announced in advance; therefore detecting references to future planned events in relevant news and social media is a direct way to develop a protest forecasting system. We report on a system for doing that in this article. It uses a combination of key‐phrase learning to identify what to look for, probabilistic soft logic to reason about location occurrences in extracted results, and time normalization to resolve future time mentions. We illustrate the application of our system to 10 countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Results demonstrate our successes in capturing significant societal unrest in these countries with an average lead time of 4.08 days. We also study the selective superiorities of news media versus social media (Twitter, Facebook) to identify relevant trade‐offs.
StarCraft AI Competition: A Step Toward Human‐Level AI for Real‐Time Strategy Games
Authors: Farooq Sehar Shahzad , Oh In‐Suk , Kim Man‐Jae , Kim Kyung Joong
Published: July 2017

This article reviews the two most recent IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) StarCraft Artificial Intelligence (AI) Competitions organized by the authors; these were the fourth and fifth in a series of annual competitions initiated in 2011. StarCraft AI Competitions have been hosted in conjunction with three different events: the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), CIG, and Student StarCraft AI Tournament (SSCAIT). The purpose of these competitions is to design bots that are able autonomously and successfully to play the StarCraft game by implementing real‐time strategies. Recent results reveal the promising use of AI techniques in creating successful AI entries, but there is room for improvement with respect to the bots' ability to adapt and learn to defeat humans and scripted AI bots.
The International Competition of Distributed and Multiagent Planners (CoDMAP)
Authors: Komenda Antonín , Štolba Michal , Kovacs Daniel L.
Published: July 2017

This article reports on the first international Competition of Distributed and Multiagent Planners (CoDMAP). The competition focused on cooperative domain‐independent planners compatible with a minimal multiagent extension of the classical planning model. The motivations for the competition were manifold: to standardize the problem description language with a common set of benchmarks, to promote development of multiagent planners both inside and outside of the multiagent research community, and to serve as a prototype for future multiagent planning competitions. The article provides an overview of cooperative multiagent planning, describes a novel variant of standardized input language for encoding mutliagent planning problems, and summarizes the key points of organization, competing planners, and results of the competition.
Systems, Engineering Environments, and Competitions
Authors: Lierler Yuliya , Maratea Marco , Ricca Francesco
Published: July 2017

The goal of this article is threefold. First, we trace the history of the development of answer set solvers, by accounting for more than a dozen of them. Second, we discuss development tools and environments that facilitate the use of answer set programming technology in practical applications. Last, we present the evolution of the answer set programming competitions, prime venues for tracking advances in answer set solving technology.
Real‐Time Coordination in Human‐Robot Interaction Using Face and Voice
Authors: Skantze Gabriel
Published: July 2017

When humans interact and collaborate with each other, they coordinate their turn‐taking behaviors using verbal and nonverbal signals, expressed in the face and voice. If robots of the future are supposed to engage in social interaction with humans, it is essential that they can generate and understand these behaviors. In this article, I give an overview of several studies that show how humans in interaction with a humanlike robot make use of the same coordination signals typically found in studies on human‐human interaction, and that it is possible to automatically detect and combine these cues to facilitate real‐time coordination. The studies also show that humans react naturally to such signals when used by a robot, without being given any special instructions. They follow the gaze of the robot to disambiguate referring expressions, they conform when the robot selects the next speaker using gaze, and they respond naturally to subtle cues, such as gaze aversion, breathing, facial gestures, and hesitation sounds.
Four Decades of AI in Portugal
Authors: Ventura Rodrigo
Published: July 2017

This column explores the emergence of AI in Portugal, its blossoming AI community, including the association supporting it, and briefly surveys AI topics currently and historically explored in the country.
The ICON Challenge on Algorithm Selection
Authors: Kotthoff Lars , Hurley Barry , O'Sullivan Barry
Published: July 2017

Algorithm selection is of increasing practical relevance in a variety of applications. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature, but their evaluations are often not comparable, making it hard to judge which approaches work best. The ICON Challenge on Algorithm Selection objectively evaluated many prominent approaches from the literature, making them directly comparable for the first time. The results show that there is still room for improvement, even for the very best approaches.
Patch antenna sensor rosettes for surface strain measurement
Authors: Li Dan , Cho Chunhee , Wang Yang
Published: July 2017

Passive (battery-free) wireless patch antenna sensors have been developed in recent years for strain sensing, to provide convenient and low-cost instrumentation. Despite past efforts, current analytical and experimental studies have mainly focused on performance in single-axial measurement, which is simple and unrealistic from typically encountered arbitrary plane stress fields. This paper presents strain sensor rosettes made of folded patch antennas and slotted patch antennas for measuring an arbitrary surface strain (plane stress) field. The transverse strain effect of both sensors is discussed and has been validated through laboratory experiments. Multiphysics coupled simulation is conducted to describe accurately the mechanical and electromagnetic behaviours of antenna sensors. Resonance frequency shifts of the antenna sensors are used to derive the three strain components in an arbitrary plane stress scenario – that is, two normal and one shear strain components. Both numerical studies and experimental validations have been performed.
Microbiological and mycotoxin risk assessment in ruminant feeding in Sulaimani governorate
Authors: Hamasalim Hozan , Hama-Khan Karwan , Sadq Sarwar
Published: July 2017

Background: Feed contamination and poisoning by microbial and fungal genera poseobvious health threat to animals.Method: Vesa, ZAB, MIK, Deern, Zano and Zizar typesof ruminant feed used in Sulaimani Governorate were analyzed for their bacterial andfungal quality. Identification of fungal isolates with determination of aflatoxin,ochratoxin and T-2 toxin for all trademarks and local feed and the prime target of thisresearch would be background foreshadow for some danger of ruminant feedstuff inSulaimani governorate and taking these aspects in consideration to assessmicrobiological quality and mycotoxins in ruminant feed.Result: The genera of bacteriaand fungi isolated and their occurrence were Salmonella sp., total plate count and totalfungal count. Based on standard method identification of fungal species in brandsruminant feed and local ruminant feed, the all commonly isolated genera wereAspergillus spp., Penicillium spp and Fusarium spp. Finally, detected concentration ofeach aflatoxin, ochratoxin and T-2 toxin in brands ruminant feed and local ruminantfeed. Most types of ruminant feed under study were lower than the maximal standardlimits of aflatoxin while all types of brands ruminant feed and local ruminant feed understudy were lower than the maximal tolerance limits of ochratoxin and T-2 toxin.
Effect of maternal body mass index on maternal and fetal outcome in Maternity Teaching Hospital in Sulaimani
Authors: Fars Gona , Ismail Nian , Abdulkarim Awayi
Published: July 2017

The current study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of body mass index on birthoutcome. This study was carried out for the period of 20 th February to 18 th April of 2014,sample of (50) pregnant women who have been attended maternity teaching hospital inSulaimani city, to determine the effect of body mass index on birth outcome, and toexplore association between some socio-demographic and obstetrics characteristics withoutcome of birth. The result shows that there is no significant association between bodymass index and outcome of labor or delivery.
"Allelopathic Effects of Euphorbia helioscopia and Papaver rhoeas on Germination and Initial Seedling Growth of Cereal Crops and Weed seeds"
Authors: Khasraw Muhammed , Mustafa Kamil , Aziz Hussein , Mustafa Kawa , Ahmad Saman , Khorsheed Fawzy
Published: July 2017

A laboratory study was conducted to investigate the allelopathic effect of aqueousextracts of fresh roots and leaves of sunspourge and field- poppy weeds on germinationand growth of four different plant species; wheat, barley, wild mustard and seabiousseeds. Maximum stimulation ratio of germination percentage was observed on barleyseeds with sunspourge root extract was 23.46%. Maximum stimulation ratio of wheatroot length was 59.16% with sunspourge leaf extract and was 33.02% for barley withfield poppy root extract, while poppy leaf extract reduced wild mustard and seabious rootlength ratio by 37.22% and 29.99% respectively. The highest stimulatory ratio of wheatshoot length was 10.84% with poppy leaf extract at the same time reduced seabiousshoot length by 18.52%. Maximum increasing of wheat fresh weight was 88.76% withpoppy leaf extract and was 87.94% with sunspourge extract leaf for barley whilesunspourge leaf extract decreased wild mustard fresh weight by 77.64%. The highestincreasing ratio of barley seedling dry weight recorded with sunspourge leaf extract was32-85%.
Influence of Magnetic Treated Saline Water on Salts Leaching from Salt Affected Soil
Authors: Hassan Khalida , Hashim Farhad , Ahmed Sarwar
Published: July 2017

To investigate the effect of water magnetic treatment and irrigation water salinity on saltleaching from salt affected soil (40.13dS m -1 ), a laboratory experiment was conductedusing soil columns filled with salt affected soil and leached by using 5 and 10 dS m -1saline water and fresh water (control,1.56 dS m -1 ). The results showed a remarkabledecrease in EC values under all treatments. Concentrations of Na, Ca and Mg decreasewith increasing the number of pore volumes. The efficiency of magnetic treatment onleaching soluble salts from soil is higher when using water of low salinity in comparisonwith water of high salinity level.
A Phytoplankton Distribution study of Dukan basin in Sulaimani district -Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
Authors: Farkha Trifa , Fatah Adil
Published: July 2017

The Phytoplankton species composition have been studied at eight stations from four

selected streams: Tabin, Charmaga, Chamirezan and Surqawshan in Dukan basin within

Sulaimani district during August 2010 to July 2011. Some physical and chemical

properties of the streams water were determined. Air and water temperature values were

varied between (3 to 43 oC) and (5 to 29 oC) ,respectively. Upon investigation, the pH

range of the sites was 7-9.4 indicating alkalinity of the water bodies. Calcium

concentrations always dominated over the other ions. Calcium values were varied

between (10 to 74 mg/l). Sodium and potassium concentration ranged between (0.66 to

16.5 mg/l) and (0.3 to 3.4 mg/l) respectively. Chloride concentrations never fall below

10 mg/l and never exceed 58 mg/l. throughout the studied period. A total of 136

phytoplankton taxa were identified which belong to six divisions , the majorities were

belonged to Bacillariophyta (92 taxa), making up 67.65 % of the total, followed by

Chlorophyta (19 taxa), making up 14.7 %, Cyanophyta (19 taxa) which make up 14 %,(

2 taxa) for each of Pyrophyta and , Euglenophyta and (1 taxon) of chrysophyta make

up 3.75% . The most diverse genera that were investigated in this study were: Navicula

(13 taxa) ,Nitizschia (15 taxa),Fragilaria(9 taxa) , Cymbella and Gomphonema (8 taxa).
Hemodynamic and renal effects of bosentan and losartan in 2k1c hypertensive rats.
Authors: Hamad Sarkawt , Maulood Ismail
Published: July 2017

Endothelin-1 (ET-1) and Angiotensin II (Ang II) play important roles in generatinghypertension. The present work was investigated the hemodynamic and renal effects ofboth ET-1 and Ang II on 2K1C rats. The design of this study included five groups of rats:Group 1 Sham rats, Group 2 Normotensive rats (2K1C(n)), Group 3 two kidney one cliphypertensive rats (2K1C(h)), Group 4 two kidney one clip hypertensive rats + Bosentan(2K1C(h) + Bosentan), and Group 5 two kidney one clip hypertensive rats + Losartan(2K1C(h) + Losartan). Systolic blood pressure (SBP) was significantly elevated in 2K1C(h)rats from third to sixth week after surgery compared with control rats. SBP significantlyfell in bosentan and losartan treated rats. Serum nitric oxide (NO) level in hypertensiverats was slightly decreased, whereas in losartan group it was significantly increased.Serum malonaldehyde (MDA) significantly increased in bosentan treated rats ascompared to hypertensive rats. Bosentan administration caused a markedly increased inNa+excretion rate compared with 2K1C(h) rats in week four after surgery. In conclusion,losartan is more potent than bosentan in reducing hypertension via elevation of serumNO level.
Effect of acidic and basic water on the geomechanical properties of limestone used in decoration of buildings in Iraq.
Authors: Daod Heyam , Rashed Kamal , Rasheed Farouk
Published: July 2017

The physico-mechanical properties of rock play an important role in planning and

designing of civil constructional work. A type of stone used in decoration of buildings in

Iraq traditionally known as (Halan rock), has been taken to check variation in its physico-

mechanical properties. Thirty two specimens of dimension 4.8cmx4.8cmx10cm of

fossiliferous limestone of Lower Fars Formation were collected. Different pH solution

from (pH1, pH3, pH5, pH7, pH9, pH11 and pH13) have been used to find the durability

of the stone. Laboratory test also includes effective porosity, both dry and saturated unit

weight, water absorption, uniaxial compressive strength, point load strength, and

modulus of elasticity together with thin section analysis. The results indicated that the

limestone appears to be less resistant to the atmospheric factors. The uniaxial

compressive strength and point Load strength decrease under acidic and alkaline

conditions.
Improve Quality and Quantity of Plant Products by Applying Potassium Nutrient (A Critical Review).
Authors: Salih Rabar , Abdan Khalina , Wayayok Aimrun , Hashim Norhashila , Rahman Khunaw
Published: July 2017

Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are regarded as the main nutrients necessary for

plant growing. Each of these fertilizers has significant effects on plants growth. Their

functions are somehow in relationship to each other. The purpose of this article is to show

the importance of the potassium nutrient on the crops life. This kind of nutrient is

disregarded in Kurdistan. Generally, the farmers have not information about the impacts

of potassium. Hopefully, this study will encourage scientists to do more research on

effects of potassium on plants. On the other hand, this article is going to be a key for

using potassium fertilizer as an important mineral for the crops in the Kurdistan at the

best way. Two factors are more important for every farmer to know before using the

fertilizers (Fertilizers cost and environment pollution). As known, for getting fertilizers

farmers must be paid, and fertilizers can damage the environment if these are not used

correctly. Hence, for solving the above problems, a soil sample must be sent to a

laboratory for physical and chemical testing before application of fertilizers. Farmers

must know about appropriate nutrients and amount to add to the soil. Application of little

amount of nutrients cannot grow crops and too many nutrients can run off the fields and

pollute streams and ground water. Fertilizers have important purpose and function.

Hence, farmers must be careful to practice the right dose, at the right time, to avoid

negative effects of the fertilizers on the environment.