As in previous years the study association CognAC organised ACAIS (the Annual CognAC Artificial Intelligence Symposium), a symposium dedicated to showcasing the latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence to its attendees and inspire them for future projects. This year, the theme was AI & Language: a growing and interesting field within Artificial Intelligence. [...]
The first presentation in this session was given by David Roschewitz from Maastricht University, who presented a joint work with Kurt Driessens and Pieter Collins titled "Simultaneous Ensemble Generation and Hyper parameter Optimization for Regression". The authors presented a method to simultaneously generate ensembles and tune the hyper parameters of the models for regression problems. [...]
This session included four fascinating presentations, focussing on different aspects of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The first paper, titled 'Constructing Knowledge Graphs of Depression', was presented by Frank van Harmelen, and was co-authored by Zhisheng Huang, Jie Yang, and Qing Hu. Frank presented a collaborative project between the VU and Beijing Anding hospital that focused [...]
The session on Games consisted of four presentations discussing applications of mathematical game theory in multi agent systems. The first two presentations presented the work of Gleb Polevoy and Mathijs de Weerdt on agents that need to divide their available time over multiple projects, respectively multiple group interactions. An example of the former is the [...]
In the Uncertainty in AI session three papers were presented. Two papers were wholly or partly motivated by legal applications. Remi Wieten from Utrecht university addressed the problem that Bayesian networks, while increasingly popular in forensic science, are poorly understood by legal experts. This problem makes it hard to build reliable Bayesian networks for crime [...]
The Agent Systems session was opened by Bram Wiggers from the University of Groningen. In his paper "The origin of mimicry: Deception or merely coincidence?", he presents an agent model for the evolution of mimicry. Mimicry refers to a situation in which two species of prey animals share a phenotype, while only one of them [...]
In the first presentation, Nico Roos proposed a model for describing a network of distributed services for task executions, and proved that for this model, even in a self-interested setting reinforcement learning can be applied to learn how to cooperate well. Specifically, when agents can decide which agent should perform the next subtask and can [...]
The first presentation of the Natural Language Processing session was given by Mathijs Pieters from the University of Groningen titled "Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques for Multi-label Genre Classification". This joint work with Marco Wiering won the SNN best paper award and studies classic and novel text classification techniques with the aim to recognize the [...]
The first talk, "Get Your Virtual Hands Off Me! - Developing Threatening Agents Using Haptic Feedback" was presented by Tibor Bosse, and described how virtual agents can be used to train people in social situations. For example, virtual agents in a VR setting are used to train tram conductors in Amsterdam on how to best [...]
After the opening remarks by the conference organizers and an introduction to the scientific context in Groningen, this session featured the first four paper presentations of the conference in the main lecture room. It had an unfortunate start due to a mix of cable and hardware issues, but speakers and chair together solved these cooperatively [...]