COVID-19 pandemic elucidated that knowledge systems will be instrumental in cases where accurate information needs to be communicated to a substantial group of people with different backgrounds and technological resources. However, several challenges and obstacles hold back the wide adoption of virtual assistants by public health departments and organizations. This paper presents the Instant Expert, an open-source semantic web framework to build and integrate voice-enabled smart assistants (i.e. chatbots) for any web platform regardless of the underlying domain and technology. The component allows non-technical domain experts to effortlessly incorporate an operational assistant with voice recognition capability into their websites. Instant Expert is capable of automatically parsing, processing, and modeling Frequently Asked Questions pages as an information resource as well as communicating with an external knowledge engine for ontology-powered inference and dynamic data utilization. The presented framework utilizes advanced web technologies to ensure reusability and reliability, and an inference engine for natural language understanding powered by deep learning and heuristic algorithms. A use case for creating an informatory assistant for COVID-19 based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data is presented to demonstrate the framework's usage and benefits.
AI Institute, University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学人工智能学院）
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have long been positioned as a tool to provide crucial data-driven decision support to people. In this survey paper, we look at how AI in general, and collaboration assistants (CAs or chatbots for short) in particular, have been used during a true global exigency - the COVID-19 pandemic. The key observation is that chatbots missed their "Apollo moment" when they could have really provided contextual, personalized, reliable decision support at scale that the state-of-the-art makes possible. We review the existing capabilities that are feasible and metho…
Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School（约热夫·斯特凡国际研究生院）；Jožef Stefan Institute（约热夫·斯特凡研究所）；Qlector d.o.o.（Qlector有限公司）
A general approach for building a smart assistant that guides a user from a forecast generated by a machine learning model through a sequence of decision-making steps is presented. We develop a methodology to build such a system. The system is demonstrated on a demand forecasting use case in manufacturing. The methodology can be extended to several use cases in manufacturing. The system provides means for knowledge acquisition, gathering data from users. We envision active learning can be used to get data labels where labeled data is scarce.
Rice University（莱斯大学）；The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston（德克萨斯大学休斯顿健康科学中心）
Many COVID-19 patients developed prolonged symptoms after the infection, including fatigue, delirium, and headache. The long-term health impact of these conditions is still not clear. It is necessary to develop a way to follow up with these patients for monitoring their health status to support timely intervention and treatment. In the lack of sufficient human resources to follow up with patients, we propose a novel smart chatbot solution backed with machine learning to collect information (i.e., generating digital diary) in a personalized manner. In this article, we describe the design framew…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
An increasing number of monitoring systems have been developed in smart cities to ensure that real-time operations of a city satisfy safety and performance requirements. However, many existing city requirements are written in English with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. There is a high demand for assisting city policy makers in converting human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications for monitoring systems. To tackle this limitation, we build CitySpec, the first intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. To create C…
SmartBench: Evaluating LLMs in Smart Homes with Anomalous Device States and Behavioral Contexts
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Jilin University（吉林大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Taibah University（泰巴大学）；The University of Jordan（约旦大学）
The coronavirus pandemic has spread over the past two years in our highly connected and information-dense society. Nonetheless, disseminating accurate and up-to-date information on the spread of this pandemic remains a challenge. In this context, opting for a solution based on conversational artificial intelligence, also known under the name of the chatbot, is proving to be an unavoidable solution, especially since it has already shown its effectiveness in fighting the coronavirus crisis in several countries. This work proposes to design and implement a smart chatbot on the theme of COVID-19, …
This paper presents a new multimodal interventional radiology dataset, called PoCaP (Port Catheter Placement) Corpus. This corpus consists of speech and audio signals in German, X-ray images, and system commands collected from 31 PoCaP interventions by six surgeons with average duration of 81.4 $\pm$ 41.0 minutes. The corpus aims to provide a resource for developing a smart speech assistant in operating rooms. In particular, it may be used to develop a speech controlled system that enables surgeons to control the operation parameters such as C-arm movements and table positions. In order to rec…
As a result of the worldwide transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has evolved into an unprecedented pandemic. Currently, with unavailable pharmaceutical treatments and vaccines, this novel coronavirus results in a great impact on public health, human society, and global economy, which is likely to last for many years. One of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that a long-term system with non-pharmaceutical interventions for preventing and controlling new infectious diseases is desirable to be implemente…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
As more and more monitoring systems have been deployed to smart cities, there comes a higher demand for converting new human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications automatically. However, these human-specific requirements are often written in English and bring missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. In this paper, we present CitySpec, an intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. CitySpec not only helps overcome the language differences brought by English requirements and formal specifications, but also offers solutions to…
Foster School of Business（福斯特商学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Coller School of Management（科勒管理学院）；Tel Aviv Univeristy（特拉维夫大学）；Muma College of Business（穆玛商学院）；University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）
This paper presents methods to choose individuals to test for infection during a pandemic such as COVID-19, characterized by high contagion and presence of asymptomatic carriers. The smart-testing ideas presented here are motivated by active learning and multi-armed bandit techniques in machine learning. Our active sampling method works in conjunction with quarantine policies, can handle different objectives, is dynamic and adaptive in the sense that it continually adapts to changes in real-time data. The bandit algorithm uses contact tracing, location-based sampling and random sampling in ord…
SmartHomeSecure: Automated Detection and Repair of Smart Home Configuration Errors Using Large Language Models
Myers-Lawson School of Construction, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（Myers-Lawson工程学院，弗吉尼亚理工学院和州立大学）；School of Technology, Eastern Illinois University（技术学院，东伊利诺伊大学）
"I Apologize For Not Understanding Your Policy": Exploring the Specification and Evaluation of User-Managed Access Control Policies by AI Virtual Assistants
Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi（德克萨斯A&M大学-科罗索市）；University of Houston - Downtown（休斯顿大学-市中心）
本文通过非结构化到结构化测试评估主流 AI 虚拟助手对用户管理访问控制政策的理解，揭示其在复杂授权与动态适应上的局限并提出改进方向。
The electricity industry is heavily implementing smart grid technologies to improve reliability, availability, security, and efficiency. This implementation needs technological advancements, the development of standards and regulations, as well as testing and planning. Smart grid load forecasting and management are critical for reducing demand volatility and improving the market mechanism that connects generators, distributors, and retailers. During policy implementations or external interventions, it is necessary to analyse the uncertainty of their impact on the electricity demand to enable a…
