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Background: Pediatric dermatology represents one of the most underserved subspecialties in pediatrics. Artificial intelligence (AI) and telemedicine have become considerable in dermatology, reaching diagnostic accuracy comparable to or exceeding that of in-person visits. This work aims to review the current state of telemedicine and AI in pediatric dermatology, suggesting potential ways to address existing issues and challenges. Methods: We conducted a literature review including only articles published in the last 15 years. A total of 458 studies were identified, of which only 76 were included. Results: Most of the studies on telemedicine evaluate accuracy focused on concordance, which ranges from 70% to 89% for the most common pediatric skin diseases. Telemedicine showed the potential to manage chronic dermatological conditions in children, as well as decrease waiting times, and represents the chance for unprivileged populations to overcome barriers limiting access to medical care. The main limitations of telemedicine consist of the language barrier and the need for adequate technologies and acceptable image-quality video, which can be overcome by AI. AI-driven apps and platforms can facilitate remote consultations between pediatric dermatologists and patients or their caregivers. However, the integration of AI into clinical practice faces some challenges ranging from technical to ethical and regulatory. It is crucial to ensure that the development, deployment, and utilization of AI systems conform to the seven fundamental requirements for trustworthy AI. Conclusion: This study supplies a detailed discussion of open challenges with a particular focus on equity and ethical considerations and defining possible concrete directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses and compares some of the automated reasoners that have been used in recent research for compliance checking. Although the list of the considered reasoners is not exhaustive, we believe that our analysis is representative enough to take stock of the current state of the art in the topic. We are interested here in formalizations at the first-order level. Past literature on normative reasoning mostly focuses on the propositional level. However, the propositional level is of little usefulness for concrete LegalTech applications, in which compliance checking must be enforced on (large) sets of individuals. Furthermore, we are interested in technologies that are freely available and that can be further investigated and compared by the scientific community. In other words, this paper does not consider technologies only employed in industry and/or whose source code is non-accessible. This paper formalizes a selected use case in the considered reasoners and compares the implementations, also in terms of simulations with respect to shared synthetic datasets. The comparison will highlight that lot of further research still needs to be done to integrate the benefits featured by the different reasoners into a single standardized first-order framework, suitable for LegalTech applications. All source codes are freely available at https://github.com/liviorobaldo/compliancecheckers, together with instructions to locally reproduce the simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning black boxes, exemplified by deep neural networks, often exhibit challenges in interpretability due to their reliance on complicated relationships involving numerous internal parameters and input features. This lack of transparency from a human perspective renders their predictions untrustworthy, particularly in critical applications. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing the design and implementation of CReEPy, an algorithm for symbolic knowledge extraction based on explainable clustering. Specifically, CReEPy leverages the underlying clustering performed by the ExACT or CREAM algorithms to generate human-interpretable Prolog rules that mimic the behaviour of opaque models. Additionally, we introduce CRASH, an algorithm for the automated tuning of hyper-parameters required by CReEPy. We present experiments evaluating both the human readability and predictive performance of the proposed knowledge-extraction algorithm, employing existing state-of-the-art techniques as benchmarks for comparison in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated compliance checking, i.e. the task of automatically assessing whether states of affairs comply with normative systems, has recently received a lot of attention from the scientific community, also as a consequence of the increasing investments in Artificial Intelligence technologies for the legal domain (LegalTech). The authors of this paper deem as crucial the research and implementation of compliance checkers that can directly process data in RDF format, as nowadays more and more (big) data in this format are becoming available worldwide, across a multitude of different domains. Among the automated technologies that have been used in recent literature, to the best of our knowledge, only two of them have been evaluated with input states of affairs encoded in RDF format. This paper formalizes a selected use case in these two technologies and compares the implementations, also in terms of simulations with respect to shared synthetic datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The XAI community is currently studying and developing symbolic knowledge-extraction (SKE) algorithms as a means to produce human-intelligible explanations for black-box machine learning predictors, so as to achieve believability in human-machine interaction. However, many extraction procedures exist in the literature, and choosing the most adequate one is increasingly cumbersome, as novel methods keep on emerging. Challenges arise from the fact that SKE algorithms are commonly defined based on theoretical assumptions that typically hinder practical applicability. This paper focuses on hypercube-based SKE methods, a quite general class of extraction techniques mostly devoted to regression-specific tasks. We first show that hypercube-based methods are flexible enough to support classification problems as well, then we propose a general model for them, and discuss how they support SKE on datasets, predictors, or learning tasks of any sort. Empirical examples are reported as well –based upon the PSyKE framework –, showing the applicability of hypercube-based methods to actual classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preferences are ubiquitous in our everyday life. They are essential in the decision making process of individuals. Recently, they have also been employed to represent ethical principles, normative systems or guidelines. In this work we focus on a ceteris paribus semantics for deontic logic: a state of affairs where a larger set of respected prescriptions is preferable to a state of affairs where some are violated. Conditional preference networks (CP-nets) are a compact formalism to express and analyse ceteris paribus preferences, with some desirable computational properties. In this paper, we show how deontic concepts (such as contrary-to-duty obligations) can be modeled with generalized CP-nets (GCP-nets) and how to capture the distinction between strong and weak permission in this formalism. To do that, we leverage on an existing restricted deontic logic that will be mapped into conditional preference nets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the computational model of Arg 2 P, a logic-based argumentation framework for defeasible reasoning and agent conversation particularly suitable for explaining agent intelligent behaviours. The model is reified as the Arg 2 P technology, which is presented and discussed both from an architectural and a technological perspective so as to point out its potential in the engineering of intelligent systems. Finally, an illustrative application scenario is discussed in the domain of computable law for autonomous vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, micro-mobility sharing systems have become extremely popular. Such systems consist in fleets of dockless electric vehicles which are deployed in cities, and used by citizens to move in a more ecological and flexible way. Unfortunately, one of the issues related to such technologies is its intrinsic load imbalance, since users can pick up and drop off the electric vehicles where they prefer. In this paper we present ESB-DQN, a multi-agent system for E-Scooter Balancing (ESB) based on Deep Reinforcement Learning where agents are implemented as Deep Q-Networks (DQN). ESB-DQN offers suggestions to pick or return e-scooters in order to make the fleet usage and sharing as balanced as possible, still ensuring that the original plans of the user undergo only minor changes. The main contributions of this paper include a careful analysis of the state of the art, an innovative customer-oriented rebalancing strategy, the integration of state-of-the-art libraries for deep Reinforcement Learning into the existing ODySSEUS simulator of mobility sharing systems, and preliminary but promising experiments that suggest that our approach is worth further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interoperability of devices from distinct brands on the Internet of Things (IoT) domain is still an open issue. The main reason is that pioneer companies always deliberately neglected to deploy devices able to interoperate with competitors products. The key factors that may invert such a trend derive, on one hand, from the abstraction of communication protocols that facilitates the migration from vertical to horizontal paradigms and, on the other hand, from the introduction of common and shared ontologies encoding devices specifications. The Semantic Web, with all its layers, can be considered the main framework for delivering ontologies, and by virtue of its features, it is surely the ideal means for providing shared knowledge. In this paper we present a framework that instantiates cognitive agents operating in IoT context, endowed with meta-reasoning in the Semantic Web. The framework, called SW-Caspar, is also provided with a module that performs semi-automatic ontology learning from sentences expressed in natural language; such a learning process generates a conceptual space reflecting the domain of discourse with an instance of a novel foundational ontology called Linguistic Oriented Davidsonian Ontology (LODO), whose main feature is to increase the deepness of reasoning without compromising linguistic-related features. LODO is inspired by the First-Order Logic Davidsonian notation and is serialized in OWL 2. Well-known examples derived from the theory of logical reasoning and a case-study applied to automation on health scenarios are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomy is crucial in cooperation. The complexity of HRI scenarios requires autonomous robots able to exploit their superhuman computations (based on DNN, Machine Learning techniques and Big Data) in a trustworthy way. Trustworthiness is not only a matter of accuracy, privacy or security, but it is becoming more and more a matter of adaptation to humans agency. As claimed by Falcone and Castelfranchi, autonomy means the possibility of dislaying or providing an unexpected behavior (including refusal) that departs from a requested (agreed upon or not) behavior. In this sense, the autonomy to decide how to adopt a task delegated by the user, with respect to her/his own real needs and goals, distinguishes intelligent and trustworthy robots from highly performing robots. This kind of smart help can be provided only by cognitive robots able to represent and ascribe mental states (beliefs, goals, intentions, desires etc.) to their interlocutors. The mental states attribution can be the result of complex reasoning mechanisms or can be fast and automatic, based on scripts, roles, categories or stereotypes typically exploited by humans every time they interact in everyday life. In all these cases, robots that build and use cognitive models of humans (that have a Theory of Mind of their interlocutors), have to operate also a meta-evaluation of their own predictive skills to build those models. Robots have to be endowed with the capability to self-trust their skills to interpret the interlocutors and the context, for producing smart and effective decisions towards humans. After exploring the main concepts that make collaboration between humans and robots trustworthy and effective, we present the first of a series of experiments draw for testing different aspects of a designed cognitive architecture for trustworthy HRI. This architecture, based on consolidated theoretical principles (theory of social adjustable autonomy, theory of mind, theory of trust) has the main goal to build cognitive robots that provide smart, trustworthy collaboration, every time a human requires their help. In particular, the experiment has been designed in order to demonstrate how the robot's capability to learn its own level of self-trust on its predictive abilities in perceiving the user and building a model of her/him, allows it to establish a trustworthy collaboration and to maintain a high level of user's satisfaction, with respect to the robot's performance, also when these abilities progressively degrade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movie industry is a highly differentiated context where production studios compete in non-price product attributes, which influences the box office results of a motion picture. Because of the short life cycle and the constant entrance of new competitive products, temporal decisions play a crucial role. Time series of the number of movies on release and the sum of the box office results of the ten top motion pictures (ranked by box office result for that week) present a counterphased seasonality in the US movie market. We suggest that a possible reason is a risk sensitivity adaptation in the behaviour of the movie's distributors. This paper provides a model supporting this hypothesis. We developed an agent-based model of a movie market, and we simulated it for 15 years. A comparable global behaviour exists when producers schedule the movies according to given risk-sensitive strategies. This research improves the knowledge of the US motion picture market, analyzing a real-world scenario and providing insight into the behaviour of existing firms in a complex environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plans for emergency response are complex collaborations in which actors take roles and responsibilities. They are generally long textual documents containing practical instructions, in natural language, for hazard responses. A more rigorous structured-text would be useful for a twofold audience. From one side, it can be useful for quickly understanding the plan and on the other side it can be used to improve the modelling phase and delivering an automatic emergency-support system. This paper proposes an approach, conceived for humans, for converting a free-form plan document into a structured version of the same document. The approach is based on a linguistic and semantic analysis that are strictly correlated and materialize in a metamodel. It contains the essential elements of an emergency plan, and it aids in interpreting the input document also reducing inconsistencies, redundancies, and ambiguities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common practice in modern explainable AI is to post-hoc explain black-box machine learning (ML) predictors – such as neural networks – by extracting symbolic knowledge out of them, in the form of either rule lists or decision trees. By acting as a surrogate model, the extracted knowledge aims at revealing the inner working of the black box, thus enabling its inspection, representation, and explanation. Various knowledge-extraction algorithms have been presented in the literature so far. Unfortunately, running implementations of most of them are currently either proofs of concept or unavailable. In any case, a unified, coherent software framework supporting them all – as well as their interchange, comparison, and exploitation in arbitrary ML workflows – is currently missing. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss the design of PSyKE, a platform providing general-purpose support to symbolic knowledge extraction from different sorts of black-box predictors via many extraction algorithms. Notably, PSyKE targets symbolic knowledge in logic form, allowing the extraction of first-order logic clauses. The extracted knowledge is thus both machine- and human-interpretable, and can be used as a starting point for further symbolic processing—e.g. automated reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different formalisms for defeasible reasoning have been used to represent knowledge and reason in the legal field. In this work, we provide an overview of the following logic-based approaches to defeasible reasoning: defeasible logic, Answer Set Programming, ABA+, ASPIC+, and DeLP. We compare features of these approaches under three perspectives: the logical model (knowledge representation), the method (computational mechanisms), and the technology (available software resources). On top of that, two real examples in the legal domain are designed and implemented in ASPIC+ to showcase the benefit of an argumentation approach in real-world domains. The CrossJustice and Interlex projects are taken as a testbed, and experiments are conducted with the Arg2P technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As such, the workshop has always been located in Italy, with the workshop Steering Committee constantly committed to involve every major Italian research group working on agents and multi-agent systems. The first Workshop "From Objects to Agents" (WOA) was held in Parma in May 2000. The topics discussed in the papers covered some of the most debated subjects in the research on agents and multi-agent systems, and were not limited to the theme of the workshop, which was suggested in the call for papers as I multi-agent systems in the machine learning era i . [Extracted from the article]

New generations of distributed systems are opening novel perspectives for logic programming (LP): On the one hand, service-oriented architectures represent nowadays the standard approach for distributed systems engineering; on the other hand, pervasive systems mandate for situated intelligence. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Logic Programming as a Service (LPaaS) as a means to address the needs of pervasive intelligent systems through logic engines exploited as a distributed service. First, we define the abstract architectural model by re-interpreting classical LP notions in the new context; then we elaborate on the nature of LP interpreted as a service by describing the basic LPaaS interface. Finally, we show how LPaaS works in practice by discussing its implementation in terms of distributed tuProlog engines, accounting for basic issues such as interoperability and configurability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to enable logic programming to deal with the diversity of pervasive systems, where many heterogeneous, domain-specific computational models could benefit from the power of symbolic computation, we explore the expressive power of labelled systems. To this end, we define a new notion of truth for logic programs extended with labelled variables interpreted in non-Herbrand domains-where, however, terms maintain their usual Herbrand interpretations. First, a model for labelled variables in logic programming is defined. Then, the fixpoint and the operational semantics are presented and their equivalence is formally proved. A meta-interpreter implementing the operational semantics is also introduced, followed by some case studies aimed at showing the effectiveness of our approach in selected scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precisely when the success of artificial intelligence (AI) sub-symbolic techniques makes them be identified with the whole AI by many non-computer-scientists and non-technical media, symbolic approaches are getting more and more attention as those that could make AI amenable to human understanding. Given the recurring cycles in the AI history, we expect that a revamp of technologies often tagged as "classical AI"—in particular, logic-based ones—will take place in the next few years. On the other hand, agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term connection with logic-based technologies, which characterised their early days, might open new ways to engineer explainable intelligent systems. This is why understanding the current status of logic-based technologies for MAS is nowadays of paramount importance. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of those technologies by making them the subject of a systematic literature review (SLR). The resulting technologies are discussed and evaluated from two different perspectives: the MAS and the logic-based ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Together with the disruptive development of modern sub-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), symbolic approaches to classical AI are re-gaining momentum, as more and more researchers exploit their potential to make AI more comprehensible, explainable, and therefore trustworthy. Since logic-based approaches lay at the core of symbolic AI, summarizing their state of the art is of paramount importance now more than ever, in order to identify trends, benefits, key features, gaps, and limitations of the techniques proposed so far, as well as to identify promising research perspectives. Along this line, this paper provides an overview of logic-based approaches and technologies by sketching their evolution and pointing out their main application areas. Future perspectives for exploitation of logic-based technologies are discussed as well, in order to identify those research fields that deserve more attention, considering the areas that already exploit logic-based approaches as well as those that are more likely to adopt logic-based approaches in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interoperability of devices from distinct brands on the Internet of Things (IoT) domain is still an open issue. The main reason is that pioneer companies always deliberately neglected to deploy devices able to interoperate with competitors products. The key factors that may invert such a trend derive, on one hand, from the abstraction of communication protocols that facilitates the migration from vertical to horizontal paradigms and, on the other hand, from the introduction of common and shared ontologies encoding devices specifications. The Semantic Web, with all its layers, can be considered the main framework for delivering ontologies, and by virtue of its features, it is surely the ideal means for providing shared knowledge. In this paper we present a framework that instantiates cognitive agents operating in IoT context, endowed with meta-reasoning in the Semantic Web. The framework, called SW-Caspar, is also provided with a module that performs semi-automatic ontology learning from sentences expressed in natural language; such a learning process generates a conceptual space reflecting the domain of discourse with an instance of a novel foundational ontology called Linguistic Oriented Davidsonian Ontology (LODO), whose main feature is to increase the deepness of reasoning without compromising linguistic-related features. LODO is inspired by the First-Order Logic Davidsonian notation and is serialized in OWL 2. Well-known examples derived from the theory of logical reasoning and a case-study applied to automation on health scenarios are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]