Multiyear satellite observations are used to document a relationship between the large-scale variability in precipitation over the tropical Atlantic and aerosol traced to African sources. During boreal winter and spring there is a significant reduction in precipitation south of the Atlantic marine intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) during months when aerosol concentrations are anomalously hi...

48 AI MAGAZINE ■ For many years, the very idea of artificial intelligence has been provocative and exciting. However, with a continually increasing focus on specialized subareas and somewhat narrow technical problems (both of which are inevitable and in many ways healthy), we may be torpedoing our core research agenda: the creation of a true synthetic intelligence. I reflect briefly on the esse...

This paper describes experience in using a visual formalism, called JASMINUM, in the design of the user interface of a structured document editor called Waterloo Rita. JASMINUM combines concepts from Abstract Data Views, with notations from Objectcharts, Statecharts, and Petri-nets. JASMINUMwas motivated by the need for a formal notation to express directly some aspects of the design of interac...

The aim of this contribution is to highlight a new, complex, challenging scenario involving the design discipline when working on the design of mobile applications. New challenging usability issues have to be faced, as well as the social and economic impact of the designed products. In this multifaceted context, design has the chance to play a key strategic role: relating to and cooperating wit...

SUMMER 2016 3 In 1998, AAAI Publications committee chair Ken Ford invited me to become the Editor-in-Chief of AI Magazine. After two issues as Editor Elect, I became Editor-in-Chief in spring 1999. Now, 70 issues and 17 years later, I am still deeply grateful for the opportunity to contribute to AAAI and to the AI community through the editorship. It has been a privilege to guide the magazine’s...

This study investigated the snowstorm impact on Wisconsin state highway system and assessed the winter maintenance effort in improving highway safety from a macroscopic perspective. Though the inverse relationship between the de-icing material consumption and the crash counts during the snowstorms is not reflected in the analysis, it implies that causes of snowstorm crashes are multifold. The f...

Seasonal characteristics of aerosol optical properties in Sky Radiometer Network (SKYNET) Hefei site are studied using a sky radiometer from March 2007 to May 2013. The aerosol optical depth (AOD), Angstrom exponent (AE), volume size distributions, single-scattering albedo (SSA), refractive index, and asymmetry factor (ASY) of aerosols are simultaneously retrieved using the SKYRAD.pack version ...

WINTER 2015 5 As George Bernard Shaw once observed, being slandered is better than being ignored. So maybe AI researchers should be happy about what’s been happening lately. After decades of pundits and philosophers arguing that AI is provably impossible, suddenly that argument has been replaced with the assertion that not only is it possible, but superhuman AI is so inevitable that it is the g...

[1] We examine the differences between observed stratospheric vertical wave reflection and wave absorption events, which differ in that the wave-induced deceleration remains confined to upper levels in the former. The two types of events signify two types of stratospheric winter dynamics, associated with different downward coupling to the troposphere. Using time-lagged composites, we find that ...

This paperpresents a new approach for consistently caching dynamic Web data in order to improve performance. Our algorithm, which we call Data Update Propagation (DUP), maintains data dependence information between cached objects and the underlying data which affect their values in a graph. When the system becomes aware of a change to underlying data, graph traversal algorithms are applied to d...