AI

Automatic Bill Recommendation for Statehouse Journalists

foaad — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 19:49:18 +0000

Automatic Bill Recommendation for Statehouse Journalists

foaad Wed, 09/06/2023 - 12:49

Authorship

Michelle Perkonigg and Foaad Khosmood

Publication

Electronic Government

Conference

Sunday, August 20, 2023 - 12:00

Tags

EGOV 2023 Proceedings

Abstract

AI4Reporters is a project designed to produce automated electronic tip sheets for news reporters covering the statehouses (state level legislatures) in the United States. The project aims to capture the most important information that occurred in a bill discussion to allow reporters to quickly decide if they want to pursue a story on the subject. In this paper, we present, discuss and evaluate a module for the tip sheets that is designed to recommend additional bills to investigate for the reporter that receives the tip sheet.

Perkonigg_Electronic_Government_2023.pdf

Feature Engineering for US State Legislative Hearings: Stance, Affiliation, Engagement and Absentees

foaad — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:32:22 +0000

Feature Engineering for US State Legislative Hearings: Stance, Affiliation, Engagement and Absentees foaad Sat, 07/29/2023 - 17:32

Authorship

Joshua Grace and Foaad Khosmood

Publication

Digital Humanities 2023

Conference

Location

Graz, Austria

Saturday, July 1, 2023 - 12:00

Tags

DH 2023 Paper

arXiv preprint version (2021)

DH 2023 Proceedings

Abstract

In US State government legislatures, most activity occurs in committees made of lawmakers discussing bills. This paper presents systems to extract legislators' engagement and absence during committee meetings and the stance and affiliation of non-lawmakers making public comments. We propose a system to track the affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational representative supports or opposes the bill.

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation from NPC Attributes

foaad — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 03:56:05 +0000

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation from NPC Attributes foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 20:56

Authorship

Megan Washburn and Foaad Khosmood

Publication

Foundations of Digital Games

Conference

Location

Malta

Wednesday, September 9, 2020 - 12:00

Tags

ACM DL

Abstract

Procedural Music Generation in Games (PMGG) can enrich the playing experience by providing both entertainment and communication to the player. We present a system that generates unique procedural thematic music for non-player characters (NPC) based on developer-defined attributes and game state. The system responds in real-time to the dynamic relationship between the player and target “boss” NPC. We create a multiplayer 2D adventure game using and evaluate the music generation system by means of user study.

Washburn_FDG20.pdf

Evaluation of Automatic Text Summarization using Synthetic Facts

foaad — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 03:49:30 +0000

Evaluation of Automatic Text Summarization using Synthetic Facts foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 20:49

Authorship

Jay Ahn and Foaad Khosmood

Publication

arXiv

Non refereed paper

Monday, April 11, 2022 - 12:00

Tags

arXiv.org

Abstract

In US State government legislatures, most of the activity occurs in committees made up of lawmakers discussing bills. When analyzing, classifying or summarizing these committee proceedings, some important features become broadly interesting. In this paper, we engineer four useful features, two applying to lawmakers (engagement and absence), and two to non-lawmakers (stance and affiliation). We propose a system to automatically track the affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational representative supports or opposes the bill.

Making California Legislative Process Transparent

foaad — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 03:35:59 +0000

Making California Legislative Process Transparent foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 20:35

Authorship

Foaad Khosmood, Hisham Assal, Johanna Snyder, Franz Kurfess

Publication

Cal Poly Position Paper

Non refereed paper

Location

San Luis Obispo, California

Monday, July 15, 2013 - 12:00

Tags

Abstract

This White Paper describes the research and design of the software system called Digital Democracy. The Digital Democracy system will provide its users: individuals with interest in public policy, journalists and media organizations, public interest and government watchdog groups, and lawmakers with direct access to videos and transcripts of State Legislative Committee hearings, as well as analytical tools enabling users of the system to conduct in-depth research of public policy issues and the attitudes of state legislators towards them.

DigitalDemocracyWhitePaper.pdf

Evolving unsupervised neural networks for Slither.io

foaad — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 02:05:02 +0000

Evolving unsupervised neural networks for Slither.io

foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 19:05

Authorship

Mitchell Miller, Megan Washburn and Foaad Khosmood

Publication

FDG 2019

Poster or Panel Discussion

Location

San Luis Obispo, California

Wednesday, August 28, 2019 - 12:00

Tags

Games
AI

ACM DL

Abstract

Slither. io is a massively multiplayer online game in which up to 500 players control worm-like avatars and consume food to grow with the goal of becoming the largest player while avoiding running into one another. The platform serves as a good testbed for developing AI controlled agents due to its accessibility, mechanical simplicity, and unpredictability. In this paper, we develop a Slither. io bot using neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) and compare its performance to that of the best open source bot available online (a high-performing expert system bot).

Slither.io FDG 2019 Poster.pdf

Composition of basic heuristics for the game 2048

foaad — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 02:00:01 +0000

Composition of basic heuristics for the game 2048

foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 19:00

Authorship

Iris Kohler, Theresa Migler and Foaad Khosmood

Publication

FDG 2019

Poster or Panel Discussion

Location

San Luis Obispo, California

Monday, August 26, 2019 - 12:00

Tags

Games
AI

ACM DL

Abstract

2048 is a simple and intriguing sliding block puzzle game that has been studied for several years. Many complex solvers, often developed using neural nets are available and capable of achieving very high scores. We are, however, interested in using only basic heuristics, the kind that could be conceivably employed by human players without the aid of computation. A common way to implement a 2048 solver involves searching the game tree for the best moves, choosing a move and scoring the game board using some evaluation functions.

2048 FDG 2019 Poster.pdf

Learning alignments from legislative discourse

foaad — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 01:37:02 +0000

Learning alignments from legislative discourse

foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 18:37

Authorship

Daniel Kauffman, Foaad Khosmood, Toshihiro Kuboi and Alex Dekhtyar

Publication

Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age

Poster or Panel Discussion

Location

Delft, Netherlands

Wednesday, May 30, 2018 - 12:00

Tags

ACM DL

Abstract

In this work, we seek to quantify the extent to which a legislator's spoken language indicates their degree of alignment toward an organization that has a taken a documented position on some legislation. To perform this study, we use a corpus of bill discussion transcripts provided by Digital Democracy1. We then apply proven learning methods in the field of natural language processing to predict alignment scores between each member of the California state legislature and a select set of state-recognized organizations.

Kauffman_Alignments_DGO2018.pdf

kauffman-dgo-poster.pdf

Automatic News Article Generation from Legislative Proceedings: A Phenom-based Approach

foaad — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 20:28:57 +0000

Automatic News Article Generation from Legislative Proceedings: A Phenom-based Approach foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 13:28

Authorship

Anastasia Klimashevskaia, Richa Gadgil, Thomas Gerrity, Foaad Khosmood and Christian Gütl

Publication

9th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing (SLSP-21)

Conference

Location

Cardiff, UK

Monday, November 1, 2021 - 12:00

Tags

Springer Link

Abstract

Algorithmic journalism refers to automatic AI-constructed news stories. There have been successful commercial implementations for news stories in sports, weather, financial reporting and similar domains with highly structured, well defined tabular data sources. Other domains such as local reporting have not seen adoption of algorithmic journalism, and thus no automated reporting systems are available in these categories which can have important implications for the industry.

Automatic News Article Generation from Legislative.pdf

Enhancing story generation with the semantic web

foaad — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 19:51:28 +0000

Enhancing story generation with the semantic web foaad Sun, 08/14/2022 - 12:51

Authorship

Erik LaBouve, Eric Miller, Foaad Khosmood

Publication

FDG 2019

Conference

Location

San Luis Obispo, California

Wednesday, August 28, 2019 - 12:00

Tags

ACM DL

Abstract

In story or character driven games, in-game stories are usually manually authored in advance. As the complexity of interactions in games increases, the quantity of hand-crafted text typically follows. Designing stories and composing content by hand is a laborious and time consuming process that if automated, would speed up game production and lower development costs. In this paper, we present a mixed initiative tool to help generalize and enhance context free grammars (CFGs) for story generation.

enhancing_story_fdg19.pdf