This project continues the development of the AITopics information portal, a service to the Artificial Intelligence research community and an educational resource for the general public. The portal can be found at www.aitopics.org. This site was originally conceived as a compendium of introductory and historical articles about artificial intelligence for use by the AI community as well as the general public. The initial prototype was a manual effort conducted by volunteers at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Following this, an NSF-funded effort was undertaken in 2012 to reduce the time required of volunteers without reducing the quality of information provided. This project advances the sophistication of the portal by automating the time-consuming process of selecting content from the literature to post on the website, and by enhancing a deployed AI news finder program employed to feed the site with fresh content. The ultimate goal of this work is to build a generally useful content management framework that would be applicable to such outreach effort across all sciences.
The project activities include A) development of the NewsFinder program to browse online AI journals as well as current periodicals to find interesting overview articles; B) creation of additional content management technology including tools for user interaction and feedback; creation of meta-data for search engines, creation of summary descriptions; automatically learning criteria for interesting items; and creation of tools to identify new topics as the field changes; C) continued curating of online versions of classic books and papers, including scanning material only available in hard copy; D) extension of NewsFinder to find articles describing new applications in each Applications area; E) as well as to provide useful information to practitioners in a new area of technology, including classification of IAAI papers by industry and type of problem; and F) expansion of the use of social media and mobile devices to refine and deliver information.
