Africa
Training a Multilingual Sportscaster: Using Perceptual Context to Learn Language
Chen, D. L., Kim, J., Mooney, R. J.
We present a novel framework for learning to interpret and generate language using only perceptual context as supervision. We demonstrate its capabilities by developing a system that learns to sportscast simulated robot soccer games in both English and Korean without any language-specific prior knowledge. Training employs only ambiguous supervision consisting of a stream of descriptive textual comments and a sequence of events extracted from the simulation trace. The system simultaneously establishes correspondences between individual comments and the events that they describe while building a translation model that supports both parsing and generation. We also present a novel algorithm for learning which events are worth describing. Human evaluations of the generated commentaries indicate they are of reasonable quality and in some cases even on par with those produced by humans for our limited domain.
LEXSYS: Architecture and Implication for Intelligent Agent systems
LEXSYS, (Legume Expert System) was a project conceived at IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture) Ibadan Nigeria. It was initiated by the COMBS (Collaborative Group on Maize-Based Systems Research in the 1990. It was meant for a general framework for characterizing on-farm testing for technology design for sustainable cereal-based cropping system. LEXSYS is not a true expert system as the name would imply, but simply a user-friendly information system. This work is an attempt to give a formal representation of the existing system and then present areas where intelligent agent can be applied.
Whoโs Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda
Blumenstock, Joshua Evan (University of California, Berkeley) | Gillick, Dan (University of California, Berkeley) | Eagle, Nathan (Santa Fe Institute)
But whereas in the general Rwandan populace males tend Despite the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in the developing to be much better educated (76.3% of males are literate, but world, remarkably little is known about the structure only 64.7% of females), among mobile phone users it is the and demographics of the mobile phone market. While a women who achieve higher levels of education: the median few qualitative studies have detailed social norms of phone woman completes secondary school, while the median man use in specific communities (Donner 2007; Burrell 2009), does not (t 4.79). Table 1 shows a few statistics on asset and a handful of quantitative researchers have begun to analyze ownership, with associated sampling error.
Causal Structure Learning for Famine Prediction
Mwebaze, Ernest (Makerere University) | Okori, Washington (Makerere University) | Quinn, John Alexander (Makerere University)
Food shortages are increasing in many areas of the world. In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding the causal relationships between socioeconomic factors in a developing-world household and their risk of experiencing famine. We analyse the extent to which it is possible to predict famine in a household based on these factors, looking at a data collected from 5404 households in Uganda. To do this we use a set of causal structure learning algorithms, employed as a committee that votes on the causal relationships between the variables. We contrast prediction accuracy of famine based on feature sets suggested by our prior knowledge and by the models we learn.
Using Data Mining to Combat Infrastructure Inefficiencies: The Case of Predicting Nonpayment for Ethiopian Telecom
Yigzaw, Mariye (Addis Ababa University) | Hill, Shawndra (University of Pennsylvania) | Banser, Anita (University of Pennsylvania) | Lessa, Lemma (Addis Ababa University)
Data mining and machine learning technologies for business applications have evolved over the past two decades, and are regularly applied in contemporary organizations to everything from manufacturing to online advertising in fields ranging from health care to motor racing. Unfortunately, data mining techniques are not applied as often to problems in the developing world. Despite the fact that some industries, such as banks, airlines, courts, and telecommunications firms, necessitate data storage as part of their business process. We argue that data mining could be used to reduce infrastructure inefficiencies, which is one of the largest problems faced by Africa. We demonstrate that we can potentially reduce the infrastructure inefficiency of the Ethiopian telecommunications industry by ranking customers according to their likelihood of nonpayment using a data mining approach.
An Approach for Mining Accumulated Crop Cultivation Problems and their Solutions
El-Beltagy, Samhaa R. (Cairo University) | Rafea, Ahmed (American University in Cairo) | Mabrouk, Said (The Central Lab for Agricultural Expert Systems) | Rafea, Mahmoud (The Central Lab for Agricultural Expert Systems)
This paper presents an approach for mining agricultural problems that have been accumulated in a textual database over a period of 5 years. The problems, which are accompanied by their solutions, offer a wealth of knowledge that can be used by decision makers, researchers, and farmers alike. However, this wealth of knowledge can not be unlocked without a) representing these problems in a structured format, and b) applying algorithms that can summarize and analyze this information. Towards the achievement of the first goal, a multi-faceted object extraction methodology is presented, and for the achievement of the second, association rules are employed. As a proof of concept, the tool was applied of a set of weed problems. The presented methodology can be modified to work with any help and support textual database where both problems and their solutions are present.
Traffic Flow Monitoring in Crowded Cities
Quinn, John Alexander (Makerere University) | Nakibuule, Rose (Makerere University)
Traffic monitoring systems usually make assumptions about the movement of vehicles, such as that they drive in dedicated lanes, and that those lanes rarely include non-vehicle clutter. Urban settings within developing countries often present extremely chaotic traffic scenarios which make these assumptions unrealistic. We show how a standard approach to traffic monitoring can be made more robust by using probabilistic inference, and in such a way that we bypass the need for vehicle segmentation. Instead of tracking individual vehicles but treat a lane of traffic as a fluid and estimate the rate of flow. Our modelling of uncertainty allows us to accurately monitor traffic flow even in the presence of substantial clutter.
Reality Mining Africa
Hill, Shawndra (University of Pennsylvania) | Banser, Anita (University of Pennsylvania) | Berhan, Getachew (Addis Ababa University) | Eagle, Nathan (Santa Fe Institute)
Cellular phones can be used as mobile sensors, continuously logging usersโ behavior including movement, communication and proximity to others. While it is well understood that data generated from mobile phones includes a record of phone calls, there are also more sophisticated data types, such as Bluetooth or cell tower proximity logging, which reveal movement patterns and day-to-day human interactions. We explore the possibility of using mobile phone data to compare movement and communication patterns across cultures. The goal of this proof-of-concept study is to quantify behavior in order to compare different populations. We compare our ability to predict future calling behavior and movement patterns from the cellular phone data of subjects in two distinct groups: a set of university students at MIT in the United States and the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In addition, we show how Bluetooth data may be used to estimate the diffusion of an airborne pathogen outbreak in the different populations.
Mining Road Traffic Accident Data to Improve Safety: Role of Road-Related Factors on Accident Severity in Ethiopia
Beshah, Tibebe (Addis Ababa University) | Hill, Shawndra (University of Pennsylvania)
Road traffic accidents (RTAs) are a major public health concern, resulting in an estimated 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries worldwide each year. In the developing world, RTAs are among the leading cause of death and injury; Ethiopia in particular experiences the highest rate of such accidents. Thus, methods to reduce accident severity are of great interest to traffic agencies and the public at large. In this work, we applied data mining technologies to link recorded road characteristics to accident severity in Ethiopia, and developed a set of rules that could be used by the Ethiopian Traffic Agency to improve safety.
Golog.lua: Towards a Non-Prolog Implementation of Golog for Embedded Systems
Ferrein, Alexander (University of Cape Town)
Among many approaches to address the high-level decision making problem for autonomous robots and agents, the robot programming and plan language Golog follows a logic-based deliberative approach, and its successors were successfully deployed in a number of robotics applications over the past ten years. Usually, Golog interpreter are implemented in Prolog, which is not available for our target platform, the bi-ped robot platform Nao. In this paper we sketch our novel prototype implementation of a Golog interpreter in the scripting language Lua. With the example of the elevator domain we discuss how the basic action theory is specified and how we implemented fluent regression or backtracking in Lua. One possible advantage of the availability of a Non-Prolog implementation of Golog could be that Golog becomes available on a larger number of platforms, and also becomes more attractive for roboticists outside the Cognitive Robotics community.