Robots operating in domestic environments generally need to interact with articulated objects, such as doors, cabinets, dishwashers or fridges. In this work, we present a novel, probabilistic framework for modeling articulated objects as kinematic graphs. Vertices in this graph correspond to object parts, while edges between them model their kinematic relationship. In particular, we present a set of parametric and non-parametric edge models and how they can robustly be estimated from noisy pose observations. We furthermore describe how to estimate the kinematic structure and how to use the learned kinematic models for pose prediction and for robotic manipulation tasks. We finally present how the learned models can be generalized to new and previously unseen objects. In various experiments using real robots with different camera systems as well as in simulation, we show that our approach is valid, accurate and efficient. Further, we demonstrate that our approach has a broad set of applications, in particular for the emerging fields of mobile manipulation and service robotics.

Publishing private data on external servers incurs the problem of how to avoid unwanted disclosure of confidential data. We study a problem of confidentiality in extended disjunctive logic programs and show how it can be solved by extended abduction. In particular, we analyze how credulous non-monotonic reasoning affects confidentiality.

We present a framework which constructs an event-style dis- course semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We assume discourse and sentence are distinct semantic objects, that play different roles in meaning evalua- tion. Moreover, two sets of composition functions, for handling different discourse relations, are introduced. The paper first gives the necessary background and motivation for event and dynamic semantics, then the framework with detailed examples will be introduced.

We consider the problem of speaker diarization, the problem of segmenting an audio recording of a meeting into temporal segments corresponding to individual speakers. The problem is rendered particularly difficult by the fact that we are not allowed to assume knowledge of the number of people participating in the meeting. To address this problem, we take a Bayesian nonparametric approach to speaker diarization that builds on the hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden Markov model (HDP-HMM) of Teh et al. [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 101 (2006) 1566--1581]. Although the basic HDP-HMM tends to over-segment the audio data---creating redundant states and rapidly switching among them---we describe an augmented HDP-HMM that provides effective control over the switching rate. We also show that this augmentation makes it possible to treat emission distributions nonparametrically. To scale the resulting architecture to realistic diarization problems, we develop a sampling algorithm that employs a truncated approximation of the Dirichlet process to jointly resample the full state sequence, greatly improving mixing rates. Working with a benchmark NIST data set, we show that our Bayesian nonparametric architecture yields state-of-the-art speaker diarization results.

For some computational problems (e.g., product configuration, planning, diagnosis, query answering, phylogeny reconstruction) computing a set of similar/diverse solutions may be desirable for better decision-making. With this motivation, we studied several decision/optimization versions of this problem in the context of Answer Set Programming (ASP), analyzed their computational complexity, and introduced offline/online methods to compute similar/diverse solutions of such computational problems with respect to a given distance function. All these methods rely on the idea of computing solutions to a problem by means of finding the answer sets for an ASP program that describes the problem. The offline methods compute all solutions in advance using the ASP formulation of the problem with an ASP solver, like Clasp, and then identify similar/diverse solutions using clustering methods. The online methods compute similar/diverse solutions following one of the three approaches: by reformulating the ASP representation of the problem to compute similar/diverse solutions at once using an ASP solver; by computing similar/diverse solutions iteratively (one after other) using an ASP solver; by modifying the search algorithm of an ASP solver to compute similar/diverse solutions incrementally. We modified Clasp to implement the last online method and called it Clasp-NK. In the first two online methods, the given distance function is represented in ASP; in the last one it is implemented in C++. We showed the applicability and the effectiveness of these methods on reconstruction of similar/diverse phylogenies for Indo-European languages, and on several planning problems in Blocks World. We observed that in terms of computational efficiency the last online method outperforms the others; also it allows us to compute similar/diverse solutions when the distance function cannot be represented in ASP.

Emergences of computers and information technological revolution made tremendous changes in the real world and provides a different dimension for the intelligent data analysis. Well formed fact, the information at right time and at right place deploy a better knowledge.However, the challenge arises when larger volume of inconsistent data is given for decision making and knowledge extraction. To handle such imprecise data certain mathematical tools of greater importance has developed by researches in recent past namely fuzzy set, intuitionistic fuzzy set, rough Set, formal concept analysis and ordering rules. It is also observed that many information system contains numerical attribute values and therefore they are almost similar instead of exact similar. To handle such type of information system, in this paper we use two processes such as pre process and post process. In pre process we use rough set on intuitionistic fuzzy approximation space with ordering rules for finding the knowledge whereas in post process we use formal concept analysis to explore better knowledge and vital factors affecting decisions.

Frustration has been generally viewed in a negative light and its potential role in learning neglected. We propose a new approach to intrinsically motivated learning where frustration is a key factor that allows to dynamically balance exploration and exploitation. Moreover, based on the result obtained from our experiment with older infants, we propose that a temporary decrease in learning from negative feedback can also be beneficial in fine-tuning a newly learned behavior. We suggest that this temporal indifference to the outcome of an action may be related to the sense of control, and results from the state of elation, that is the experience of overcoming a very difficult task after prolonged frustration. Our preliminary simulation results serve as a proof-of-concept for our approach.

MapReduce provided a novel computing model for complex job decomposition and sub-tasks management to support cloud computing with large distributed data sets. However, its performance is significantly influenced by the working data distributions over those data sets. In this paper, we put forward a novel model to balance data distribution to improve cloud computing performance in data-intensive applications, such as distributed data mining. By extending the classic MapReduce model with an agent-aid layer and abstracting working load requests for data blocks as tokens, the agents can reason from previously received tokens about where to send other tokens in order to balance the working tasks and improve system performance. Our key contribution lies in building an efficient token routing algorithm in spite of agents' unknowing to the global state of data distribution in cloud. We also built a prototype of our system, and the experimental results show that our approach can significantly improve the efficiency of cloud computing.

Speech acts provide good insights into the communicative behavior of tweeters on Twitter. This paper is mainly concerned with speech act recognition in Twitter as a multi-class classification problem, for which we propose a set of word-based and character-based features. Inexpensive, robust and efficient, our method achieves an average F1 score of nearly 0.7 with the existence of much noise in our annotated Twitter data. In view of the deficiency of training data for the task, we experimented extensively with different configurations of training and test data, leading to empirical findings that may provide valuable reference for building benchmark datasets for sustained research on speech act recognition in Twitter.

Users are constantly involved in a multitude of activities in ever-changing context. Analyzing activities in context-rich environments has become a great challenge in context-awareness research. Traditional methods for activity recognition, such as classification, cannot cope with the variety and dynamicity of context and activities. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition approach that incorporates unsupervised learning. We analyze the feasibility of applying subspace clustering---a specific type of unsupervised learning — to high-dimensional, heterogeneous sensory input. Then we present the correspondence between clustering output and classification input. This approach has the potential to discover implicit, evolving activities, and can provide valuable assistance to traditional classification based methods.