Analyzing chat traffic has important applications for both the military and the civilian world. This paper presents a case study of a real-world application of chat analysis in support of team training exercise in the military. It compares the results of an unsupervised learning approach with those of a supervised classification approach. The paper also discusses some of the specific challenges presented by this domain.

Consider an embedded agent with a self-modifying, Turing-equivalent policy that can change only through active self-modifications. How can we make sure that it learns to continually accelerate reward intake? Throughout its life the agent remains ready to undo any self-modification generated during any earlier point of its life, provided the reward per time since then has not increased, thus enforcing a lifelong success-story of self-modifications, each followed by long-term reward acceleration up to the present time. The stack-based method for enforcing this is called the success-story algorithm. It fully takes into account that early self-modifications set the stage for later ones (learning a learning algorithm), and automatically learns to extend self-evaluations until the collected reward statistics are reliable ... a very simple but general method waiting to be re-discovered! Time permitting, I will also briefly discuss more recent mathematically optimal universal maximizers of lifelong reward, in particular, the fully self-referential Goedel machine.

The social world that most of us navigate effortlessly can prove to be a perplexing and disconcerting place for individuals with autism. Currently there are no models to assist non-expert authors as they create customized social script-based instructional modules for a particular child. We describe an approach to using human computation to develop complex models of social scripts for a plethora of complex and interesting social scenarios, possible obstacles that may arise in those scenarios, and potential solutions to those obstacles. Human input is the natural way to build these models, and in so doing create valuable assistance for those trying to navigate the intricacies of a social life.

At a computational level, language processing tasks are traditionally processed in a language-only space/context, isolated from perception and action. However, at a cognitive level, language processing has been shown experimentally to be embodied, i.e. to inform and be informed by perception and action. In this paper, we argue that embodied cognition dictates the development of a new generation of language processing tools that bridge the gap between the symbolic and the sensorimotor representation spaces. We describe that tasks and challenges such tools need to address and provide an overview of the first such suite of processing tools developed in the framework of the POETICON project.

Robot factors such as motions and utterances have a possibility of interaction effects with generation and other human factors, and these effects influence robotics design in elder care. Some psychological experiments conducted in our research group found these interaction effects between generation and other factors based on directly comparison between younger and elder persons in interaction with a small-sized humanoid robot. The paper firstly reviews the previous two studies, reports results of the current experiment, and then discusses about their implications from the perspective of robotics design for elder care.

Previous work has suggested the use of lexicalized grammars for probabilistic plan recognition. Such grammars allow the domain builder to delay commitment to hypothesizing high level goals in order to reduce computational costs. However this delay has limitations. In the case of only partial observation traces, delaying commitment can prevent such algorithms from forming correct conclusions about some goals. This paper presents a heuristic metric to address this limitation. It advocates computing the maximum change in conditional probability across all the computed explanations given the observations explicitly considering a goal of interest.

In this paper, we present some of our work in mobile user modeling following the three steps in a general user modeling process. First, we outline a framework for mobile user activity logging. The framework integrates various hardware and software sensors on smartphones. Second, we have worked on learning relevant user locations for personal information management and recognizing user activities from sensor data to analyze the collected data. Third, the user model can be used to adapt mobile information access, for example in mobile recommender systems. The paper also outlines some requirements for an Activity Context Representation and Exchange Language from the perspective of mobile user modeling.

In this paper we present a principled planner based approach to the active visual object search problem in unknown environments. We make use of a hierarchical planner that combines the strength of decision theory and heuristics. Furthermore, our object search approach leverages on the conceptual spatial knowledge in the form of object co-occurrences and semantic place categorisation. A hierarchical model for representing object locations is presented with which the planner is able to perform indirect search. Finally we present real world experiments to show the feasibility of the approach.

In this paper we describe the integration of a robot control platform (Player/Stage) and a real robot (Pioneer P3DX) with PELEA (Planning, Execution and LEarning Architecture). PELEA is a general-purpose planning architecture suitable for a wide range of real world applications, from robotics to emergency management. It allows planning engineers to generate planning applications since it integrates planning, execution, replanning, monitoring and learning capabilities. We also present a relational learning approach for automatically modeling robot-action execution durations, with the purpose of improving the planning process of PELEA by refining domain definitions.

Using these custom tools requires have been busily converting material from paper and microfilm training and a skilled workforce. We show in this paper that into digital domain. Newspapers, books, journals and some parts of that process can be distributed to a pool of even individual letters are finding themselves inside large unskilled volunteers with good results.