Europe
In Defense of the Neo-Piagetian Approach to Modeling and Engineering Human-Level Cognitive Systems
Licato, John (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | Bringsjord, Selmer (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Presumably any human-level cognitive system (HLCS) must have the capacity to: maintain and learn new concepts; believe propositions about its environment that are constructed from these concepts, and from what it perceives; reason over the propositions it believes, in order to among other things manipulate its environment and justify its significant decisions; and learn new concepts. Given this list of desiderata, it’s hard to see how any intelligent attempt to build or simulate a HLCS can avoid falling under a neo-Piagetian approach to engineering HLCSs. Unfortunately, such engineering has been discursively declared by Jerry Fodor to be flat-out impossible. After setting out Fodor’s challenges, we refute them and, inspired by those refutations, sketch our solutions on behalf of those wanting to computationally model and construct HLCSs, under neo-Piagetian assumptions.
Interoperating Learning Mechanisms in a Cognitive Architecture
Choi, Dongkyu (University of Illinois at Chicago) | Ohlsson, Stellan (University of Illinois at Chicago)
People acquire new knowledge in various ways and this helps them to adapt to changing environment properly. In this paper, we investigatethe interoperation of multiple learning mechanisms within a single system. We extend a cognitive architecture, ICARUS, to have three different modes of learning. Through experiments in a modified Blocks World and a route generation domain, we test and demonstrate the system's ability to get synergistic effects from these learning mechanisms.
Tool Use Learning in Robots
Brown, Solly (University of New South Wales) | Sammut, Claude (University of New South Wales)
Learning to use an object as a tool requires understanding what goals it helps to achieve, the properties of the tool that make it useful and how the tool must be manipulated to achieve the goal. We present a method that allows a robot to learn about objects in this way and thereby employ them as tools. An initial hypothesis for an action model of tool use is created by observing another agent accomplishing a task using a tool. The robot then refines its hypothesis by active learning, generating new experiments and observing the outcomes. Hypotheses are updated using Inductive Logic Programming. One of the novel aspects of this work is the method used to select experiments so that the search through the hypothesis space is minimised.
Explorations in ACT-R Based Cognitive Modeling — Chunks, Inheritance, Production Matching and Memory in Language Analysis
Ball, Jerry T. (Air Force Research Laboratory)
According to Baddeley, "The episodic buffer is assumed to be a limitedcapacity Our research team has been working on the development of a language analysis model (Ball, 2011; Ball, Heiberg & temporary storage system that is capable of Silber, 2007) within the ACT-R cognitive architecture integrating information from a variety of sources…the (Anderson, 2007) since 2002 (Ball, 2004). The focus is on buffer provides not only a mechanism for modeling the development of a general-purpose, large-scale, functional environment, but also for creating new cognitive model (Ball, 2008; Ball et al., 2010) that adheres to well representations" (ibid, p. 421). A key empirical result which established cognitive constraints on human language motivated Baddeley to introduce the episodic buffer after 25 processing (HLP) as realized by ACT-R.
Acquiring Commonsense Knowledge for a Cognitive Agent
Allen, James (University of Rochester)
A critical prerequisite for human-level cognitive systems is having a rich conceptual understanding of the world. We describe a system that learns conceptual knowledge by deep understanding of WordNet glosses. While WordNet is often criticized for having a too fine-grained approach to word senses, the set of glosses do generally capture useful knowledge about the world and encode a substantial knowledge base about everyday concepts. Unlike previous approaches that have built ontologies of atomic concepts from the provided WordNet hierarchies, we construct complex concepts compositionally using description logic and perform reasoning to derive the best classification of knowledge. We view this work as simultaneously accomplishing two goals: building a rich semantic lexicon useful for natural language processing, and building a knowledge base that encodes common-sense knowledge.
Shared Mental Models of Distributed Human-Robot Teams for Coordinated Disaster Responses
Neerincx, Mark (TNO The Netherlands) | Greef, Tjerk de (Delft University) | Smets, Nanja (TNO The Netherlands) | Sam, Minh Po (Delft University)
Shared Mental Models (SSM) are crucial for adequate coordination of activities and resource deployment in disaster responses. Both human and robot are actors in the construction of such models. Based on a situated Cognitive Engineering (sCE) methodology, we identified the needs, functions and evaluation paradigm for this model construction support. Via prototyping, some basic functions proved to be of value (e.g., hierarchical view on functions, processes and resources). Currently, more advanced functions are under investigation (e.g., observability display). The evaluations will provide the empirical foundation of the underlying SMM theory for human-robot teams.
Toward a Social Attentive Machine
Mancas, Matei (University of Mons) | Riche, Nicolas (University of Mons) | Leroy, Julien (University of Mons) | Gosselin, Bernard (University of Mons) | Dutoit, Thierry (University of Mons)
In this paper, we discuss the design of a new “intelligent” system capable of selecting the most “outstanding” user from a group of people in a scene. This ability to select a user to interact with is very important in natural interfaces and in emergency-related applications where several people can ask to communicate simultaneousely. The system uses both static and dynamic features such as speed, height and social features (interpersonal distances) which are all acquired using a RGB-Depth camera (Kinect). Those features are combined and a contrast-based approach is able to focus the system’ attention on a specific user without complex rules. People position with respect to the Kinect sensor and learning of the previous people behavior are also used in a top-down way to influence the decision on the most interesting people. This application is represented by a wall of HAL9000's eyes that search in the scene who is the most different person then track and focus at him until someone more "different'' shows up.
Dataset Acquisitions for USAR Environments
Pomerleau, François (ETH Zurich) | Lescot, Benoit (ETH Zurich) | Colas, Francis (ETH Zurich) | Liu, Ming (ETH Zurich) | Siegwart, Roland (ETH Zurich)
Earlier Teamwork implies communication with shared references work also evaluates the robustness of ICP against low constrained and symbols. The collaboration between robot and human is environments (Rusinkiewicz and Levoy 2001). This therefore highly dependent on a common representation of was mainly done in simulation so real word datasets targeting the environment. Part of this representation is a map, either this limitations could bring the analysis farther. An other global or local, that can serve both the robot to do its own problem, recently raised in vision registration (Mortensen, task and the human to increase his situation awareness, to Deng, and Shapiro 2005), is the problem of repetitive elements collaboratively plan and observe the evolution of a situation.
Using Doctrines for Human-Robot Collaboration to Guide Ethical Behavior
Kruijff, Geert-Jan M. (DFKI GmbH)
In this paper, we consider the issue of guiding ethical behavior in human-robot teams from a systemic viewpoint. Considering a team as a sociotechnical complex, we look at how responsibility for actions can arise through the interaction between the different actors in the team while playing specific roles. We define the notions of role, discuss how they establish a social network, and then use logical notions of multi-agent trust to formalize responsibility as accountability against capabilities that are invoked during collaboration.
Smart Monitoring of Complex Public Scenes
Iocchi, Luca ( Sapienza University ) | Monekosso, Ndedi D. (Belfast University) | Nardi, Daniele (Sapienza University) | Nicolescu, Mircea (Nevada University) | Remagnino, Paolo (Kinngston University) | Valera, Maria (Kingston University)
Security operators are increasingly interested in solutions that can provide an automatic understanding of potentially crowded public environments. In this paper, an on-going research is presented, on building a complex system consists of three main components: human security operators carrying sensors, mobile robotic platforms carrying sensors and network of fixed sensors (i.e. cameras) installed in the environment. The main objectives of this research are: 1) to develop models and solutions for an intelligent integration of sensorial information coming from different sources, 2) to develop effective human-robot interaction methods in the paradigm multi-human vs. multi-robot, 3) to integrate all these components in a system that allows for robust and efficient coordination among robots, vision sensors and human guards, in order to enhance surveillance in crowded public environments.