Mixed reality is an important classroom tool for managing complexity from both the students' and instructor's standpoints. It can be used to provide important scaffolds when introducing robotics, by allowing elements of perception and control to be abstracted, and these abstractions removed as a course progresses (or left in place to introduce robotics to younger groups of students). In prior work, we have illustrated the potential of this approach both in providing scaffolding, building an inexpensive robotics laboratory, and also providing control of evaluation of robotics environments for student evaluation and scientific experimentation. In this paper, we explore integrating extensions and improvements to the mixed reality components themselves as part of a course in applied artificial intelligence and robotics. We present a set of assignments that in addition to exploring robotics concepts, actively integrate creating or improving mixed reality components. We find that this approach better leverages the advantages brought about by mixed reality in terms of student motivation, and also provides some very useful software engineering experience to the students.

Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. What distinguishes reinforcement learning from supervised learning is that only partial feedback is given to the learner about the learner's predictions. Further, the predictions may have long term effects through influencing the future state of the controlled system. Thus, time plays a special role. The goal in reinforcement learning is to develop efficient learning algorithms, as well as to understand the algorithms' merits and limitations.

A popular method for selecting the number of clusters is based on stability arguments: one chooses the number of clusters such that the corresponding clustering results are "most stable". In recent years, a series of papers has analyzed the behavior of this method from a theoretical point of view. However, the results are very technical and difficult to interpret for non-experts. In this paper we give a high-level overview about the existing literature on clustering stability. In addition to presenting the results in a slightly informal but accessible way, we relate them to each other and discuss their different implications.

As network attacks have increased in number and severity over the past few years, intrusion detection system (IDS) is increasingly becoming a critical component to secure the network. Due to large volumes of security audit data as well as complex and dynamic properties of intrusion behaviors, optimizing performance of IDS becomes an important open problem that is receiving more and more attention from the research community. The uncertainty to explore if certain algorithms perform better for certain attack classes constitutes the motivation for the reported herein. In this paper, we evaluate performance of a comprehensive set of classifier algorithms using KDD99 dataset. Based on evaluation results, best algorithms for each attack category is chosen and two classifier algorithm selection models are proposed. The simulation result comparison indicates that noticeable performance improvement and real-time intrusion detection can be achieved as we apply the proposed models to detect different kinds of network attacks.

We investigate inflection structure of a synthetic language using Latin as an example. We construct a bipartite graph in which one group of vertices correspond to dictionary headwords and the other group to inflected forms encountered in a given text. Each inflected form is connected to its corresponding headword, which in some cases in non-unique. The resulting sparse graph decomposes into a large number of connected components, to be called word groups. We then show how the concept of the word group can be used to construct coverage curves of selected Latin texts. We also investigate a version of the inflection graph in which all theoretically possible inflected forms are included. Distribution of sizes of connected components of this graphs resembles cluster distribution in a lattice percolation near the critical point.

We define a class of Euclidean distances on weighted graphs, enabling to perform thermodynamic soft graph clustering. The class can be constructed form the "raw coordinates" encountered in spectral clustering, and can be extended by means of higher-dimensional embeddings (Schoenberg transformations). Geographical flow data, properly conditioned, illustrate the procedure as well as visualization aspects.

We describe how to use propositional model counting for a quantitative analysis of product configuration data. Our approach computes valuable meta information such as the total number of valid configurations or the relative frequency of components. This information can be used to assess the severity of documentation errors or to measure documentation quality. As an application example we show how we apply these methods to product documentation formulas of the Mercedes-Benz line of vehicles. In order to process these large formulas we developed and implemented a new model counter for non-CNF formulas. Our model counter can process formulas, whose CNF representations could not be processed up till now.

Classic decision-theory is based on the maximum expected utility (MEU) principle, but crucially ignores the resource costs incurred when determining optimal decisions. Here we propose an axiomatic framework for bounded decision-making that considers resource costs. Agents are formalized as probability measures over input-output streams. We postulate that any such probability measure can be assigned a corresponding conjugate utility function based on three axioms: utilities should be real-valued, additive and monotonic mappings of probabilities. We show that these axioms enforce a unique conversion law between utility and probability (and thereby, information). Moreover, we show that this relation can be characterized as a variational principle: given a utility function, its conjugate probability measure maximizes a free utility functional. Transformations of probability measures can then be formalized as a change in free utility due to the addition of new constraints expressed by a target utility function. Accordingly, one obtains a criterion to choose a probability measure that trades off the maximization of a target utility function and the cost of the deviation from a reference distribution. We show that optimal control, adaptive estimation and adaptive control problems can be solved this way in a resource-efficient way. When resource costs are ignored, the MEU principle is recovered. Our formalization might thus provide a principled approach to bounded rationality that establishes a close link to information theory.

Frequent Episode Discovery framework is a popular framework in Temporal Data Mining with many applications. Over the years many different notions of frequencies of episodes have been proposed along with different algorithms for episode discovery. In this paper we present a unified view of all such frequency counting algorithms. We present a generic algorithm such that all current algorithms are special cases of it. This unified view allows one to gain insights into different frequencies and we present quantitative relationships among different frequencies. Our unified view also helps in obtaining correctness proofs for various algorithms as we show here. We also point out how this unified view helps us to consider generalization of the algorithm so that they can discover episodes with general partial orders.

When agents are acting together, they may need a simple mechanism to decide on joint actions. One possibility is to have the agents express their preferences in the form of a ballot and use a voting rule to decide the winning action(s). Unfortunately, agents may try to manipulate such an election by misreporting their preferences. Fortunately, it has been shown that it is NP-hard to compute how to manipulate a number of different voting rules. However, NP-hardness only bounds the worst-case complexity. Recent theoretical results suggest that manipulation may often be easy in practice. To address this issue, I suggest studying empirically if computational complexity is in practice a barrier to manipulation. The basic tool used in my investigations is the identification of computational "phase transitions". Such an approach has been fruitful in identifying hard instances of propositional satisfiability and other NP-hard problems. I show that phase transition behaviour gives insight into the hardness of manipulating voting rules, increasing concern that computational complexity is indeed any sort of barrier. Finally, I look at the problem of computing manipulation of other, related problems like stable marriage and tournament problems.