We address two domains of skill transfer problems encountered by an autonomous robot: within-domain adaptation and cross-domain transfer. Our aim is to provide skill representations which enable transfer in each problem classification. As such, we explore two approaches to skill representation which address each problem classification separately. The first representation, based on mimicking, encodes the full demonstration and is well suited for within-domain adaptation. The second representation is based on imitation and serves to encode a set of key points along the trajectory, which represent the goal points most relevant to the successful completion of the skill. This representation enables both within-domain and cross-domain transfer. A planner is then applied to these constraints, generating a domain-specific trajectory which addresses the transfer task.

This paper discusses how AI models of argumentation can play a role in personalized and participatory medicine. It describes our previous research on natural language generation of argumentation for genetic counseling and a pilot study on risk visualization, and our current research on argumentation mining.

Computer Science researchers have long sought ways to apply the fruits of their labors to education. From the Logo turtles to the latest Cognitive Tutors, the allure of computers that will understand and help humans learn and grow has been a constant thread in Artificial Intelligence research. Now, advances in robotics and our understanding of Human-Robot Interaction make it feasible to develop physically-present robots that are capable of presenting educational material in an engaging manner, adapting online to sensory information from individual students, and building sophisticated, personalized models of a student’s mastery over complex educational domains. In this paper, we discuss how using physical robots as platforms for artificially intelligent tutors enables an expanded space of possible educational interactions. We also describe a work-in-progress to (1) extend previous work in personalized user models for robotic tutoring and (2) further explore the differences between interaction with physical robots and onscreen agents. Specifically, we are examining how embedding an tutoring interaction inside a story, game, or activity with an agent may differentially affect learning gains and engagement in interactions with physical robots and screen-based agents.

Socially assistive robotics (SAR) has the potential to combinethe massive replication and standardization of computertechnology with the benefits of learning in a social and tangible(hands-on) context. We are developing HRI methodsfor SAR systems designed to supplement the efforts of humanteachers to personalize education in the classroom. Thisabstract defines and proposes solutions to the computationalchallenges inherent in accomplishing differentiated and personalizededucation utilizing SAR in real-world classrooms. We aim to design robotic systems that are compelling, assistchildren in achieving educational goals, and mitigate developmentalchallenges in a classroom context. To do so, ourapproach must be deeply informed by the needs of our targetusers, children, at all stages of development, and mustadapt to a variety of special needs. In this abstract, we discussmotivation and computational methods for personalizedSAR systems for general, special needs, and mixed multichildeducation contexts. We focus on the personalizationand adaptation of curriculum, feedback, and robot character.

Adaptation is a critical component of collaboration. Nevertheless, online learning is not yet used in most successful human-robot interactions, especially when the human's and robot's goals are not fully aligned. There are at least two barriers to the successful application of online learning in HRI. First, typical machine-learning algorithms do not learn at time scales that support effective interactions with people. Algorithms that learn at sufficiently fast time scales often produce myopic strategies that do not lead to good long-term collaborations. Second, random exploration, a core component of most online-learning algorithms, can be problematic for developing collaborative relationships with a human partner. We anticipate that a new genre of online-learning algorithms can overcome these two barriers when paired with (cheap-talk) communication. In this paper, we overview our efforts in these two areas to produce a situation-independent, learning system that quickly learns to collaborate with a human partner.

The two applications under development The EMOTE project (http://www.emote-project.eu/) is are a Treasure Hunt exercise designed to teach mapreading working towards the development of an empathic robot tutor skills, and a multi-player game Enercities-2 designed to be used with the 11-14 group and a multi-touch table to teach aspects of sustainable urban development.

Eye contact is a crucial behaviour in human communication and therefore an essencial feature in human-robot interaction. A study regarding the development of an eye behaviour model for a robotic tutor in a task-oriented environment is presented, along with a description of how our proposed model is being used to implement an autonomous robot in the EMOTE project.

One way of teaching grammar, namely morphology and syntax, is to visualize sentences as diagrams capturing relationships between words. Similarly, such relationships are captured in a more complex way in treebanks serving as key building stones in modern natural language processing. However, building them is very time consuming, thus we have been seeking for an alternative cheaper and faster way, like crowdsourcing. The purpose of our work is to explore possibility to get sentence diagrams produced by students and teachers. In our pilot study, the object language is Czech, where sentence diagrams are part of elementary school curriculum.

Increasingly social networks are being used for citizen science, where members of the public contribute knowledge to scientific endeavours. Tasks can be presented and solved using human computation, termed groupsourcing, with users benefiting from community tuition and experts gaining knowledge from the crowd. This paper gives details of a prototype that utilises groupsourcing to solve image classification tasks, to support social learning and to facilitate knowledge discovery in the domain of marine biology.

The emergence of online crowdsourcing sites, online work platforms, and evenMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), has created an increasing need for reliably evaluating the skills of the participating users in a scalable way.Many platforms already allow users to take online tests and verify their skills, but the existing approaches face many problems. First of all, cheating is very common in online testing without supervision, as the test questions often "leak" and become easily available online together with the answers.Second, technical skills, such as programming, require the tests to be frequently updated in order to reflect the current state-of-the-art. Third,there is very limited evaluation of the tests themselves, and how effectively they measure the skill that the users are tested for. In this paper, we present a Scalable Testing and Evaluation Platform (STEP),that allows continuous generation and evaluation of test questions. STEP leverages already available content, on Question Answering sites such as StackOverflow and re-purposes these questions to generate tests. The system utilizes a crowdsourcing component for the editing of the questions, while it uses automated techniques for identifying promising QA threads that can be successfully re-purposed for testing. This continuous question generation decreases the impact of cheating and also creates questions that are closer to the real problems that the skill holder is expected to solve in real life.STEP also leverages the use of Item Response Theory to evaluate the quality of the questions. We also use external signals about the quality of the workers.These identify the questions that have the strongest predictive ability in distinguishing workers that have the potential to succeed in the online job marketplaces. Existing approaches contrast in using only internal consistency metrics to evaluate the questions. Finally, our system employs an automatic "leakage detector" that queries the Internet to identify leaked versions of our questions. We then mark these questions as "practice only," effectively removing them from the pool of questions used for evaluation. Our experimental evaluation shows that our system generates questions of comparable or higher quality compared to existing tests, with a cost of approximately 3-5 dollars per question, which is lower than the cost of licensing questions from existing test banks.