Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Media


Profile of a Winner: Brandeis University and Ullanta Performance Robotics' "Robotic Love Triangle"

AI Magazine

"environment" is a key principle of dynamic, crowded environment. The robots were "costumed" through reception area, recognition of humans, The guests Although all our competitors chose voicesynthesis one foot tall. A number of people were impressed were programmed to switch behavioral other (see figure). Robotics has since used these techniques not acknowledging humans. Credits: Directed by Barry Brian Werger. of the real world would result in numerous from walls, robots, and people; rotation for Seth Landsman, Dan Griffin, and Andy becoming involved with the other social response to "humanlike" sonar signatures.


Constraints and Agents: Confronting Ignorance

AI Magazine

Research on constraints and agents is emerging at the intersection of the communities studying constraint computation and software agents. Constraint- based reasoning systems can be enhanced by using agents with multiple problem-solving approaches or diverse problem representations. The constraint computation paradigm can be used to model agent consultation, cooperation, and competition. An interesting theme in agent interaction, which is studied here in constraint-based terms, is confronting ignorance: the agent's own ignorance or its ignorance of other agents.


Designing for Human-Agent Interaction

AI Magazine

Interacting with a computer requires adopting some metaphor to guide our actions and expectations. Most human-computer interfaces can be classified according to two dominant metaphors: (1) agent and (2) environment. Interactions based on an agent metaphor treat the computer as an intermediary that responds to user requests. In the environment metaphor, a model of the task domain is presented for the user to interact with directly. The term agent has come to refer to the automation of aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI), such as anticipating commands or autonomously performing actions. Norman's 1984 model of HCI is introduced as reference to organize and evaluate research in human-agent interaction (HAI). A wide variety of heterogeneous research involving HAI is shown to reflect automation of one of the stages of action or evaluation within Norman's model. Improvements in HAI are expected to result from a more heterogeneous use of methods that target multiple stages simultaneously.


AAAI 1997 Spring Symposium Reports

AI Magazine

It comprises activities Systems, Knowledge Representation managing an interaction. On the focused on the organization, acquiring and Reasoning, and Knowledge Discovery. Wide Web and will remain available in any system that aims to tutor users The KM community has been at ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/AIKM97. Cross-language text retrieval (CLTR) is the problem of matching a query in The presentations made at this symposium This symposium brought together one language to related documents in dealt with vastly different environments, researchers in natural language processing other languages. As internet resources ranging from digital libraries (NLP) from both academia such as the World Wide Web have and broadcast news archives to virtual and industry, including service become global networks, many new reality and, of course, the web.


LIFESTYLE FINDER: Intelligent User Profiling Using Large-Scale Demographic Data

AI Magazine

A number of approaches have been advanced for taking data about a user's likes and dislikes and generating a general profile of the user. These profiles can be used to retrieve documents matching user interests; recommend music, movies, or other similar products; or carry out other tasks in a specialized fashion. This article presents a fundamentally new method for generating user profiles that takes advantage of a large-scale database of demographic data. These data are used to generalize user-specified data along the patterns common across the population, including areas not represented in the user's original data. I describe the method in detail and present its implementation in the LIFESTYLE FINDER agent, an internet-based experiment testing our approach on more than 20,006 users worldwide.


Citation-Based Journal Rankings for AI Research A Business Perspective

AI Magazine

A significant and growing area of business-computing research is concerned with AI. Knowledge about which journals are the most influential forums for disseminating AI research is important for business school faculty, students, administrators, and librarians. To date, there has been only one study attempting to rank AI journals from a business-computing perspective. It used a subjective methodology, surveying opinions of business faculty about a prespecified list of 30 journals. Here, we report the results of a more objective study. We conducted a citation analysis covering a time period of 5 years to compile 15,600 citations to 1,244 different journals. Based on these data, the journals are ranked in two ways involving the magnitude and the duration of scientific impact each has had in the field of AI.


From Digitized Images to Online Catalogs Data Mining a Sky Survey

AI Magazine

The value of scientific digital-image libraries seldom lies in the pixels of images. For large collections of images, such as those resulting from astronomy sky surveys, the typical useful product is an online database cataloging entries of interest. We focus on the automation of the cataloging effort of a major sky survey and the availability of digital libraries in general. The SKICAT system automates the reduction and analysis of the three terabytes worth of images, expected to contain on the order of 2 billion sky objects. For the primary scientific analysis of these data, it is necessary to detect, measure, and classify every sky object. SKICAT integrates techniques for image processing, classification learning, database management, and visualization. The learning algorithms are trained to classify the detected objects and can classify objects too faint for visual classification with an accuracy level exceeding 90 percent. This accuracy level increases the number of classified objects in the final catalog threefold relative to the best results from digitized photographic sky surveys to date. Hence, learning algorithms played a powerful and enabling role and solved a difficult, scientifically significant problem, enabling the consistent, accurate classification and the ease of access and analysis of an otherwise unfathomable data set.


Glove-TalkII: Mapping Hand Gestures to Speech Using Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

There are many different possible schemes for converting hand gestures to speech. The choice of scheme depends on the granularity of the speech that you want to produce. Figure 1 identifies a spectrum defined by possible divisions of speech based on the duration of the sound for each granularity. What is interesting is that in general, the coarser the division of speech, the smaller the bandwidth necessary for the user. In contrast, where the granularity of speech is on the order of articulatory musclemovements (i.e. the artificial vocal tract [AVT]) high bandwidth control is necessary for good speech. Devices which implement this model of speech production are like musical instruments which produce speech sounds.


Connectionism for Music and Audition

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, NIPS has heard neural networks generate tunes and harmonize chorales. With a large amount of music becoming available in computer readable form, real data can be used to train connectionist models. At the beginning of this workshop, Andreas Weigend focused on architectures to capture structure on multiple time scales.


Tonal Music as a Componential Code: Learning Temporal Relationships Between and Within Pitch and Timing Components

Neural Information Processing Systems

This study explores the extent to which a network that learns the temporal relationships within and between the component features of Western tonal music can account for music theoretic and psychological phenomena such as the tonal hierarchy and rhythmic expectancies. Predicted and generated sequences were recorded as the representation of a 153-note waltz melody was learnt by a predictive, recurrent network. The network learned transitions and relations between and within pitch and timing components: accent and duration values interacted in the development of rhythmic and metric structures and, with training, the network developed chordal expectancies in response to the activation of individual tones. Analysis of the hidden unit representation revealed that musical sequences are represented as transitions between states in hidden unit space.