Wikipedia provides an enormous amount of background knowledge to reason about the semantic relatedness between two entities. We propose Wikipedia-based Distributional Semantics for Entity Relatedness (DiSER), which represents the semantics of an entity by its distribution in the high dimensional concept space derived from Wikipedia. DiSER measures the semantic relatedness between two entities by quantifying the distance between the corresponding high-dimensional vectors. DiSER builds the model by taking the annotated entities only, therefore it improves over existing approaches, which do not distinguish between an entity and its surface form. We evaluate the approach on a benchmark that contains the relative entity relatedness scores for 420 entity pairs. Our approach improves the accuracy by 12% on state of the art methods for computing entity relatedness. We also show an evaluation of DiSER in the Entity Disambiguation task on a dataset of 50 sentences with highly ambiguous entity mentions. It shows an improvement of 10% in precision over the best performing methods. In order to provide the resource that can be used to find out all the related entities for a given entity, a graph is constructed, where the nodes represent Wikipedia entities and the relatedness scores are reflected by the edges. Wikipedia contains more than 4.1 millions entities, which required efficient computation of the relatedness scores between the corresponding 17 trillions of entity-pairs.

The need for health providers to share information is a pressing need in our ever more connected world. A patient's health information should seamlessly flow from labs to hospitals to primary care offices. To address this need, in this paper we present the Health E-Match, which focuses on the matching health terms in support of semantic interoperability. Health E-Match determines the semantic similarity between data items, realizing, for instance, that "BHGC (UR)" and "BETA-HCG (QUAL)" both refer to the same pregnancy test, known as "Beta human chorionic gonadotropin, urine qualitative." Our approach is grounded in probabilistic machine learning, and leverages several sophisticated methods for comparing the similarity between medical data items beyond simple edit distance. We present two large scale, real-world experiments to verify that our approach is both accurate and has the ability to eventually be "universal" in that models trained on one set of data translate to strong performance on data from a completely different provider.

Programming a robot to perform tasks requires training that is beyond the skill level of most individuals. To address this issue, we focus on developing a method that identifies keywords used to convey task knowledge among people and a framework that uses these keywords as conditions for knowledge acquisition by the robot learner. The methodology includes generalizing task modeling and providing a robot learner the ability to learn and improve its skills through accumulated experience gained from interaction with humans. More specifically, the aim of this research addresses the issues of knowledge encoding, acquisition, and retrieval through interactive instance-based learning (IIBL). In interaction studies, the benefit of using such a robot learner is in promoting social behaviors that results from the participant taking on an active role as teacher. Our recent experiment with 33 participants, including 19 typically developing children, and a pilot study with two children with autism spectrum disorder showed that IIBL provides a framework for designing an effective robot learner, and that the robot learner successfully increases the amount of social interactions initiated by the participants.

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that enables robots to improve their spatial-semantic representation of the environment by engaging users in dialog. The algorithm aims to reduce the entropy in maps formulated based upon user-provided natural language descriptions (e.g., "The kitchen is down the hallway"). The robot's available information-gathering actions take the form of targeted questions intended to reduce the entropy over the grounding of the user's descriptions. These questions include those that query the robot's local surround (e.g., "Are we in the kitchen?") as well as areas distant from the robot (e.g., "Is the lab near the kitchen?"). Our algorithm treats dialog as an optimization problem that seeks to balance the information-theoretic value of candidate questions with a measure of cost associated with dialog. In this manner, the method determines the best questions to ask based upon expected entropy reduction while accounting for the burden on the user. We evaluate the entropy reduction based upon a joint distribution over a hybrid metric, topological, and semantic representation of the environment learned from user-provided descriptions and the robot's sensor data. We demonstrate that, by asking deliberate questions of the user, the method results in significant improvements in the accuracy of the resulting map.

The goal of this research is to enable robots to learn new things from everyday people. For years, the AI and Robotics community has sought to enable robots to efficiently learn new skills from a knowledgeable human trainer, and prior work has focused on several important technical problems. This vast amount of research in the field of robot Learning by Demonstration has by and large only been evaluated with expert humans, typically the system's designer. Thus, neglecting a key point that this interaction takes place within a social structure that can guide and constrain the learning problem. %Moreover, we We believe that addressing this point will be essential for developing systems that can learn from everyday people that are not experts in Machine Learning or Robotics. Our work focuses on new research questions involved in letting robots learn from everyday human partners (e.g., What kind of input do people want to provide a machine learner? How does their mental model of the learning process affect this input? What interfaces and interaction mechanisms can help people provide better input from a machine learning perspective?) Often our research begins with an investigation into the feasibility of a particular machine learning interaction, which leads to a series of research questions around re-designing both the interaction and the algorithm to better suit learning with end-users. We believe this equal focus on both the Machine Learning and the HRI contributions are key to making progress toward the goal of machines learning from humans. In this abstract we briefly overview four different projects that highlight our HRI approach to the problem of Learning from Demonstration.

The agent is "always on," i.e. it is continuously available and aware (using a camera and infrared motion sensor) when the user is in its presence and can initiate interaction with the user, rather than requiring the user login to begin interaction. We expect that the agent will help reduce the user's isolation not just by always being around but also by specific activities that connect the user with friends, family and the local community. Our goal is for the agent to be a natural, humanlike presence that "resides" in the user's apartment. Beginning in the late summer of 2014, we will be placing our agents with users for a monthlong evaluation study. Figure 1: Virtual agent interface -- "Karen" Three issues of our project directly concern the topics of this workshop are: (1) the embodiment of the agent, (2) the engagement behaviors that are associated with being "always measures we will be using are questionnaires that assess the on," and (3) AI tools for support intelligent behavior.

Important aspects of human cognition, like creativity and play, involve dealing with multiple divergent views of objects, goals, and plans. We argue in this paper that the current model of optimization that drives much of modern machine learning research is far too restrictive a paradigm to mathematically model the richness of human cognition. Instead, we propose a much more flexible and powerful framework of equilibration, which not only generalizes optimization, but also captures a rich variety of other problems, from game theory, complementarity problems, network equilibrium problems in economics, and equation solving. Our thesis is that creative activity involves dealing not with a single objective function, which optimization requires, but rather balancing multiple divergent and possibly contradictory goals. Such modes of cognition are better modeled using the framework of variational inequalities (VIs). We provide a brief review of this paradigm for readers unfamiliar with the underlying mathematics, and sketch out how VIs can account for creativity and play in human and animal cognition.

Shared mental models have been shown to improve human team performance. We thus conjecture that shared mental models (SMMs) integrated into cognitive robotic architectures might also improve the performance of mixed human-robot teams. To date, very little research has focused on developing appropriate computational constructs that can support domain independence and generalizability, while also being scalable. In this paper, we outline our proposed development of SMMs for cognitive robots.

Efforts to study computational aspects of the conscious mind have made substantial progress, but have yet to provide a compelling route to creating a phenomenally conscious machine. Here I suggest that an important reason for this is the computational explanatory gap: our inability to explain the implementation of high level cognitive algorithms that are of interest in AI in terms of neurocomputational processing. Bridging this gap could contribute to further progress in machine consciousness, to producing artificial general intelligence, and to understanding the fundamental nature of consciousness.

Can brain-mapping data be used to reverse engineer a brain Noam Chomsky discusses the evolution of the field of system in silico? This is actually the question of whether artificial intelligence from 1956, when John McCarthy consciousness is fully contained within the physical defined the science, until today (Ramsay, 2012). The goal structure that is the brain. Do the brain and its supporting of AI was to study intelligence by implementing its systems fully account for consciousness or are there other essential features using man-made technology. This goal components that transcend the body that are also at play? If has resulted in several practical applications people use metaphysical components play a role, then the answer is every day. The field has produced significant advances in negative, since mapping just the anatomical aspects of the search engines, data mining, speech recognition, image consciousness system would leave a critical component processing, and expert systems, to name a few.