Industry
Learning Sensor, Space and Object Geometry
Stober, Jeremy (The University of Texas at Austin)
Robots with many sensors are capable of generating volumes of high-dimensional perceptual data. Making sense of this data and extracting useful knowledge from it is a difficult problem. For robots lacking proper models, trying to understand a stream of uninterpreted data is an especially acute problem. One critical step in linking raw uninterpreted perceptual data to cognition is dimensionality reduction. Current methods for reducing the dimension of data do not meet the demands of a robot situated in the world, and methods that use only perceptual data do not take full advantage of the interactive experience of an embodied robot agent. This work proposes a new scalable, incremental and active approach to dimensionality reduction suitable for extracting geometric knowledge from uninterpreted sensors and effectors. The proposed method uses distinctive state abstractions to organize early sensorimotor experience and sensorimotor embedding to incrementally learn accurate geometric representations based on experience. This approach is applied to the problem of learning the geometry of sensors, space, and objects. The result is evaluated using techniques from statistical shape analysis.
Joint Inference for Extracting Text Descriptors from Triage Images of Mass Disaster Victims
Chhaya, Niyati (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
The major contributions of this work include a set of biographical mann 2002), ethnicity recognition (Lu and Jain 2004), eyeglasses feature extractors brought together by a probabilistic identification (Jiang, Binkert, and Achermann 2000), graphical model. Most of this work is limited and addressed to a particular resulting in a text descriptor to describe triage images of disaster set of images and tends to do poorly with disaster victims. The model is built using domain information victim images. At the same time, there is no particular work gathered from data and literature. Our goal is to automatically Feature extraction as introduced above needs to be preceded process images of patients taken as part of the intake by first locating the person in the image, particularly the process at emergency medical care centers to extract searchable, face.
Playing to Program: Towards an Intelligent Programming Tutor for RUR-PLE
desJardins, Marie (University of Maryland Baltimore County) | Ciavolino, Amy (University of Maryland Baltimore County) | Deloatch, Robert (University of Maryland Baltimore County) | Feasley, Eliana (University of Maryland Baltimore County)
Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) provide students with a one-on-one tutor, allowing them to work at their own pace, and helping them to focus on their weaker areas. The RUR1–Python Learning Environment (RUR-PLE), a game-like virtual environment to help students learn to program, provides an interface for students to write their own Python code and visualize the code execution (Roberge 2005). RUR-PLE provides a fixed sequence of learning lessons for students to explore. We are extending RUR-PLE to develop the Playing to Program (PtP) ITS, which consists of three components: (1) a Bayesian student model that tracks student competence, (2) a diagnosis module that provides tailored feedback to students, and (3) a problem selection module that guides the student’s learning process. In this paper, we summarize RUR-PLE and the PtP design, and describe an ongoing user study to evaluate the predictive accuracy of our student modeling approach.
Introducing Uninformed Search with Tangible Board Games
Martin, Fred G. (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
Researchers have established the value of hands-on learning with tangible artifacts in mathematics and related fields. Inspired by this work, an assignment was developed for an undergraduate/graduate Artificial Intelligence course to introduce students to the formal representation of search. Students analyzed a familiar board game — e.g., Rush Hour or peg solitaire — using the standard approach to modeling an uninformed search process. The assignment was well-received by students, and analysis of their work yielded unexpected insights into the challenges students face in understanding how the formal problem model interacts with search algorithms. This paper introduces the theoretical motivations for the work, analyzes student work products, and makes recommendations for future extensions.
Autonomous Skill Acquisition on a Mobile Manipulator
Konidaris, George (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Kuindersma, Scott (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | Grupen, Roderic (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | Barto, Andrew (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
We describe a robot system that autonomously acquires skills through interaction with its environment. The robot learns to sequence the execution of a set of innate controllers to solve a task, extracts and retains components of that solution as portable skills, and then transfers those skills to reduce the time required to learn to solve a second task.
Analogical Dialogue Acts: Supporting Learning by Reading Analogies in Instructional Texts
Barbella, David Michael (Northwestern University) | Forbus, Kenneth D. (Northwestern University)
Analogy is heavily used in instructional texts. We introduce the concept of analogical dialogue acts (ADAs), which represent the roles utterances play in instructional analogies. We describe a catalog of such acts, based on ideas from structure-mapping theory. We focus on the operations that these acts lead to while understanding instructional texts, using the Structure-Mapping Engine (SME) and dynamic case construction in a computational model. We test this model on a small corpus of instructional analogies expressed in simplified English, which were understood via a semi-automatic natural language system using analogical dialogue acts. The model enabled a system to answer questions after understanding the analogies that it was not able to answer without them.
Complete Information Pursuit Evasion in Polygonal Environments
Klein, Kyle (University of California Santa Barbara) | Suri, Subhash (University of California Santa Barbara)
Suppose an unpredictable evader is free to move around in a polygonal environment of arbitrary complexity that is under full camera surveillance. How many pursuers, each with the same maximum speed as the evader, are necessary and sufficient to guarantee a successful capture of the evader? The pursuers always know the evader's current position through the camera network, but need to physically reach the evader to capture it. We allow the evader the knowledge of the current positions of all the pursuers as well---this accords with the standard worst-case analysis model, but also models a practical situation where the evader has ``hacked'' into the surveillance system. Our main result is to prove that three pursuers are always sufficient and sometimes necessary to capture the evader. The bound is independent of the number of vertices or holes in the polygonal environment.
The Epistemic Logic Behind the Game Description Language
Ruan, Ji (The University of New South Wales) | Thielscher, Michael (The University of New South Wales)
A general game player automatically learns to play arbitrary new games solely by being told their rules. For this purpose games are specified in the game description language GDL, a variant of Datalog with function symbols and a few known keywords. In its latest version GDL allows to describe nondeterministic games with any number of players who may have imperfect, asymmetric information. We analyse the epistemic structure and expressiveness of this language in terms of epistemic modal logic and present two main results: The operational semantics of GDL entails that the situation at any stage of a game can be characterised by a multi-agent epistemic (i.e., S5-) model; (2) GDL is sufficiently expressive to model any situation that can be described by a (finite) multi-agent epistemic model.
Intrinsic Chess Ratings
Regan, Kenneth Wingate (University at Buffalo (SUNY)) | Haworth, Guy McCrossan (University of Reading (UK))
This paper develops and tests formulas for representing playing strength at chess by the quality of moves played, rather than by the results of games. Intrinsic quality is estimated via evaluations given by computer chess programs run to high depth, ideally so that their playing strength is sufficiently far ahead of the best human players as to be a `relatively omniscient' guide. Several formulas, each having intrinsic skill parameters s for `sensitivity' and c for `consistency', are argued theoretically and tested by regression on large sets of tournament games played by humans of varying strength as measured by the internationally standard Elo rating system. This establishes a correspondence between Elo rating and the parameters. A smooth correspondence is shown between statistical results and the century points on the Elo scale, and ratings are shown to have stayed quite constant over time. That is, there has been little or no `rating inflation'. The theory and empirical results are transferable to other rational-choice settings in which the alternatives have well-defined utilities, but in which complexity and bounded information constrain the perception of the utility values.
Composite Social Network for Predicting Mobile Apps Installation
Pan, Wei (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Aharony, Nadav (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Pentland, Alex (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
We have carefully instrumented a large portion of the population living in a university graduate dormitory by giving participants Android smart phones running our sensing software. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of predicting mobile application (known as “apps”) installation using social networks and explain its challenge. Modern smart phones, like the ones used in our study, are able to collect different social networks using built-in sensors. (e.g. Bluetooth proximity network, call log network, etc) While this information is accessible to app market makers such as the iPhone AppStore, it has not yet been studied how app market makers can use these information for marketing research and strategy development. We develop a simple computational model to better predict app installation by using a composite network computed from the different networks sensed by phones. Our model also captures individual variance and exogenous factors in app adoption. We show the importance of considering all these factors in predicting app installations, and we observe the surprising result that app installation is indeed predictable. We also show that our model achieves the best results compared with generic approaches.