Problem Solving
Artificial Intelligence for Long-Term Robot Autonomy: A Survey
Kunze, Lars, Hawes, Nick, Duckett, Tom, Hanheide, Marc, Krajník, Tomáš
Abstract-- Autonomous systems will play an essential role in many applications across diverse domains including space, marine, air, field, road, and service robotics. They will assist us in our daily routines and perform dangerous, dirty and dull tasks. However, enabling robotic systems to perform autonomously in complex, real-world scenarios over extended time periods (i.e. Some of these have been investigated by sub-disciplines of Artificial Intelligence (AI) including navigation & mapping, perception, knowledge representation & reasoning, planning, interaction, and learning. The different sub-disciplines have developed techniques that, when re-integrated within an autonomous system, can enable robots to operate effectively in complex, long-term scenarios. In this paper, we survey and discuss AI techniques as'enablers' for long-term robot autonomy, current progress in integrating these techniques within long-running robotic systems, and the future challenges and opportunities for AI in long-term autonomy. I. INTRODUCTION Robot technology has improved tremendously over the last decade. Consequently, autonomous robot systems have been able to operate in increasingly complex environments and for increasingly long periods of time, i.e. weeks, months, or years. When a fully modelled robot is deployed in a completely known, static environment, the challenge of long-term autonomy (LTA) reduces to one of robustness, i.e. enabling the robot to remain operational for as long as possible. Without these simplifying assumptions autonomous robots face a number of interrelated challenges. The first refers to the application requirements, e.g., the robot platform (hardware and software), environment and tasks to be performed.
AtDelfi: Automatically Designing Legible, Full Instructions For Games
Green, Michael Cerny, Khalifa, Ahmed, Barros, Gabriella A. B., Machado, Tiago, Nealen, Andy, Togelius, Julian
This paper introduces a fully automatic method for generating video game tutorials. The AtDELFI system (AuTomatically DEsigning Legible, Full Instructions for games) was created to investigate procedural generation of instructions that teach players how to play video games. We present a representation of game rules and mechanics using a graph system as well as a tutorial generation method that uses said graph representation. We demonstrate the concept by testing it on games within the General Video Game Artificial Intelligence (GVG-AI) framework; the paper discusses tutorials generated for eight different games. Our findings suggest that a graph representation scheme works well for simple arcade style games such as Space Invaders and Pacman, but it appears that tutorials for more complex games might require higher-level understanding of the game than just single mechanics.
AI Reasoning Systems: PAC and Applied Methods
Learning and logic are distinct and remarkable approaches to prediction. Machine learning has experienced a surge in popularity because it is robust to noise and achieves high performance; however, ML experiences many issues with knowledge transfer and extrapolation. In contrast, logic is easily intepreted, and logical rules are easy to chain and transfer between systems; however, inductive logic is brittle to noise. We then explore the premise of combining learning with inductive logic into AI Reasoning Systems. Specifically, we summarize findings from PAC learning (conceptual graphs, robust logics, knowledge infusion) and deep learning (DSRL, $\partial$ILP, DeepLogic) by reproducing proofs of tractability, presenting algorithms in pseudocode, highlighting results, and synthesizing between fields. We conclude with suggestions for integrated models by combining the modules listed above and with a list of unsolved (likely intractable) problems.
A Survey of Knowledge Representation and Retrieval for Learning in Service Robotics
Within the realm of service robotics, researchers have placed a great amount of effort into learning motions and manipulations for task execution by robots. The task of robot learning is very broad, as it involves many tasks such as object detection, action recognition, motion planning, localization, knowledge representation and retrieval, and the intertwining of computer vision and machine learning techniques. In this paper, we focus on how knowledge can be gathered, represented, and reproduced to solve problems as done by researchers in the past decades. We discuss the problems which have existed in robot learning and the solutions, technologies or developments (if any) which have contributed to solving them. Specifically, we look at three broad categories involved in task representation and retrieval for robotics: 1) activity recognition from demonstrations, 2) scene understanding and interpretation, and 3) task representation in robotics - datasets and networks. Within each section, we discuss major breakthroughs and how their methods address present issues in robot learning and manipulation.
A Meaning-based Statistical English Math Word Problem Solver
Liang, Chao-Chun, Wong, Yu-Shiang, Lin, Yi-Chung, Su, Keh-Yih
We introduce MeSys, a meaning-based approach, for solving English math word problems (MWPs) via understanding and reasoning in this paper. It first analyzes the text, transforms both body and question parts into their corresponding logic forms, and then performs inference on them. The associated context of each quantity is represented with proposed role-tags (e.g., nsubj, verb, etc.), which provides the flexibility for annotating an extracted math quantity with its associated context information (i.e., the physical meaning of this quantity). Statistical models are proposed to select the operator and operands. A noisy dataset is designed to assess if a solver solves MWPs mainly via understanding or mechanical pattern matching. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing systems on both benchmark datasets and the noisy dataset, which demonstrates that the proposed approach understands the meaning of each quantity in the text more.
Representing scenarios for process evolution management
In the following writing we discuss a conceptual framework for representing events and scenarios from the perspective of a novel form of causal analysis. This causal analysis is applied to the events and scenarios so as to determine measures that could be used to manage the development of the processes that they are a part of in real time. An overall terminological framework and entity-relationship model are suggested along with a specification of the functional sets involved in both reasoning and analytics. The model is considered to be a specific case of the generic problem of finding sequential series in disparate data. The specific inference and reasoning processes are identified for future implementation.
Lattice based Conceptual Spaces to Explore Cognitive Functionalities for Prosthetic Arm
Ishwarya, M S, Cherukuri, Aswani Kumar
Upper limb Prosthetic can be viewed as an independent cognitive system in order to develop a conceptual space. In this paper, we provide a detailed analogical reasoning of prosthetic arm to build the conceptual spaces with the help of the theory called geometric framework of conceptual spaces proposed by Gardenfors. Terminologies of conceptual spaces such as concepts, similarities, properties, quality dimensions and prototype are applied for a specific prosthetic system and conceptual space is built for prosthetic arm. Concept lattice traversals are used on the lattice represented conceptual spaces. Cognitive functionalities such as generalization (Similarities) and specialization (Differences) are achieved in the lattice represented conceptual space. This might well prove to design intelligent prosthetics to assist challenged humans. Geometric framework of conceptual spaces holds similar concepts closer in geometric structures in a way similar to concept lattices. Hence, we also propose to use concept lattice to represent concepts of geometric framework of conceptual spaces. Also, we extend our discussion with our insights on conceptual spaces of bidirectional hand prosthetics.
Arcades: A deep model for adaptive decision making in voice controlled smart-home
Brenon, Alexis, Portet, François, Vacher, Michel
Smart-home is an application domain which brings together home automation and ambient intelligence to ease life of dwellers and to provide support to people in loss of autonomy. The development of smarthomes is not only a cultural and technological evolution but is also recognized as one way to address the challenges created by an aging population in developed countries [42]. If home automation is concerned with sensing (sensors, actuators, middle-ware) and low-level automation (heating control, lighting control), Ambient Intelligence should provide perception and reasoning capabilities into the smart-home ecosystem. However, although the development of smart-homes is supported by a large amount of research and industrial projects, it has not reached a large public since many challenges are still to be addressed. One of the main challenges is due to the complexity of setting up the smart-home system in case of new situations (devices, house, dwellers, after an accident, etc.).
Verifying Conceptual Domain Models with Human Computation: A Case Study in Software Engineering
Sabou, Marta (Technical University of Vienna) | Winkler, Dietmar (Technical University of Vienna) | Penzerstadler, Peter (Technical University of Vienna) | Biffl, Stefan (Technical University of Vienna)
Conceptual domain models, such as taxonomies, knowledge graphs or Extended Entity Relationship (EER) diagrams are core to all information systems. The task of verifying the correctness of these models is of high interest to the knowledge and software engineering communities and attracted the first solution approaches using human computation. Yet, since these solutions are published within the boundaries of their communities, there is a lack of concerted work on this topic. As a first step to alleviate this status quo, we formalize the problem of verifying conceptual models and propose a generic approach (VeriCoM) to solve it with human computation techniques. We show how VeriCoM was applied in a software engineering use case focusing on verifying the correctness of an EER diagram against a system specification document. An evaluation of VeriCoM in a series of four workshops within one controlled experiment performed with a crowd of semi-experts lead to the identification of a set of defects with precision of 73% and a recall from a Gold Standard defect set of 63%.
Managing Data through the Lens of an Ontology
Lenzerini, Maurizio (Università di Roma La Sapienza)
While the amount of data stored in current information systems continuously grows, and the processes making use of such data become more and more complex, extracting knowledge and getting insights from these data, as well as governing both data and the associated processes, are still challenging tasks. The problem is complicated by the proliferation of data sources and services both within a single organization, and in cooperating environments. Effectively accessing, integrating and managing data in complex organizations is still one of the main issues faced by the information technology industry today. Indeed, it is not surprising that data scientists spend a comparatively large amount of time in the data preparation phase of a project, compared with the data minining and knowledge discovery phase. Whether you call it data wrangling, data munging, or data integration, it is estimated that 50%-80% of a data scientists time is spent on collecting and organizing data for analysis. If we consider that in any complex organization, data governance is also essential for tasks other than data analytics, we can conclude that the challenge of identifying, gathering, retaining, and providing access to all relevant data for the business at an acceptable cost, is huge.