In this paper, the problem of endowing ubiquitous robots with cognitive capabilities for recognizing emotions, sentiments, affects and moods of humans, in their context, is studied. A hybrid approach based on multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network and n-ary ontologies for emotion-aware robotic systems is proposed. In particular, an algorithm based on the hybrid-level fusion, an expressive emotional knowledge representation and reasoning model are introduced to recognize complex and non-observable emotional context of the user. Empirical experiments on real-world dataset corroborate its effectiveness.

A 23-year-old'professional speedcuber' has set a new world record by completing a Rubik's Cube in just 4.59 seconds. Korean SeungBeom Cho solved the 3D puzzle in his first round at the World Cube Association's ChicaGhosts 2017 event in Chicago, smashing his previous personal best of 6.54 seconds. Footage of Mr Cho's attempt shows him given just a few seconds to examine the cube before starting, completing it just moments later. A series of UK records have been broken by quick-fingered Rubik's Cube solvers at the UK championships held in Stevenage, Hertfordshire on Sunday. Competitors as young as seven tackled the notoriously tricky cubes one-handed, blindfolded and even with their feet in a bid to become the top gamers of the weekend.

Multi-Context Systems (MCS) are a powerful framework for interlinking possibly heterogeneous, autonomous knowledge bases, where information can be exchanged among knowledge bases by designated bridge rules with negation as failure. An acknowledged issue with MCS is inconsistency that arises due to the information exchange. To remedy this problem, inconsistency removal has been proposed in terms of repairs, which modify bridge rules based on suitable notions for diagnosis of inconsistency. In general, multiple diagnoses and repairs do exist; this leaves the user, who arguably may oversee the inconsistency removal, with the task of selecting some repair among all possible ones. To aid in this regard, we extend the MCS framework with preference information for diagnoses, such that undesired diagnoses are filtered out and diagnoses that are most preferred according to a preference ordering are selected. We consider preference information at a generic level and develop meta-reasoning techniques on diagnoses in MCS that can be exploited to reduce preference-based selection of diagnoses to computing ordinary subset-minimal diagnoses in an extended MCS. We describe two meta-reasoning encodings for preference orders: the first is conceptually simple but may incur an exponential blowup. The second is increasing only linearly in size and based on duplicating the original MCS. The latter requires nondeterministic guessing if a subset-minimal among all most preferred diagnoses should be computed. However, a complexity analysis of diagnoses shows that this is worst-case optimal, and that in general, preferred diagnoses have the same complexity as subset-minimal ordinary diagnoses. Furthermore, (subset-minimal) filtered diagnoses and (subset-minimal) ordinary diagnoses also have the same complexity.

We introduce the concept of local bucket error for the mini-bucket heuristics and show how it can be used to improve the power of AND/OR search for combinatorial optimization tasks in graphical models (e.g. MAP/MPE or weighted CSPs). The local bucket error illuminates how the heuristic errors are distributed in the search space, guided by the mini-bucket heuristic. We present and analyze methods for compiling the local bucket-errors (exactly and approximately) and show that they can be used to yield an effective tool for balancing look-ahead overhead during search. This can be especially instrumental when memory is restricted, accommodating the generation of only weak compiled heuristics. We illustrate the impact of the proposed schemes in an extensive empirical evaluation for both finding exact solutions and anytime suboptimal solutions.

Recently, a number of noteworthy results have been achieved in various fields of artificial intelligence, and many aspects of the problem solving process have received significant attention by the scientific community. In this context, the extraction of comprehensive knowledge suitable for problem solving and reasoning, from textual and pictorial problem descriptions, has been less investigated, but recognized as essential for autonomous thinking in Artificial Intelligence. In this work we present a challenge where methods and tools for deep understanding are strongly needed for enabling problem solving: we propose to solve mathematical puzzles by means of computers, starting from text and diagrams describing them, without any human intervention. We are aware that the proposed challenge is hard and of difficult solution nowadays (and in the foreseeable future), but even studying and solving only single parts of the proposed challenge would represent an important step forward for artificial intelligence.

What characters believe, how they act based on those beliefs,and how their beliefs are updated is an essential element of many stories. State-space narrative planning algorithms treat their search spaces like a set of temporally possible worlds. We present an extension that models character beliefs as epistemically possible worlds and describe how such a space is generated. We also present the results of an experiment that demonstrates that the model meets the expectations of a human audience.

This paper contains analysis of concept of a class within different object-oriented knowledge representation models. The main attention is paid to structure of the class and its efficiency in the context of data storage, using object-relational mapping. The main achievement of the paper is extension of concept of homogeneous class of objects by introducing concepts of single-core and multi-core inhomogeneous classes of objects, which allow simultaneous defining of a few different types within one class of objects, avoiding duplication of properties and methods in representation of types, decreasing sizes of program codes and providing more efficient information storage in the databases. In addition, the paper contains results of experiment, which show that data storage in relational database, using proposed extensions of the class, in some cases is more efficient in contrast to usage of homogeneous classes of objects.

Plenty of efficient algorithms exist to solve a rubik's cube. I was curious to find out if a neural net could learn how to solve a cube in the most "efficient" way, by solving the cube in less than 20 moves, i.e god's number. This is a very naive solution, to start as a proof of concept. I used a 2 layer neural net: 1 convnet layer and 1 feedforward layer. The input is the state of the cube to be solved.

The question of how humans solve problem has been addressed extensively. However, the direct study of the effectiveness of this process seems to be overlooked. In this paper, we address the issue of the effectiveness of human problem solving: we analyze where this effectiveness comes from and what cognitive mechanisms or heuristics are involved. Our results are based on the optimal probabilistic problem solving strategy that appeared in Solomonoff paper on general problem solving system. We provide arguments that a certain set of cognitive mechanisms or heuristics drive human problem solving in the similar manner as the optimal Solomonoff strategy. The results presented in this paper can serve both cognitive psychology in better understanding of human problem solving processes as well as artificial intelligence in designing more human-like agents.

This paper introduces a cognitive architecture for a humanoid robot to engage in a proactive, mixed-initiative exploration and manipulation of its environment, where the initiative can originate from both the human and the robot. The framework, based on a biologically-grounded theory of the brain and mind, integrates a reactive interaction engine, a number of state-of-the-art perceptual and motor learning algorithms, as well as planning abilities and an autobiographical memory. The architecture as a whole drives the robot behavior to solve the symbol grounding problem, acquire language capabilities, execute goal-oriented behavior, and express a verbal narrative of its own experience in the world. We validate our approach in human-robot interaction experiments with the iCub humanoid robot, showing that the proposed cognitive architecture can be applied in real time within a realistic scenario and that it can be used with naive users.