Robots are becoming increasingly common in home, industrial and medical environments. Their end users may know what they want the robots to do but lack the required technical skills to program them. We present a case-based reasoning approach for training a control module that controls a multi-purpose robotic platform. The control module learns by observing an expert performing a task and does not require any human intervention to program or modify the control module. To avoid requiring the control module to be modified when the robot it controls is repurposed, smart sensors and effectors register with the control module allowing it to dynamically modify the case structure it uses and how those cases are compared. This allows the hardware configuration to be modified, or completely changed, without having to change the control module. We present a case study demonstrating how a robot can be trained using learning by observation and later repurposed with new sensors and then retrained.

While similarity and retrieval in case-based reasoning (CBR) have received a lot of attention in the literature, other aspects of CBR, such as case reuse are less understood. Specifically, we focus on one of such, less understood, problems: "knowledge transfer". The issue we intend to elucidate can be expressed as follows: what knowledge present in a source case is transferred to a target problem in case-based inference? This paper presents a preliminary formal model of knowledge transfer and relates it to the classical notion of analogy.

Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) has continuously been the preeminent international meeting on case-based reasoning (CBR). Through 2009, ICCBR had been a biennial conference, held in alternation with its sister conference, the European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR), which was located in Europe. At the 2009 ICCBR, the ICCBR Program Committee elected to extend an offer of consolidation with ECCBR. The offer was accepted by the ECCBR 2010 organizers and they considered it approved by the ECCBR community, as the two conferences shared a majority of Program Committee members. Therefore, starting in 2010, ICCBR and ECCBR are merged in a single conference series, called ICCBR.

The article discusses some applications of fuzzy logic ideas to formalizing of the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) process and to measuring the effectiveness of CBR systems

The study is from a base of accident scenarii in rail transport (feedback) in order to develop a tool to share build and sustain knowledge and safety and secondly to exploit the knowledge stored to prevent the reproduction of accidents / incidents. This tool should ultimately lead to the proposal of prevention and protection measures to minimize the risk level of a new transport system and thus to improve safety. The approach to achieving this goal largely depends on the use of artificial intelligence techniques and rarely the use of a method of automatic learning in order to develop a feasibility model of a software tool based on case based reasoning (CBR) to exploit stored knowledge in order to create know-how that can help stimulate domain experts in the task of analysis, evaluation and certification of a new system.

While such systems have been shown to successfully support a broad range of interactions, they rely heavily on precoded data. For example, dialogue responses are typically limited to only one or two dozen phrases, which pales in comparison to the diversity of human speech. We believe that in order for robotic systems to become a truly ubiquitous technology, robots must make sense of natural human behavior and engage with humans in a more humanlike way. Robots must become more like humans instead of forcing humans to be more like robots. Much of human knowledge about the appropriateness of behavior, in terms of both speech and actions, comes from our personal experiences and our observations of others. We compare its performance variations form a knowledge base from which to a teleoperated robot following a scripted task we learn what to say and what actions to perform to protocol and examine both the behavior of the achieve certain goals.

Increasingly, optimization problems in machine learning, especially those arising from high-dimensional statistical estimation, have a large number of variables. Modern statistical estimators developed over the past decade have statistical or sample complexity that depends only weakly on the number of parameters when there is some structure to the problem, such as sparsity. A central question is whether similar advances can be made in their computational complexity as well. In this paper, we propose strategies that indicate that such advances can indeed be made. In particular, we investigate the greedy coordinate descent algorithm, and note that performing the greedy step efficiently weakens the costly dependence on the problem size provided the solution is sparse. We then propose a suite of methods that perform these greedy steps efficiently by a reduction to nearest neighbor search. We also devise a more amenable form of greedy descent for composite non-smooth objectives; as well as several approximate variants of such greedy descent. We develop a practical implementation of our algorithm that combines greedy coordinate descent with locality sensitive hashing. Without tuning the latter data structure, we are not only able to significantly speed up the vanilla greedy method, but also outperform cyclic descent when the problem size becomes large. Our results indicate the effectiveness of our nearest neighbor strategies, and also point to many open questions regarding the development of computational geometric techniques tailored towards first-order optimization methods.

We consider feature selection and weighting for nearest neighbor classifiers. A technical challenge in this scenario is how to cope with the discrete update of nearest neighbors when the feature space metric is changed during the learning process. This issue, called the target neighbor change, was not properly addressed in the existing feature weighting and metric learning literature. In this paper, we propose a novel feature weighting algorithm that can exactly and efficiently keep track of the correct target neighbors via sequential quadratic programming. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that guarantees the consistency between target neighbors and the feature space metric. We further show that the proposed algorithm can be naturally combined with regularization path tracking, allowing computationally efficient selection of the regularization parameter. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through experiments.

We study the family of p-resistances on graphs for p ≥ 1. This family generalizes the standard resistance distance. We prove that for any fixed graph, for p=1, the p-resistance coincides with the shortest path distance, for p=2 it coincides with the standard resistance distance, and for p → ∞ it converges to the inverse of the minimal s-t-cut in the graph. Secondly, we consider the special case of random geometric graphs (such as k-nearest neighbor graphs) when the number n of vertices in the graph tends to infinity. We prove that an interesting phase-transition takes place. There exist two critical thresholds p^* and p^** such that if p < p^*, then the p-resistance depends on meaningful global properties of the graph, whereas if p > p^**, it only depends on trivial local quantities and does not convey any useful information. We can explicitly compute the critical values: p^* = 1 + 1/(d-1) and p^** = 1 + 1/(d-2) where d is the dimension of the underlying space (we believe that the fact that there is a small gap between p^* and p^** is an artifact of our proofs. We also relate our findings to Laplacian regularization and suggest to use q-Laplacians as regularizers, where q satisfies 1/p^* + 1/q = 1.