AI systems may be better thought of as peers than as tools. This paper explores applications of augmented collective intelligence (ACI) beneficial to collaborative ideation. Design considerations are offered for an experiment that evaluates the performance of hybrid human- AI collectives. The investigation described combines humans and large language models (LLMs) to ideate on increasingly complex topics. A promising real-time collection tool called Polis is examined to facilitate ACI, including case studies from citizen engagement projects in Taiwan and Bowling Green, Kentucky. The authors discuss three challenges to consider when designing an ACI experiment: topic selection, participant selection, and evaluation of results. The paper concludes that researchers should address these challenges to conduct empirical studies of ACI in collaborative ideation.

The polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis is a problem that can be leveraged using prognostication based learning procedures. Many implementations of PCOS can be seen with Machine Learning but the algorithms have certain limitations in utilizing the processing power graphical processing units. The simple machine learning algorithms can be improved with advanced frameworks using Deep Learning. The Linear Discriminant Analysis is a linear dimensionality reduction algorithm for classification that can be boosted in terms of performance using deep learning with Deep LDA, a transformed version of the traditional LDA. In this result oriented paper we present the Deep LDA implementation with a variation for prognostication of PCOS.

We study the problem of object retrieval in scenarios where visual sensing is absent, object shapes are unknown beforehand and objects can move freely, like grabbing objects out of a drawer. Successful solutions require localizing free objects, identifying specific object instances, and then grasping the identified objects, only using touch feedback. Unlike vision, where cameras can observe the entire scene, touch sensors are local and only observe parts of the scene that are in contact with the manipulator. Moreover, information gathering via touch sensors necessitates applying forces on the touched surface which may disturb the scene itself. Reasoning with touch, therefore, requires careful exploration and integration of information over time -- a challenge we tackle. We present a system capable of using sparse tactile feedback from fingertip touch sensors on a dexterous hand to localize, identify and grasp novel objects without any visual feedback. Videos are available at https://taochenshh.github.io/projects/tactofind.

Robot learning methods have the potential for widespread generalization across tasks, environments, and objects. However, these methods require large diverse datasets that are expensive to collect in real-world robotics settings. For robot learning to generalize, we must be able to leverage sources of data or priors beyond the robot's own experience. In this work, we posit that image-text generative models, which are pre-trained on large corpora of web-scraped data, can serve as such a data source. We show that despite these generative models being trained on largely non-robotics data, they can serve as effective ways to impart priors into the process of robot learning in a way that enables widespread generalization. In particular, we show how pre-trained generative models can serve as effective tools for semantically meaningful data augmentation. By leveraging these pre-trained models for generating appropriate "semantic" data augmentations, we propose a system GenAug that is able to significantly improve policy generalization. We apply GenAug to tabletop manipulation tasks, showing the ability to re-target behavior to novel scenarios, while only requiring marginal amounts of real-world data. We demonstrate the efficacy of this system on a number of object manipulation problems in the real world, showing a 40% improvement in generalization to novel scenes and objects.

Training automated agents to complete complex tasks in interactive environments is challenging: reinforcement learning requires careful hand-engineering of reward functions, imitation learning requires specialized infrastructure and access to a human expert, and learning from intermediate forms of supervision (like binary preferences) is time-consuming and extracts little information from each human intervention. Can we overcome these challenges by building agents that learn from rich, interactive feedback instead? We propose a new supervision paradigm for interactive learning based on "teachable" decision-making systems that learn from structured advice provided by an external teacher. We begin by formalizing a class of human-in-the-loop decision making problems in which multiple forms of teacher-provided advice are available to a learner. We then describe a simple learning algorithm for these problems that first learns to interpret advice, then learns from advice to complete tasks even in the absence of human supervision. In puzzle-solving, navigation, and locomotion domains, we show that agents that learn from advice can acquire new skills with significantly less human supervision than standard reinforcement learning algorithms and often less than imitation learning.

High dimensional data for classification does create many difficulties for machine learning algorithms. The generalization can be done using ensemble learning methods such as bagging based supervised non-parametric random forest algorithm. In this paper we solve the problem of binary classification for high dimensional data using random forest for polycystic ovary syndrome dataset. We have performed the implementation and provided a detailed visualization of the data for general inference. The training accuracy that we have achieved is 95.6% and validation accuracy over 91.74% respectively.

Spherical robots can conduct surveillance in hostile, cluttered environments without being damaged, as their protective shell can safely house sensors such as cameras. However, lateral oscillations, also known as wobble, occur when these sphere-shaped robots operate at low speeds, leading to shaky camera feedback. These oscillations in a pendulum-actuated spherical robot are caused by the coupling between the forward and steering motions due to nonholonomic constraints. Designing a controller to limit wobbling in these robots is challenging due to their underactuated nature. We propose a model-based controller to navigate a pendulum-actuated spherical robot using wobble-free turning maneuvers consisting of circular arcs and straight lines. The model is developed using Lagrange-D'Alembert equations and accounts for the coupled forward and steering motions. The model is further analyzed to derive expressions for radius of curvature, precession rate, wobble amplitude, and wobble frequency during circular motions. Finally, we design an input-output feedback linearization-based controller to control the robot's heading direction and wobble. Overall, the proposed controller enables a teleoperator to command a specific forward velocity and pendulum angle as per the desired turning radius while limiting the robot's lateral oscillations to enhance the quality of camera feedback.

A spherical robot has many practical advantages as the entire electronics are protected within a hull and can be carried easily by any Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, its use is limited due to finding mounts for sensors. Pendulum actuated spherical robot provides space for mounting sensors at the yoke. We study the non-linear dynamics of a pendulum-actuated spherical robot to analyze the dynamics of internal assembly (yoke) for mounting sensors. For such robots, we provide a coupled dynamic model that takes care of the relationship between forward and sideways motion. We further demonstrate the effects of wobbling and precession captured by our model when the bot is controlled to execute a turning maneuver while moving with a moderate forward velocity, a practical situation encountered by spherical robots moving in an indoor setting. A simulation setup based on the developed model provides visualization of the spherical robot motion.

Complex and contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those that involve multi-fingered hands and underactuated object manipulation, present a significant challenge to any control method. Methods based on reinforcement learning offer an appealing choice for such settings, as they can enable robots to learn to delicately balance contact forces and dexterously reposition objects without strong modeling assumptions. However, running reinforcement learning on real-world dexterous manipulation systems often requires significant manual engineering. This negates the benefits of autonomous data collection and ease of use that reinforcement learning should in principle provide. In this paper, we describe a system for vision-based dexterous manipulation that provides a "programming-free" approach for users to define new tasks and enable robots with complex multi-fingered hands to learn to perform them through interaction. The core principle underlying our system is that, in a vision-based setting, users should be able to provide high-level intermediate supervision that circumvents challenges in teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching which allow a robot to not only learn a task efficiently but also to autonomously practice. Our system includes a framework for users to define a final task and intermediate sub-tasks with image examples, a reinforcement learning procedure that learns the task autonomously without interventions, and experimental results with a four-finger robotic hand learning multi-stage object manipulation tasks directly in the real world, without simulation, manual modeling, or reward engineering.

The area of computer vision [1] has excelled in terms of innovation and performance delivered by leveraging Deep Learning [2]. The various tasks of computer vision are classification, object detection [3], object counting [4], image segmentation [5, 6] and many more. Classification [7] can be termed as one of the most primordial tasks in computer vision. The task of classification is identification of an entity or object by prognosticating its appropriate label is done effectively using Convolutional Neural Networks [8] abbreviated as CNN. The standard CNN gone under massive improvements in the latter period when ImageNet [9] Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) [10] came into existence yielding many models that are currently state-of-the-art deep learning models for image classification.