Emotions are a ubiquitous component of motivation and learning. We have developed an affective behavior model for intelligent tutoring systems that considers both the affective and knowledge state of the student to generate tutorial actions. The affective behavior model (ABM) was designed based on teachers' expertise obtained through interviews. It relies on a dynamic decision network with a utility measure on both student learning and affect to generate tutorial actions aimed at balancing the two. We have integrated and evaluated the ABM in an educational game to learn number factorization. We carried out a controlled user study to evaluate the impact of the affective model on learning. The results show that for the younger students there is a significant improvement on learning when the affective behavior model is incorporated.

Though polarity classification has been extensively explored at document level, there has been little work investigating feature design at sentence level. Due to the small number of words within a sentence, polarity classification at sentence level differs substantially from document-level classification in that resulting bag-of-words feature vectors tend to be very sparse resulting in a lower classification accuracy. In this paper, we show that performance can be improved by adding features specifically designed for sentence-level polarity classification. We consider both explicit polarity information and various linguistic features. A great proportion of the improvement that can be obtained by using polarity information can also be achieved by using a set of simple domain-independent linguistic features.

As robots become more common, it becomes increasingly useful for them to communicate and effectively share knowledge that they have learned through their individual experiences.  Learning from experiences, however, is often-times embodiment-specific; that is, the knowledge learned is grounded in the robot’s unique sensors and actuators.  This type of learning raises questions as to how communication and knowledge exchange via social interaction can occur, as properties of the world can be grounded differently in different robots.  This is especially true when the robots are heterogeneous, with different sensors and perceptual features used to define the properties.  In this paper, we present methods and representations that allow heterogeneous robots to learn grounded property representations, such as that of color categories, and then build models of their similarities and differences in order to map their respective representations.  We use a conceptual space representation, where object properties are learned and represented as regions in a metric space, implemented via supervised learning of Gaussian Mixture Models.  We then propose to use confusion matrices that are built using instances from each robot, obtained in a shared context, in order to learn mappings between the properties of each robot.  Results are demonstrated using two perceptually heterogeneous Pioneer robots, one with a web camera and another with a camcorder.

We compare two approaches to Bayesian network inference, called variable elimination (VE) and arc reversal (AR). It is established that VE never requires more space than AR, and never requires more computation (multiplications and additions) than AR.

Presentations are one of the most common and effective ways of communicating the overview of a work to the audience. Given a technical paper, automatic generation of presentation slides reduces the effort of the presenter and helps in creating a structured summary of the paper. In this paper, we propose the framework of a novel system that does this task. Any paper that has an abstract and whose sections can be categorized under introduction, related work, model, experiments and conclusions can be given as input. As documents in LaTeX are rich in structural and semantic information we used them as input to our system. These documents are initially converted to XML format. This XML file is parsed and information in it is extracted. A query specific extractive summarizer has been used to generate slides. All graphical elements from the paper are made well use of by placing them at appropriate locations in the slides. These slides are presented in the document order.

This paper describes the Spyglass tool, which is designed to help analysts explore very large collections of unstructured text documents. Spyglass uses a domain ontology to index documents, and provides retrieval and visualization services based on the ontology and the resulting index. The ontology based approach allows analysts to share information and helps to ensure consistency of results. The approach is also scalable and lends itself very well to parallel computation. The Spyglass system is described in detail and indexing and query results using a large set of sample documents are presented.

This paper extends the concept of trust modeling within a multi-agent environment.  Trust modeling often focuses on identifying the appropriate trust level for the other agents in the environment and then using these levels to determine how to interact with each agent.  However, this type of modeling does not account for sneaky agents who are willing to cooperate when the stakes are low and take selfish, greedy actions when the rewards rise.  Adding trust to an interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP) allows trust levels to be continuously monitored and corrected enabling agents to make better decisions.  The addition of trust modeling increases the decision process calculations, but solves more complex trust problems that are representative of the human world.  The modified I-POMDP reward function and belief models can be used to accurately track the trust levels of agents with hidden agendas.  Testing demonstrates that agents quickly identify the hidden trust levels to mitigate the impact of a deceitful agent.

In Web-based CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) often including cooperative learning, remote members communicate their intentions in cyberspace, using textual sentences, pictures and voice. However, often, communication between members cannot be correctly done and interface errors occur. Different from face-to-face communication, partners' situations including their interest, concentration, boredom, and tiredness cannot be easily transmitted. Oversight and mishearing of remote partners is often overlooked. Besides, it is further difficult to understand their real intentions sufficiently. To overcome these problems, “Augmented Cyberspace” for dependable Web-based CSCW Systems, is proposed, which is also applicable to system such as e-learning, e-commerce, etc. This assesses situations of remote users through timely fusing information of multiple biological sensors and the related contexts. By exploiting the timely assessment, the system augments the cyberspace through emphasizing the situation of remote users or providing warnings in conventional media such as text, image, and voice. Experimental results showed the necessity and feasibility of such assessment by information fusion of multiple sensors.

Highly capable multiple robot architectures often resort to micromanagement to provide enhanced cooperative abilities, sacrificing individual autonomy. Conversely, multi-robot architectures that maintain individual autonomy are often limited in their cooperative abilities.  This article presents a modified three layer architecture that solves both of these issues.  The addition of a Coordinator layer to a three-layered approach provides a platform-independent interface for coordination on tasks and takes advantage of individual autonomy to improve coordination capabilities.  This reduces communication overhead versus many multi-robot architecture designs and allows for more straightforward resizing of the robot collective and increased individual autonomy.

In this paper we present a syntactical way to develop the adaptation capability in logical-based intelligent agents. We use prime implicants to represent the beliefs of an agent and present how syntactical belief update operators can be obtained by correlating models and prime implicants. Using prime implicants allows the introdution a new notion of belief update. We characterize this new operator both in terms of postulates and in terms of explicit operators.