Anticipating the actions of others is key to coordinating joint activities. We propose the notion of anticipatory action and perception for for robots acting with humans. We describe four systems in which anticipation has been modeled for human-robot interaction; two in a teamwork setting, and two in a human-robot joint performance setting. In evaluating the effects of anticipatory agent activity, we find in one study that anticipation aids in team efficiency, as well as in the perceived commitment of the robot to the team and its contribution to the team's fluency and success. In another study we see anticipatory action and perception affect the human partner's sense of team fluency, the team's improvement over time, the robot’s contribution to the efficiency and fluency, the robot's intelligence, and the robot’s adaptation to the task. We also find that subjects working with the anticipatory robot attribute more human qualities to the robot, such as gender and intelligence.

The friend of a friend (FOAF) vocabulary is widely used on the Web to describe individual people and their properties. Since FOAF does not require a unique ID for a person, it is not clear when two FOAF agents should be linked as co-referent, i.e., denote the same person in the world. One approach is to use the presence of inverse functional properties (e.g., foaf:mbox) as evidence that two individuals are the same. Another applies heuristics based on the string similarity of values of FOAF properties such as name and school as evidence for or against co-reference. Performance is limited, however, by many factors: non-semantic string matching, noise, changes in the world, and the lack of more sophisticated graph analytics. We describe a supervised machine learning approach that uses features defined over pairs of FOAF individuals to produce a classifier for identifying co-referent FOAF instances. We present initial results using data collected from Swoogle and other sources and describe plans for additional analysis.

Some of the top legal ontologies developed so far include the Functional Ontology for Law [FOLaw] The increasing need for legal information and content (Valente 1995), the Frame-Based Ontology (van Kralingen management caused by the growing amount of 1995), the LRI-Core ontology (Breuker 2004), unstructured (or poorly structured) legal data managed by DOLCE CLO [Core Legal Ontology] (Gangemi et al. legal publishing companies, law firms and public 2003), or the Ontology of Fundamental Concepts (Rubino administrations, or the increasing amount of legal et al. 2006, Sartor 2006) the basis for the LKIF-Core information directly available on the World Wide Web, Ontology (Breuker et al. 2007). Nevertheless, most legal have created an urgent need to construct conceptual ontologies are domain specific ontologies, which represent structures for knowledge representation to share and particular legal domains towards search, indexing and manage intelligently all this information, whilst making reasoning in a specific domain of national or European law human-machine communication and understanding (e.g. the IPRONTO ontology by Delgado et al. 2003, the possible.

We propose a methodology for automatic synthesis of embedded control software that accounts for exogenous disturbances. The resulting system is guaranteed, by construction, to satisfy a given specification expressed in linear temporal logic. The embedded control software consists of three components: a goal generator, a trajectory planner, and a continuous controller. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique through an example of an autonomous vehicle navigating an urban environment. This example also illustrates that the system is not only robust with respect to exogenous disturbances but also capable of handling violation of the environment assumptions.

We summarise the experimental design issues related to timing in several human-robot interaction scenarios investigating turn-taking or synchronization between child-sized humanoid robots and human participants. Our aim is not to have the humanoid robots just replicate the human’s behaviours (e.g. waving, peek-a-boo, or drumming), but to engage in interactions in a socially appropriate manner. From these various studies, we have identified several ways in which time has an impact on interaction. We have also identified practical concerns about data collection for time-dependent interactions and ways to address them. The conclusions drawn from this work is likely to be useful in informing the design of systems which engage in synchronized or turn-taking interactions with people.

A key challenge for policymakers in many developing countries is to decide which intervention or collection of interventions works best to improve learning outcomes in their schools. Our aim is to develop a causal model that explains student learning outcomes in terms of observable characteristics as well as conditions and processes difficult to observe directly. We start with a theoretical model based on the results of previous research, direct experience and experts’ knowledge in the field. This model is then refined through application of supervised learning methods to available data sets. Once calibrated with local data in a country, the model estimates the probability that a given intervention would affect learning outcomes.

The Web of Data (WoD) is growing at an amazing rate and it will no longer be feasible to deal with it in a global way, by centralising the data or reasoning processes making use of that data. We believe that Computational Intelligence techniques provides the adaptiveness, robustness and scalability that will be required to exploit the full value of ever growing amounts of dynamic Semantic Web data.

Time perception and inferences there from are of critical importance to many autonomous agents. But time is not perceived directly by any sensory organ. We argue that time is constructed by cognitive processes. Here we present a model for time perception that concentrates on succession and duration, and that generates these concepts and others, such as continuity, immediate present duration, and lengths of time. These concepts are grounded through the perceptual process itself. The LIDA cognitive model is used to illustrate these ideas.

On interactive surfaces, an accurate system calibration is crucial for a precise user interaction. Today, geometric distortions are eliminated by a static calibration. However, this calibration is specific to a user’s posture, and parallax distortions occur if this changes (i.e. if the user moves or if multiple users take turns). Within this paper, we describe an approach to model automatic online re-calibration to cope with changing viewpoints by using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP). Hereby, the viewpoint is stochastically deducted from the precision of user interactions on the surface. To enable the implementation on embedded systems, a small model is defined using states and observations, which are formulated relative to the current assumed viewpoint. We show the structure of a family of models, that can be generated automatically based on the user’s position probability and pointing accuracy.

Navigation and localization are still one of the most fundamental tasks to be accomplished by mobile autonomous robots. One of the main purposes of the navigation and localization process is to build a precise, usually allocentric spatial static representation (e.g. [S. Thrun and Schulz, 2000] ). Although robots are able to carry more and more powerful sensors, the question is, which informations are needed for localization and navigation. One way to do these tasks with only a minimal amount of resources is via landmarks. Furthermore it is an easy and failsafe way to do so. Localization can be done with only a single 180 degree camera, and a navigation by the change of the landmark ordering is very robust against misinterpretations and errors. This technique uses the fact that, seen from the agent, landmarks are switching locations only in a certain way( [Wagner, Visser, and Herzog, 2004] ). With an additional timer the robustness of this technique can be further increased. But with timing and the use of angles between the landmarks, it is also possible to measure the distances between the landmarks and the agent. Furthermore this technique can be extended to detect moving objects and to compute the speed and direction of them.