Roboticists need to have a solid understanding of hardware and software. The standard computer science education in the United States, however, tends to teach students only about software. To remedy this situation, we explore new ways of teaching them about hardware in a playful way. Realizing that pinball machines are simple robots, we have developed a pinball machine interface between a PC and a recent Lord of the Rings pinball machine, which enables students to implement pinball games and gain knowledge of hardware and interface programming in the process. This paper describes both our pinball machine interface and our experience developing it. As far as we know, this is the first time that anyone has managed to control an existing pinball machine completely.

With the advent of RDFa and the at least partial support by major search engines, semantically structured data is more and more appearing on the Web. To enable high value use cases, links between entity descriptions need to be established. The linked data model suggests that links should be state explicitly by those who expose entity descriptions, but unlike on the normal web, incentives for doing so are unclear so that the model ultimately seems to fail in practice. In this position paper, we make the conjecture that explicit links are not needed for realizing the semantic web. We propose discuss how Record Linkage techniques are in general very well suited for the task but argue the need for a tool would allow data publishers to have an active role in producing entity descriptions that can then be linked automatically.

Most social networks have implemented extensive and complex controls in order to battle the host of privacy concerns that initially plagued their online communities. These controls have taken the form of a-priori access control, which allow users to construct barriers preventing unwanted users from viewing their personal information. However, in cases in which the access restriction mechanisms are bypassed or when the access restrictions are met but the data is later misused, this system leaves users unprotected. Our framework, Respect My Privacy, proposes an alternative approach to the protection of privacy. Our strategy is similar to how legal and social rules work in our societies where the vast majority of these rules are not enforced perfectly or automatically, yet most of us follow the majority of the rules because social systems built up over thousands of years encourage us to do so and often make compliance easier than violation. Our project aims to support similar functionality in social networks. Instead of focusing on enforcing privacy policies through restricted access, we focus on helping users conform to existing policies by making them aware of the usage restrictions associated with the data. The framework has two main functions - generating privacy or usage control policies for social networks, and visualizing these policies while exploring social networks. We have implemented this functionality across three platforms: Facebook, OpenSocial and Tabulator, a Semantic Web browser. These applications enable users to specify privacy preferences for their data and then display this privacy-annotated data prominently enabling other users to easily recognize and conform to these preferences.

Food shortages are increasing in many areas of the world. In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding the causal relationships between socioeconomic factors in a developing-world household and their risk of experiencing famine. We analyse the extent to which it is possible to predict famine in a household based on these factors, looking at a data collected from 5404 households in Uganda. To do this we use a set of causal structure learning algorithms, employed as a committee that votes on the causal relationships between the variables. We contrast prediction accuracy of famine based on feature sets suggested by our prior knowledge and by the models we learn.

This communication is accomplished via and Scheutz in preparation). The observed naturallytimed strategies which necessarily incorporate time. The interaction interaction is used to argue that in at least some interesting between the agents is naturally extended over time, yet interactive situations, explicit representation of or in neither agent does any explicit representation of or reasoning operation on time is not necessary. Observing that many interactive about time occur. Kelso et al's Virtual Partner Interaction situations will be similar, we hypothesize that in (Kelso et al. 2009) is a paradigm in which a virtual fact most interactions will require no explicit representation hand is guided by a dynamical system known to guide most or reasoning about time.

In this paper, we propose a model of the web of data as a graph of interlinked graphs which goes beyond the standard single-graph RDF semantics, describe two different ways in which a query on this structure can be answered, and characterize semantically each of these ways in terms of restrictions on the relation between the domain of interpretation of each single component graph.

Semantic technologies are available, and gain popularity on the Web as well as on the desktop, but both (desktop and Web) act as large data silos, making personal and online data difficult to interlink. We propose a system that enables easy publishing of personal notes as linked social media content, while at the same time semantically enriching the desktop resources with information retrieved from the Linked Data cloud. The transformation, publication and linking process is integrated with the familiar desktop applications and online blogging platforms, providing a better usability experience.

In 3 experiments, participants learned bone anatomy by using a hand-held controller to rotate an on-screen 3D bone model. The on-screen bone included (OR condition) or did not include (no-OR condition) orientation references—visible lines marking its axes. The learning task involved rotating the on-screen bone to match target orientations. Learning outcomes were assessed by having participants identify anatomical features from different orientations. On the learning task, the OR group performed more accurately, directly, and quickly than the control group and high-spatial individuals outperformed low-spatial individuals. Assessments of anatomy learning indicated that under more challenging conditions, ORs elevated learning by low-spatial individuals to near that of high-spatial individuals. In Experiment 3, orientation references were shown to help learners avoid disorientation due to the symmetrical shape of the object.

Telephone-based information access has the potential to deliver a significant positive impact in the developing world. We discuss some of the most important issues that must be addressed in order to realize this potential, including matters related to resource development, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech systems, and user-interface design. Although our main focus has been on the eleven official languages of South Africa, we believe that many of these same issues will be relevant for the application of speech technology throughout the developing world.

Research effort, with its emphasis on evaluation and measurable progress, things began to change. Instead SHRDLU (WIN72) is perhaps the canonical example. of systems whose architecture and vocabulary were The rapid growth of efforts to found the next generation of based on linguistic theory (in this case acoustic phonetics), systems on general-purpose knowledge representation languages new approaches based on statistical modelling and Bayesian (I'm thinking of several varieties of semantic nets, probability emerged and quickly spread. "Every time I fire a from plain to partitioned, as well as KRL, KL-ONE and linguist my system's performance improves" (Fred Jellinek, their successors, ending (not yet, of course) with CYC (See head of speech recognition at IBM, c. 1980, latterly repudiated (BRA08) for all these) stumbled to a halt once their failure by Fred but widely attested). As advanced from resolution theorem provers through a number more and more problems are re-conceived as instances of of stages to the current proliferation of a range of Description the noisy channel model, the empiricist paradigm continually Logic'reasoners'; Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s there grew, so did the need to manage the impact of change and was real energy and optimism at the interface between computational conflict: enter'truth maintenance', subsequently renamed and theoretical linguistics, the overwhelming success'reason maintenance'. While still using some of But outflanking these'normal science' advances of AI, the terminology of linguistic theory, computational linguistics the paradigm shifters were coming up fast on the outside: practioners are increasingly detached from theory itself, over the last ten years machine learning has spread from which has suffered a, perhaps connected, loss of energy and small specialist niches such as speech recognition to become sense of progress.