Autonomous development of goals: From generic rewards to goal and self detection

Rolf M, Asada M. Autonomous development of goals: From generic rewards to goal and self detection. In: 4th International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics, {ICDL-EPIROB} 2014, Genoa, Italy, October 13-16, 2014. IEEE; 2014: 187--194

Contact force estimation from flexible tactile sensor values considering hysteresis by Gaussian process

Horii T, Giovannini F, Nagai Y, Natale L, Metta G, Asada M. Contact force estimation from flexible tactile sensor values considering hysteresis by Gaussian process. In: 4th International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics, {ICDL-EPIROB} 2014, Genoa, Italy, October 13-16, 2014. IEEE; 2014: 137--138

Learning where to look with movement-based intrinsic motivations: a bio-inspired model

Most sophisticated mammals, in particular primates, interact with the world to acquire knowledge and skills later exploitable to obtain biologically relevant resources. These interactions are driven by intrinsic motivations. Recent research on brain is revealing the system of neural structures, pivoting on superior colliculus, underlying trial-and-error learning processes guided by movement-detection, one important element of one speci?c type of intrinsic motivation mechanism. Here we present a preliminary computational model of such system guiding the acquisition of overt attentional skills. The model is formed by bottom-up attentional components, exploiting the intrinsic properties of the scene, and top-down attentional components, learning under the guidance of movement-based intrinsic motivation. The model is tested with a simple task, inspired by the \u27gaze- contingency paradigm\u27 proposed in cognitive psychology, where looking some portions of the environment can directly change it. The tests of the model show how its integrated components can learn skills causing relevant changes in the environment while ignoring changes non-contingent to own action. The model also allows the presentation of a wider research agenda directed to build biologically plausible models of the interaction between overt attention control and intrinsic motivations

Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales