16,686 research outputs found
Children, Humanoid Robots and Caregivers
This paper presents developmental learning on a humanoid robot from human-robot interactions. We consider in particular teaching humanoids as children during the child's Separation and Individuation developmental phase (Mahler, 1979). Cognitive development during this phase is characterized both by the child's dependence on her mother for learning while becoming awareness of her own individuality, and by self-exploration of her physical surroundings. We propose a learning framework for a humanoid robot inspired on such cognitive development
Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1
Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences
Grounding Symbols in Multi-Modal Instructions
As robots begin to cohabit with humans in semi-structured environments, the
need arises to understand instructions involving rich variability---for
instance, learning to ground symbols in the physical world. Realistically, this
task must cope with small datasets consisting of a particular users' contextual
assignment of meaning to terms. We present a method for processing a raw stream
of cross-modal input---i.e., linguistic instructions, visual perception of a
scene and a concurrent trace of 3D eye tracking fixations---to produce the
segmentation of objects with a correspondent association to high-level
concepts. To test our framework we present experiments in a table-top object
manipulation scenario. Our results show our model learns the user's notion of
colour and shape from a small number of physical demonstrations, generalising
to identifying physical referents for novel combinations of the words.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, To appear in the Proceedings of the ACL workshop
Language Grounding for Robotics, Vancouver, Canad
What are the affordances of information and communication technologies?
The paper examines the notion that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have affordances that epitomize the features of our late modern age (Giddens, 1991) and explores whether these affordances (Salomon, 1993, p. 51) can be used to facilitate particular approaches to educational practice. It argues that a clear articulation of these affordances would enable us to understand how these technologies can be most effectively used to support learning and teaching. We believe that any one affordance can be considered to have both positive and negative connotations and the paper draws on social and educational theory to provide an initial taxonomy of these affordances
Pre-Training Multi-Modal Dense Retrievers for Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering
This paper studies a category of visual question answering tasks, in which
accessing external knowledge is necessary for answering the questions. This
category is called outside-knowledge visual question answering (OK-VQA). A
major step in developing OK-VQA systems is to retrieve relevant documents for
the given multi-modal query. Current state-of-the-art asymmetric dense
retrieval model for this task uses an architecture with a multi-modal query
encoder and a uni-modal document encoder. Such an architecture requires a large
amount of training data for effective performance. We propose an automatic data
generation pipeline for pre-training passage retrieval models for OK-VQA tasks.
The proposed approach leads to 26.9% Precision@5 improvements compared to the
current state-of-the-art asymmetric architecture. Additionally, the proposed
pre-training approach exhibits a good ability in zero-shot retrieval scenarios
Young children's research: children aged 4-8 years finding solutions at home and at school
Children's research capacities have become increasingly recognised by adults, yet children remain excluded from the academy, with reports of their research participation generally located in adults' agenda. Such practice restricts children's freedom to make choices in matters affecting them, underestimates children’s capabilities and denies children particular rights. The present paper reports on one aspect of a small-scale critical ethnographic study adopting a constructivist grounded approach to conceptualise ways in which children's naturalistic behaviours may be perceived as research. The study builds on multi-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, embracing 'new' sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy and early childhood education and care (ECEC). Research questions include: 'What is the nature of ECEC research?' and 'Do children’s enquiries count as research?' Initially, data were collected from the academy: professional researchers (n=14) confirmed 'finding solutions' as a research behaviour and indicated children aged 4-8 years, their practitioners and primary carers as 'theoretical sampling'. Consequently, multi-modal case studies were constructed with children (n=138) and their practitioners (n=17) in three ‘good’ schools, with selected children and their primary carers also participating at home. This paper reports on data emerging from children aged 4-8 years at school (n=17) and at home (n=5). Outcomes indicate that participating children found diverse solutions to diverse problems, some of which they set themselves. Some solutions engaged children in high order thinking, whilst others did not; selecting resources and trialing activities engaged children in 'finding solutions'. Conversely, when children's time, provocations and activities were directed by adults, the quality of their solutions was limited, they focused on pleasing adults and their motivation to propose solutions decreased. In this study, professional researchers recognised 'finding solutions' as research behaviour and children aged 4-8 years naturalistically presented with capacities for finding solutions; however, the children's encounters with adults affected the solutions they found
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