Experience-driven procedural content generation (extended abstract)

Procedural content generation is an increasingly important area of technology within modern human-computer interaction with direct applications in digital games, the semantic web, and interface, media and software design. The personalization of experience via the modeling of the user, coupled with the appropriate adjustment of the content according to user needs and preferences are important steps towards effective and meaningful content generation. This paper introduces a framework for procedural content generation driven by computational models of user experience we name Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation. While the framework is generic and applicable to various subareas of human computer interaction, we employ games as an indicative example of content-intensive software that enables rich forms of interaction.The research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT projects C2Learn (318480) and iLearnRW (318803).peer-reviewe

Design Preference Elicitation, Identification and Estimation.

Understanding user preference has long been a challenging topic in the design research community. Econometric methods have been adopted to link design and market, achieving design solutions sound from both engineering and business perspectives. This approach, however, only refines existing designs from revealed or stated preference data. What is needed for generating new designs is an environment for concept exploration and a channel to collect and analyze preferences on newly-explored concepts. This dissertation focuses on the development of querying techniques that learn and extract individual preferences efficiently. Throughout the dissertation, we work in the context of a human-computer interaction where in each iteration the subject is asked to choose preferred designs out of a set. The computer learns from the subject and creates the next query set so that the responses from the subject will yield the most information on the subject's preferences. The challenges of this research are: (1) To learn subject preferences within short interactions with enormous candidate designs; (2) To facilitate real-time interactions with efficient computation. Three problems are discussed surrounding how information-rich queries can be made. The major effort is devoted to preference elicitation, where we discuss how to locate the most preferred design of a subject. Using efficient global optimization, we develop search algorithms that combine exploration of new concepts and exploitation of existing knowledge, achieving near-optimal solutions with a small number of queries. For design demonstration, the elicitation algorithm is incorporated with an online 3D car modeler. The effectiveness of the algorithm is confirmed by real user tests on finding car models close to the users' targets. In preference identification, we consider designs as binary labeled, and the objective is to classify preferred designs from not-preferred ones. We show that this classification problem can be formulated and solved by the same active learning technique used for preference estimation, where the objective is to estimate a preference function. Conceptually, this dissertation discusses how to extract preference information effectively by asking relevant but not redundant questions during an interaction.Ph.D.Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91578/1/yiren_1.pd

Towards autonomous decision-making: A probabilistic model for learning multi-user preferences

Information systems have revolutionized the provisioning of decision-relevant information, and decision support tools have improved human decisions in many domains. Autonomous decision- making, on the other hand, remains hampered by systems’ inability to faithfully capture human preferences. We present a computational preference model that learns unobtrusively from lim- ited data by pooling observations across like-minded users. Our model quantifies the certainty of its own predictions as input to autonomous decision-making tasks, and it infers probabilistic segments based on user choices in the process. We evaluate our model on real-world preference data collected on a commercial crowdsourcing platform, and we find that it outperforms both individual and population-level estimates in terms of predictive accuracy and the informative- ness of its certainty estimates. Our work takes an important step toward systems that act autonomously on their users’ behalf

Decision-maker Trade-offs In Multiple Response Surface Optimization

The focus of this dissertation is on improving decision-maker trade-offs and the development of a new constrained methodology for multiple response surface optimization. There are three key components of the research: development of the necessary conditions and assumptions associated with constrained multiple response surface optimization methodologies; development of a new constrained multiple response surface methodology; and demonstration of the new method. The necessary conditions for and assumptions associated with constrained multiple response surface optimization methods were identified and found to be less restrictive than requirements previously described in the literature. The conditions and assumptions required for a constrained method to find the most preferred non-dominated solution are to generate non-dominated solutions and to generate solutions consistent with decision-maker preferences among the response objectives. Additionally, if a Lagrangian constrained method is used, the preservation of convexity is required in order to be able to generate all non-dominated solutions. The conditions required for constrained methods are significantly fewer than those required for combined methods. Most of the existing constrained methodologies do not incorporate any provision for a decision-maker to explicitly determine the relative importance of the multiple objectives. Research into the larger area of multi-criteria decision-making identified the interactive surrogate worth trade-off algorithm as a potential methodology that would provide that capability in multiple response surface optimization problems. The ISWT algorithm uses an ε-constraint formulation to guarantee a non-dominated solution, and then interacts with the decision-maker after each iteration to determine the preference of the decision-maker in trading-off the value of the primary response for an increase in value of a secondary response. The current research modified the ISWT algorithm to develop a new constrained multiple response surface methodology that explicitly accounts for decision-maker preferences. The new Modified ISWT (MISWT) method maintains the essence of the original method while taking advantage of the specific properties of multiple response surface problems to simplify the application of the method. The MISWT is an accessible computer-based implementation of the ISWT. Five test problems from the multiple response surface optimization literature were used to demonstrate the new methodology. It was shown that this methodology can handle a variety of types and numbers of responses and independent variables. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the methodology can be successful using a priori information from the decision-maker about bounds or targets or can use the extreme values obtained from the region of operability. In all cases, the methodology explicitly considered decision-maker preferences and provided non-dominated solutions. The contribution of this method is the removal of implicit assumptions and includes the decision-maker in explicit trade-offs among multiple objectives or responses