Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

Towards memory supporting personal information management tools

In this article we discuss re-retrieving personal information objects and relate the task to recovering from lapse(s) in memory. We propose that fundamentally it is lapses in memory that impede users from successfully re-finding the information they need. Our hypothesis is that by learning more about memory lapses in non-computing contexts and how people cope and recover from these lapses, we can better inform the design of PIM tools and improve the user's ability to re-access and re-use objects. We describe a diary study that investigates the everyday memory problems of 25 people from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on the findings, we present a series of principles that we hypothesize will improve the design of personal information management tools. This hypothesis is validated by an evaluation of a tool for managing personal photographs, which was designed with respect to our findings. The evaluation suggests that users' performance when re-finding objects can be improved by building personal information management tools to support characteristics of human memory

A Framework for Symmetric Part Detection in Cluttered Scenes

The role of symmetry in computer vision has waxed and waned in importance during the evolution of the field from its earliest days. At first figuring prominently in support of bottom-up indexing, it fell out of favor as shape gave way to appearance and recognition gave way to detection. With a strong prior in the form of a target object, the role of the weaker priors offered by perceptual grouping was greatly diminished. However, as the field returns to the problem of recognition from a large database, the bottom-up recovery of the parts that make up the objects in a cluttered scene is critical for their recognition. The medial axis community has long exploited the ubiquitous regularity of symmetry as a basis for the decomposition of a closed contour into medial parts. However, today's recognition systems are faced with cluttered scenes, and the assumption that a closed contour exists, i.e. that figure-ground segmentation has been solved, renders much of the medial axis community's work inapplicable. In this article, we review a computational framework, previously reported in Lee et al. (2013), Levinshtein et al. (2009, 2013), that bridges the representation power of the medial axis and the need to recover and group an object's parts in a cluttered scene. Our framework is rooted in the idea that a maximally inscribed disc, the building block of a medial axis, can be modeled as a compact superpixel in the image. We evaluate the method on images of cluttered scenes.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Web Portal Design Guidelines as Identified by Children through the Processes of Design and Evaluation

The Web is an important source of information for school projects, but young users do not always find it easy to locate relevant material. A critical factor in success is the portal through which they search or browse web content. Traditionally web portals have been designed by adults with young users in mind, but there is very little evidence that the latter make use of them. In this paper design guidelines are elaborated for such portals that are based upon focus group and operational evaluations by elementary school students of two prototype web portals designed by two intergenerational teams, each comprising elementary school students and adult designers. The evaluations offer strong support for involving children throughout the design process for portals that both in presentation and functionality reflect the cognitive and affective needs of young users rather than adults

The impact of face systems on the pragmalinguistic features of academic e-mail requests

This study investigates the impact of power/distance (PD) variables operationalized as face systems on the pragmalinguistic features of academic e-mail requests. A corpus of 90 academic e-mails was classified into four face system groups: hierarchical (sender +P), hierarchical (recipient +P), deference, and solidarity. Request perspectives, strategies, and mitigating supportive moves were analyzed. The analysis revealed that the speaker and hearer dominance were the most frequent request perspectives in the hierarchical (recipient+P) and deference groups. The impersonal perspective was more common in the hierarchical (sender+P) group. The preparatory was the dominant request strategy in all groups, relatively more frequent in the hierarchical (recipient+P) and deference groups. The most common supportive move was the grounder, which occurred more frequently than other supportive moves. The findings of the study indicate that face systems influence the request patterns in academic e-mail communication. The study offers implications for future research on pragmatics of computermediated communication (CMC)