Learning plan networks in conversational video games

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-123).We look forward to a future where robots collaborate with humans in the home and workplace, and virtual agents collaborate with humans in games and training simulations. A representation of common ground for everyday scenarios is essential for these agents if they are to be effective collaborators and communicators. Effective collaborators can infer a partner's goals and predict future actions. Effective communicators can infer the meaning of utterances based on semantic context. This thesis introduces a computational cognitive model of common ground called a Plan Network. A Plan Network is a statistical model that provides representations of social roles, object affordances, and expected patterns of behavior and language. I describe a methodology for unsupervised learning of a Plan Network using a multiplayer video game, visualization of this network, and evaluation of the learned model with respect to human judgment of typical behavior. Specifically, I describe learning the Restaurant Plan Network from data collected from over 5,000 players of an online game called The Restaurant Game.by Jeffrey David Orkin.S.M

Semantics and Verification of Hierarchical CRP Programs

Communicating Reactive Processes (CRP) paradigm unifies asynchronous and synchronous mechanisms of concurrent programming languages. As an example, CRP unifies Esterel and Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). It has been earlier shown that such a unification and in particular CRP can be used for the specification of hybrid systems and dynamic real-time systems. In this paper, we extend the CRP to support hierarchical refinement and describe a compositional semantics. Further, we show how verification can be done using the verification techniques and tools used for the verification of Esterel programs. We illustrate how a careful separation of Esterel and CSP mechanisms in CRP has enabled the use of the technique of verification by reductions for verification and illustrate the use of tools such as Auto/Autograph for the verification of CRP programs through the banker-teller example. 1 Introduction Programming languages that have been used for real-time programming can be ..