Towards robots with teleological action and language understanding

International audienceIt is generally agreed upon that in order to achieve generalizable learning capabilities of robots they need to be able to acquire compositional structures - whether in language or in action. However, in human development the capability to perceive compositional structure only evolves at a later stage. Before the capability to understand action and language in a structured, compositional way arises, infants learn in a holistic way which enables them to interact in a socially adequate way with their social and physical environment even with very limited understanding of the world, e.g. trying to take part in games without knowing the exact rules. This capability endows them with an action production advantage which elicits corrective feedback from a tutor, thus reducing the search space of possible action interpretations tremendously. In accordance with findings from developmental psychology we argue that this holistic way is in fact a teleological representation encoding a goal-directed per- ception of actions facilitated through communicational frames. This observation leads to a range of consequences which need to be verfied and analysed in further research. Here, we discuss two hypotheses how this can be made accessible for action learning in robots: (1) We explore the idea that the teleological approach allows some kind of highly reduced one shot learning enabling the learner to perform a meaningful, although only partially "correct" action which can then be further refined through compositional approaches. (2) We discuss the possibility to transfer the concept of "conversational frames" as recurring interaction patterns to the action domain, thus facilitating to understand the meaning of a new action. We conclude that these capabilities need to be combined with more analytical compositional learning methods in order to achieve human-like learning performance

How can I produce a digital video artefact to facilitate greater understanding among youth workers of their own learning-to-learn competence?

In Ireland, youth work is delivered largely in marginalised communities and through non-formal and informal learning methods. Youth workers operate in small isolated organisations without many of the resources and structures to improve practice that is afforded to larger formal educational establishments. Fundamental to youth work practice is the ability to identify and construct learning experiences for young people in non-traditional learning environments. It is therefore necessary for youth workers to develop a clear understanding of their own learning capacity in order to facilitate learning experiences for young people. In the course of this research, I attempted to use technology to enhance and support the awareness among youth workers of their own learning capacity by creating a digital video artifact that explores the concept – learning-to-learn. This study presents my understanding of the learning-to-learn competence as, I sought to improve my practice as a youth service manager and youth work trainer. This study was conducted using an action research approach. I designed and evaluated the digital media artifact – “Lenny’s Quest” in collaboration with staff and trainer colleagues in the course of two cycles of action research, and my research was critiqued and validated throughout this process