Learning search behaviour from humans

A frequent method for taking into account the partially observable nature of an environment in which robots interact lies in formulating the problem domain as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). By having humans demonstrate how to act in this partially observable context we can leverage their prior knowledge, experience and intuition, which is difficult to encode directly in a controller, to solve a task formulated as a POMDP. In this work we learn search behaviours from human demonstrators and transfer this knowledge to a robot in a context where no visual information is available. The task consists of finding a block on a table. This is a non-trivial problem since no visual information is available and as a result, the belief of the demonstrator’s state (position in the environment) has to be inferred. We show that by representing the belief of the human’s position in the environment by a particle filter (PF) and learning a mapping from this belief to their end-effector velocities with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), we model the human’s search process. We compare the different types of search behaviour demonstrated by the humans to that of our learned model, to validate that the search process has been successfully modelled. We then contrast the performance of this human-inspired search model to a greedy controller and show that (similarly to humans) the learned controller minimises uncertainty, hence demonstrating more robustness in the face of false belief

Pain rewarded: hyperalgesic and allodynic effect of operant conditioning in healthy humans : protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: "pain rewarded" is a hypothesis wherein acute pain sufferers are exposed to reinforcers and punishers from their environment that shape their behaviour, i.e. pain responses. Such a point of view has been taken for granted by many clinicians and researchers although existing evidence has not yet been systematically summarized. This planned systematic review and meta-analysis is aiming to summarize the research findings on pain modulation (hyperalgesic effect) and pain elicitation (allodynic effect) resulting from operant conditioning procedures in healthy humans. Methods: the systematic review will be performed by searching for articles indexed in PubMed database, Cochrane Register of Controlled Trials (Central), Web of Science™, ScienceDirect, Ebsco database, PsycInfo, Medline, PsycArticles and cinahl. Studies will be included if they investigate healthy humans, exposed to modulation or elicitation of a pain experience induced by operant conditioning. Studies will be screened for eligibility and risk of bias by two independent assessors. Narrative and meta-analytical syntheses are planned. Discussion: data will be pooled and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively (if possible) in order to advance the understanding of pain mechanisms, especially the development of chronic pain. This systematic review will guide the planning of future experiments and research by summarizing important technical details of conditioning procedures in healthy humans

Cognition in Aristotle's Poetics

This paper examines Aristotle’s understanding of the contributions of perceptual and rational cognition to the composition and reception of poetry. An initial outline of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology shows that Aristotelian perception is sufficiently powerful to sustain very rich, complex patterns of behaviour in human as well as non-human animals, and examines the interaction between perception (cognition of the particular and the ‘that’) and the distinctive capacity for reason (which makes possible cognition of the universal and the ‘why’) in human behaviour. The rest of the paper applies this framework to a number of problems in the Poetics: (i) If Aristotelian tekhnê is defined as a productive disposition involving reason, how can poetic tekhnê be manifested in the work of poets who work by non-rational habit or talent? (ii) Why does Aristotle believe that the pleasure taken in imitation qua imitation involves rational inference? (iii) What does Aristotle mean when he contrasts history (concerned with the particular) and poetry (concerned with the universal)? (iv) How is Aristotle’s insistence on universality and rationality in the construction of poetic plots to be reconciled with his willingness to tolerate irrationalities and implausibilities

The CHREST architecture of cognition : the role of perception in general intelligence

Original paper can be found at: http://www.atlantis-press.com/publications/aisr/AGI-10/ Copyright Atlantis Press. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This paper argues that the CHREST architecture of cognition can shed important light on developing artificial general intelligence. The key theme is that "cognition is perception." The description of the main components and mechanisms of the architecture is followed by a discussion of several domains where CHREST has already been successfully applied, such as the psychology of expert behaviour, the acquisition of language by children, and the learning of multiple representations in physics. The characteristics of CHREST that enable it to account for empirical data include: self-organisation, an emphasis on cognitive limitations, the presence of a perception-learning cycle, and the use of naturalistic data as input for learning. We argue that some of these characteristics can help shed light on the hard questions facing theorists developing artificial general intelligence, such as intuition, the acquisition and use of concepts and the role of embodiment

Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field

Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe