Evolving Graphical Planner: Contextual Global Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

The ability to perform effective planning is crucial for building an instruction-following agent. When navigating through a new environment, an agent is challenged with (1) connecting the natural language instructions with its progressively growing knowledge of the world; and (2) performing long-range planning and decision making in the form of effective exploration and error correction. Current methods are still limited on both fronts despite extensive efforts. In this paper, we introduce the Evolving Graphical Planner (EGP), a model that performs global planning for navigation based on raw sensory input. The model dynamically constructs a graphical representation, generalizes the action space to allow for more flexible decision making, and performs efficient planning on a proxy graph representation. We evaluate our model on a challenging Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task with photorealistic images and achieve superior performance compared to previous navigation architectures. For instance, we achieve a 53% success rate on the test split of the Room-to-Room navigation task through pure imitation learning, outperforming previous navigation architectures by up to 5%

A Two-Step Approach for Narrowband Source Localization in Reverberant Rooms

This paper presents a two-step approach for narrowband source localization within reverberant rooms. The first step involves dereverberation by modeling the homogeneous component of the sound field by an equivalent decomposition of planewaves using Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS), while the second step focuses on source localization by modeling the dereverberated component as a sparse representation of point-source distribution using Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). The proposed method enhances localization accuracy with fewer measurements, particularly in environments with strong reverberation. A numerical simulation in a conference room scenario, using a uniform microphone array affixed to the wall, demonstrates real-world feasibility. Notably, the proposed method and microphone placement effectively localize sound sources within the 2D-horizontal plane without requiring prior knowledge of boundary conditions and room geometry, making it versatile for application in different room types

Playing Hitler: The representation of Nazism in Hearts of Iron IV

Mastergradsoppgave i digital kommunikasjon og kultur, Høgskolen i Innlandet, 2020.Hearts of Iron IV is a strategy game set during the Second World War, and it features a representation of Nazi-Germany that some right-wing extremists online have taken interest in. This thesis seeks to analyse that representation of Nazi-Germany in order to work out what it communicates about Nazism and how much room for interpretation it leaves open to the player. To answer the research question of how the formalistic devices of Hearts of Iron IV create its representation of Nazi-Germany, this thesis employs textual analysis with a neoformalist approach. The analysis suggests that the room for interpretation left open to the player of the game is quite large, with the game making very few overt value judgements about Nazi-Germany. This means that the game itself does not contain a pro-Nazi message, but instead it serves as a blank slate representation of Nazi-Germany onto which players are able to project their ideology. Consequently, the game on its own is unlikely to contribute directly to radicalisation, as it doesn’t contain much in the way of radicalising content. However, it is probable that it is the open interpretative space that appeals to neo-Nazis, as it allows them to project their ideology onto the game

The impact of hotel attributes on room rate in star graded hotels in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how the availability or absence of different hotel attributes affect the room rate during a given period. This study identified the impact of various hotel attributes on the room rate. Research methodology: Published data on available hotel attributes, and room rates of selected room categories of star-graded hotels in Colombo district, Sri Lanka, were gathered online through booking.com. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method was used to estimate the impact of key determinants under hotel amenities, quality signals, and locational attributes. Results: The results revealed eleven key attributes of the room rate in star-graded hotels, illustrating the positive impact from seven determinants and the negative impact from four determinants. Hotel class or star grade was the most significant determinant in the room rate, which generally determines the pricing behavior and service quality and most of the attributes and characteristics in a hotel. Availability of a business center, location of the hotel, fitness center/spa, total number of rooms in the hotel, room size, and view from room also significantly determined the room rate. Limitations: Booking.com, as the most popular Online Travel Agent (OTA) used in Sri Lanka, it was assumed that the information is frequently updated. The study was extended for the hotels in the Colombo district, and hence, the results were based on the point data, which may not be an islandwide representation or year through data. Contribution: As theoretical applications are underused in pricing and revenue decisions in the Sri Lankan hotel sector, results will lead to advance the decision making of practitioners, and this study will be a complement to the lack of literature in the field of revenue management in Sri Lankan context and may encourage future researchers laying an inspiring beginning.&nbsp

Public engagement in prioritizing research proposals: A case study

Australia has reflected an international shift toward public participation in governance and science. Researchers have critiqued this shift as insufficient. Meanwhile, studies of how research funds are allocated also found room for improvement. This experiment tested a way to add value to the effort researchers put into research proposals by using them for deliberative public engagement. Three Australian events tested a model of deliberative participation in decision-making about science funding. These events were shorter than most deliberative processes, based on a model tested in the United Kingdom. Although recruitment was aimed at broad representation, participants had more formal education than Australia’s average. Voting decisions were most influenced by potential benefits to society of the planned research, as well as participants’ understanding of plans presented. Some reported that their decisions were influenced by whether benefits would happen locally. Results suggested that participants’ voting decisions were more influenced by the research plans than who presented them. However, unconscious biases cannot be ruled out as factors in decision-making. Participants reported they would be keen to participate in such a process again; however, this enthusiasm was linked to a meal incentive. The impact of brevity on deliberative decision-making is discussed, along with potential modifications for future experiments

Control room agents : an information-theoretic approach

In this thesis, a particular class of agent is singled out for examination. In order to provide a guiding metaphor, we speak of control room agents. Our focus is on rational decision- making by such agents, where the circumstances obtaining are such that rationality is bounded. Control room agents, whether human or non-human, need to reason and act in a changing environment with only limited information available to them. Determining the current state of the environment is a central concern for control room agents if they are to reason and act sensibly. A control room agent cannot plan its actions without having an internal representation (epistemic state) of its environment, and cannot make rational decisions unless this representation, to some level of accuracy, reflects the state of its environment. The focus of this thesis is on three aspects regarding the epistemic functioning of a control room agent: 1. How should the epistemic state of a control room agent be represented in order to facilitate logical analysis? 2. How should a control room agent change its epistemic state upon receiving new information? 3. How should a control room agent combine available information from different sources? In describing the class of control room agents as first-order intentional systems hav- ing both informational and motivational attitudes, an agent-oriented view is adopted. The central construct used in the information-theoretic approach, which is qualitative in nature, is the concept of a templated ordering. Representing the epistemic state of a control room agent by a (special form of) tem- plated ordering signals a departure from the many approaches in which only the beliefs of an agent are represented. Templated orderings allow for the representation of both knowledge and belief. A control room agent changes its epistemic state according to a proposed epistemic change algorithm, which allows the agent to select between two well-established forms of belief change operations, namely, belief revision and belief update. The combination of (possibly conflicting) information from different sources has re- ceived a lot of attention in recent years. Using templated orderings for the semantic representation of information, a new family of purely qualitative merging operations is developed.School of ComputingPh. D. (Computer Science