Adapting robot task planning to user preferences: an assistive shoe dressing example

The final publication is available at link.springer.comHealthcare robots will be the next big advance in humans’ domestic welfare, with robots able to assist elderly people and users with disabilities. However, each user has his/her own preferences, needs and abilities. Therefore, robotic assistants will need to adapt to them, behaving accordingly. Towards this goal, we propose a method to perform behavior adaptation to the user preferences, using symbolic task planning. A user model is built from the user’s answers to simple questions with a fuzzy inference system, and it is then integrated into the planning domain. We describe an adaptation method based on both the user satisfaction and the execution outcome, depending on which penalizations are applied to the planner’s rules. We demonstrate the application of the adaptation method in a simple shoe-fitting scenario, with experiments performed in a simulated user environment. The results show quick behavior adaptation, even when the user behavior changes, as well as robustness to wrong inference of the initial user model. Finally, some insights in a non-simulated world shoe-fitting setup are also provided.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Networks Within Cities and Among Cities: A Paradigm for Urban Development and Governance

Networks and networking have become fashionable concepts and terms in regional science, and in particular in regional and urban geography in the last decade: we speak about network firms, network society, network economy but also network cities, city-networks, reti urbane, reseaux de villes. Only catch-words for somebody; a true new scientific paradigm according to others. Our opinion is that in fact we are confronted with a new paradigm in spatial sciences, under some precise conditions: - that its exact meaning is thoroughly defined, - that its theoretical economic rationale is justified, - that the novelty of its empirical content is clearly pointed out, with respect to more traditional spatial facts and processes that can easily be interpreted through existing spatial paradigms. The relevant theoretical building block on which the network concept or paradigm may be constructed are: - a new view of the economy as a system or web of links between individuals, firms and institutions, where links depend on experience and evolve through learning processes; the existing endowment of knowledge and other production factors is put into value through a relational capability addressed towards the exchange and collection of information, building reputation and trust, creating synergies, cutting down uncertainty, boosting learning processes; - the acknowledgement of cooperation as a new organisational and behavioural form, intermediate between hierarchy (internal development and merging of external activities through direct control) and market resort; cooperation networks among firms collaborating with each other on technological advances and innovation projects were the earlier phenomena that were abundantly explored in the past. In a spatial perspective, two phenomena in particular are worth exploring today through the network concept: - networking as cooperation among individuals, firms and institutions taking place inside the cities concerning collective action, public/private partnerships on large urban projects and the supply of public goods, and giving rise to new forms of urban governance; - networking as inter-urban cooperation, assuming the cities as economic actors, competing but also cooperating in the global arena where locations of internationally mobile factors (professionals, corporations, institutions) are decided and negotiated. The paper is organised in the following way: - a major section is devoted to the interpretation of the micro-economic efficiency of local networking (local urban networks), in terms of the usual criteria of optimal allocation of resources and collective welfare, viewing the network as an organisational alternative between market failure and state failure; - a transition section deals with the interpretation of cities, a collective actor at best, as individual/unitary economic actors, given the case for collective action among interest groups, the possibility of defining in broad terms a function of collective preference referring to non-mobile local actors, the engagement of public and private actors in processes of strategic planning and definition of shared visions for the future of the city vis-a-vis mobile actors; - another main section interprets competition and cooperation among cities (inter-city-networks) underlining advantages, risks and conditions for maximising overall comprehensive well-being. JEL classification: D70, H77, R58

”Thou shalt not covet ...”: Prohibitions, Temptation and Moral Values

We propose a theory studying temptation in presence of both externally and internally sanctioned prohibitions. Moral values that (internally) sanction prohibited actions and their desire may increase utility by reducing self-control costs, thereby serving as partial commitment devices. We apply the model to crime and study the conditions under which agents would optimally adhere to moral values of honesty. Incentives to be moral are non- monotonic in the crime premium. Larger external punishments increase temptation and demand for morality, so that external and internal sanctions are complements. The model helps rationalizing stylized facts that proved difficult to explain with available theories.Prohibitions, Temptation, Self-Control, Moral Values, Crime

Answer Set Planning Under Action Costs

Recently, planning based on answer set programming has been proposed as an approach towards realizing declarative planning systems. In this paper, we present the language Kc, which extends the declarative planning language K by action costs. Kc provides the notion of admissible and optimal plans, which are plans whose overall action costs are within a given limit resp. minimum over all plans (i.e., cheapest plans). As we demonstrate, this novel language allows for expressing some nontrivial planning tasks in a declarative way. Furthermore, it can be utilized for representing planning problems under other optimality criteria, such as computing ``shortest'' plans (with the least number of steps), and refinement combinations of cheapest and fastest plans. We study complexity aspects of the language Kc and provide a transformation to logic programs, such that planning problems are solved via answer set programming. Furthermore, we report experimental results on selected problems. Our experience is encouraging that answer set planning may be a valuable approach to expressive planning systems in which intricate planning problems can be naturally specified and solved

State-of-the-art on research and applications of machine learning in the building life cycle

Fueled by big data, powerful and affordable computing resources, and advanced algorithms, machine learning has been explored and applied to buildings research for the past decades and has demonstrated its potential to enhance building performance. This study systematically surveyed how machine learning has been applied at different stages of building life cycle. By conducting a literature search on the Web of Knowledge platform, we found 9579 papers in this field and selected 153 papers for an in-depth review. The number of published papers is increasing year by year, with a focus on building design, operation, and control. However, no study was found using machine learning in building commissioning. There are successful pilot studies on fault detection and diagnosis of HVAC equipment and systems, load prediction, energy baseline estimate, load shape clustering, occupancy prediction, and learning occupant behaviors and energy use patterns. None of the existing studies were adopted broadly by the building industry, due to common challenges including (1) lack of large scale labeled data to train and validate the model, (2) lack of model transferability, which limits a model trained with one data-rich building to be used in another building with limited data, (3) lack of strong justification of costs and benefits of deploying machine learning, and (4) the performance might not be reliable and robust for the stated goals, as the method might work for some buildings but could not be generalized to others. Findings from the study can inform future machine learning research to improve occupant comfort, energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience of buildings, as well as to inspire young researchers in the field to explore multidisciplinary approaches that integrate building science, computing science, data science, and social science

Made in Italy as a collective belief.A model of investment in stereotypes

This paper interprets for the fist time the phenomenon of the made in Italy as a collective belief. First, a conceptual framework is proposed for analysing the formation and evolution of collective beliefs, by characterizing precisely the way individuals are expected to behave in this respect. Then, we argue that different paths may end up provoking the emergence of a collective belief, and maintain that the made in Italy can be though of as the case of a collective belief about the inventive and creative Italian way of producing a specific set of goods. Afterwards, we point to the investment in public rituals as the way to actively foster this collective belief, and then interpret such process as an economic problem of providing a public good. We highlight the main collective action implications of such analysis, by modelling individuals’ behaviour in different settings. The analysis is focused on those characteristics that make the made in Italy a special public good, such as joint private benefits, asymmetries between agents, accession costs, and transaction costs. Finally, policy and institutional implications are explored, in terms of redistribution, proactive subsidization, and contract design.collective beliefs, public rituals, impure public goods