World Modeling for Intelligent Autonomous Systems

The functioning of intelligent autonomous systems requires constant situation awareness and cognition analysis. Thus, it needs a memory structure that contains a description of the surrounding environment (world model) and serves as a central information hub. This book presents a row of theoretical and experimental results in the field of world modeling. This includes areas of dynamic and prior knowledge modeling, information fusion, management and qualitative/quantitative information analysis

World Modeling for Intelligent Autonomous Systems

The functioning of intelligent autonomous systems requires constant situation awareness and cognition analysis. Thus, it needs a memory structure that contains a description of the surrounding environment (world model) and serves as a central information hub. This book presents a row of theoretical and experimental results in the field of world modeling. This includes areas of dynamic and prior knowledge modeling, information fusion, management and qualitative/quantitative information analysis

World Modeling for Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Within the scope of this work, we have attained a row of theoretical and experimental results in the field of world modeling as well as gathered significant experience and expertise. The covered topics include concepts and approaches for dynamic and prior knowledge modeling, information association, fusion and management as well as their practical realization and experimental evaluation

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Digital Interaction and Machine Intelligence

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access. This book presents the Proceedings of the 9th Machine Intelligence and Digital Interaction Conference. Significant progress in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its wider use in many interactive products are quickly transforming further areas of our life, which results in the emergence of various new social phenomena. Many countries have been making efforts to understand these phenomena and find answers on how to put the development of artificial intelligence on the right track to support the common good of people and societies. These attempts require interdisciplinary actions, covering not only science disciplines involved in the development of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction but also close cooperation between researchers and practitioners. For this reason, the main goal of the MIDI conference held on 9-10.12.2021 as a virtual event is to integrate two, until recently, independent fields of research in computer science: broadly understood artificial intelligence and human-technology interaction

Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

The Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications brings together diverse technical and scientific work in order to help those who employ AI methods in space applications to identify common goals and to address issues of general interest in the AI community. Topics include the following: automation for Space Station; intelligent control, testing, and fault diagnosis; robotics and vision; planning and scheduling; simulation, modeling, and tutoring; development tools and automatic programming; knowledge representation and acquisition; and knowledge base/data base integration

Social Construction of Technical Aids - Personal Meaning and Interactional Effects of Disability and Assistive Devices in Everyday Life

This thesis concerns the role of disability and assistive devices in everyday life among persons with, for instance, impairments related to mobility (e.g. wheelchair users) and bodily shape and configuration (e.g. dysmelia). Assistive devices are seen as both includators (assisting participation and emancipation) and excludators (limiting participation, restraining empowerment, and stigmatizing). Perspectives include, for instance, stigmatisation, body-image, coping, empowerment, agency, motivation, needs, and everyday life. Use of assistive devices is discussed from the ValMO-model: Value and Meaning in Human Occupations. The discussion concerns the useworthiness, as opposed to usability, of assistive devices from a perspective of not only physics-based effectiveness (Newton), but also from a self-image and agency perspective based on habitus (Bourdieu). In study I, the experience of prescription of active rigid-frame ultra light-weight wheelchairs was reported, using data on 278 prescribers in Sweden. Prescribers emphasised self-image, design, appearance and aesthetics. Even though prescribers want to prescribe an optimal wheelchair, they may lack the possibility to do so due to: (1) lack of practice and specialized knowl-edge; and (2) narrow regulations, both pertaining to municipal political decisions. Study II describes the experience of active wheelchairs and societal provision thereof utilizing thematic qualitative content analysis of eleven interviews with experienced users in Sweden. Results showed users experiencing injustice and unfairness negoti-ating wheelchair needs in terms of physical and social functioning (agency); changes of attitudes/organization are suggested. Study III was grounded theory study that showed an adaptation of stigma-handling strategies to situations in everyday life by women aged 20 to 30 with dysmelia, i.e. upper limb reduction deficiency. Strategies were comprehensive patterns of action aimed at controlling information about one’s status as deviating from a contextual normality. A proofing or being attitude consti-tuted a contextual adaptation understood in terms of a concealing or revealing tactic, aiming at delaying or promoting exposure to contextual attitudes and possible prejudices. If exposure was delayed, a person with dysmelia blended in. Exposure could be voluntary or imposed. After exposure, the relative importance of TULRD in the specific context could decrease, thus a boost of an amplification or altering of the attitude, i.e. boost was the interactional outcome enforcing the choice of strategy in another context

Neural Scene Representations for 3D Reconstruction and Generative Modeling

With the increasing technologization of society, we use machines for more and more complex tasks, ranging from driving assistance to video conferencing, to exploring planets. The scene representation, i.e., how sensory data is converted to compact descriptions of the environment, is a fundamental property for enabling the success but also the safety of such systems. A promising approach for developing robust, adaptive, and powerful scene representations are learning-based systems that can adapt themselves from observations. Indeed, deep learning has revolutionized computer vision in recent years. In particular, better model architectures, large amounts of training data, and more powerful computing devices enabled deep learning systems with unprecedented performance, and they now set the state-of-the-art in many benchmarks, ranging from image classification, to object detection, to semantic segmentation. Despite these successes, the way these systems operate is still fundamentally different from human cognition. In particular, most approaches operate in the 2D domain, while humans understand that images are projections of the three-dimensional world. In addition, they often do not follow a compositional understanding of scenes, which is fundamental to human reasoning. In this thesis, our goal is to develop scene representations that enable autonomous agents to navigate and act robustly and safely in complex environments while reasoning compositionally in 3D. To this end, we first propose a novel output representation for deep learning-based 3D reconstruction and generative modeling. We find that, compared to previous representations, our neural field-based approach does not require 3D space to be discretized achieving reconstructions at arbitrary resolution with a constant memory footprint. Next, we develop a differentiable rendering technique to infer these neural field-based 3D shape and texture representations from 2D observations and find that this allows us to scale to more complex, real-world scenarios. Subsequently, we combine our novel 3D shape representation with a spatially and temporally continuous vector field to model non-rigid shapes in motion. We observe that our novel 4D representation can be used for various discriminative and generative tasks, ranging from 4D reconstruction to 4D interpolation, to motion transfer. Finally, we develop an object-centric generative model that can generate 3D scenes in a compositional manner and that allows for photorealistic renderings of generated scenes. We find that our model not only improves image fidelity but also enables more controllable scene generation and image synthesis than prior work while training only from raw, unposed image collections