mARC: Memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts

This paper introduces the memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts (mARC). mARC is a novel data modeling technology rooted in the second quantization formulation of quantum mechanics. It is an all-purpose incremental and unsupervised data storage and retrieval system which can be applied to all types of signal or data, structured or unstructured, textual or not. mARC can be applied to a wide range of information clas-sification and retrieval problems like e-Discovery or contextual navigation. It can also for-mulated in the artificial life framework a.k.a Conway "Game Of Life" Theory. In contrast to Conway approach, the objects evolve in a massively multidimensional space. In order to start evaluating the potential of mARC we have built a mARC-based Internet search en-gine demonstrator with contextual functionality. We compare the behavior of the mARC demonstrator with Google search both in terms of performance and relevance. In the study we find that the mARC search engine demonstrator outperforms Google search by an order of magnitude in response time while providing more relevant results for some classes of queries

Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey

With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 37 page

Place Categorization and Semantic Mapping on a Mobile Robot

In this paper we focus on the challenging problem of place categorization and semantic mapping on a robot without environment-specific training. Motivated by their ongoing success in various visual recognition tasks, we build our system upon a state-of-the-art convolutional network. We overcome its closed-set limitations by complementing the network with a series of one-vs-all classifiers that can learn to recognize new semantic classes online. Prior domain knowledge is incorporated by embedding the classification system into a Bayesian filter framework that also ensures temporal coherence. We evaluate the classification accuracy of the system on a robot that maps a variety of places on our campus in real-time. We show how semantic information can boost robotic object detection performance and how the semantic map can be used to modulate the robot's behaviour during navigation tasks. The system is made available to the community as a ROS module