A Developmental Organization for Robot Behavior

This paper focuses on exploring how learning and development can be structured in synthetic (robot) systems. We present a developmental assembler for constructing reusable and temporally extended actions in a sequence. The discussion adopts the traditions of dynamic pattern theory in which behavior is an artifact of coupled dynamical systems with a number of controllable degrees of freedom. In our model, the events that delineate control decisions are derived from the pattern of (dis)equilibria on a working subset of sensorimotor policies. We show how this architecture can be used to accomplish sequential knowledge gathering and representation tasks and provide examples of the kind of developmental milestones that this approach has already produced in our lab

Constraint Logic Programming for Natural Language Processing

This paper proposes an evaluation of the adequacy of the constraint logic programming paradigm for natural language processing. Theoretical aspects of this question have been discussed in several works. We adopt here a pragmatic point of view and our argumentation relies on concrete solutions. Using actual contraints (in the CLP sense) is neither easy nor direct. However, CLP can improve parsing techniques in several aspects such as concision, control, efficiency or direct representation of linguistic formalism. This discussion is illustrated by several examples and the presentation of an HPSG parser.Comment: 15 pages, uuencoded and compressed postscript to appear in Proceedings of the 5th Int. Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming. Lisbon, Portugal. 199

An Overview of Schema Theory

The purpose of this paper is to give an introduction to the field of Schema Theory written by a mathematician and for mathematicians. In particular, we endeavor to to highlight areas of the field which might be of interest to a mathematician, to point out some related open problems, and to suggest some large-scale projects. Schema theory seeks to give a theoretical justification for the efficacy of the field of genetic algorithms, so readers who have studied genetic algorithms stand to gain the most from this paper. However, nothing beyond basic probability theory is assumed of the reader, and for this reason we write in a fairly informal style. Because the mathematics behind the theorems in schema theory is relatively elementary, we focus more on the motivation and philosophy. Many of these results have been proven elsewhere, so this paper is designed to serve a primarily expository role. We attempt to cast known results in a new light, which makes the suggested future directions natural. This involves devoting a substantial amount of time to the history of the field. We hope that this exposition will entice some mathematicians to do research in this area, that it will serve as a road map for researchers new to the field, and that it will help explain how schema theory developed. Furthermore, we hope that the results collected in this document will serve as a useful reference. Finally, as far as the author knows, the questions raised in the final section are new.Comment: 27 pages. Originally written in 2009 and hosted on my website, I've decided to put it on the arXiv as a more permanent home. The paper is primarily expository, so I don't really know where to submit it, but perhaps one day I will find an appropriate journa

Constructing Conditional Plans by a Theorem-Prover

The research on conditional planning rejects the assumptions that there is no uncertainty or incompleteness of knowledge with respect to the state and changes of the system the plans operate on. Without these assumptions the sequences of operations that achieve the goals depend on the initial state and the outcomes of nondeterministic changes in the system. This setting raises the questions of how to represent the plans and how to perform plan search. The answers are quite different from those in the simpler classical framework. In this paper, we approach conditional planning from a new viewpoint that is motivated by the use of satisfiability algorithms in classical planning. Translating conditional planning to formulae in the propositional logic is not feasible because of inherent computational limitations. Instead, we translate conditional planning to quantified Boolean formulae. We discuss three formalizations of conditional planning as quantified Boolean formulae, and present experimental results obtained with a theorem-prover

Security policy refinement using data integration: a position paper.

In spite of the wide adoption of policy-based approaches for security management, and many existing treatments of policy verification and analysis, relatively little attention has been paid to policy refinement: the problem of deriving lower-level, runnable policies from higher-level policies, policy goals, and specifications. In this paper we present our initial ideas on this task, using and adapting concepts from data integration. We take a view of policies as governing the performance of an action on a target by a subject, possibly with certain conditions. Transformation rules are applied to these components of a policy in a structured way, in order to translate the policy into more refined terms; the transformation rules we use are similar to those of global-as-view database schema mappings, or to extensions thereof. We illustrate our ideas with an example. Copyright 2009 ACM

Declarative Specification

Deriving formal specifications from informal requirements is extremely difficult since one has to overcome the conceptual gap between an application domain and the domain of formal specification methods. To reduce this gap we introduce application-specific specification languages, i.e., graphical and textual notations that can be unambiguously mapped to formal specifications in a logic language. We describe a number of realised approaches based on this idea, and evaluate them with respect to their domain specificity vs. generalit