145,002 research outputs found
Autonomous Decision-Making based on Biological Adaptive Processes for Intelligent Social Robots
Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThe unceasing development of autonomous robots in many different scenarios drives a
new revolution to improve our quality of life. Recent advances in human-robot interaction
and machine learning extend robots to social scenarios, where these systems pretend
to assist humans in diverse tasks. Thus, social robots are nowadays becoming real in
many applications like education, healthcare, entertainment, or assistance. Complex
environments demand that social robots present adaptive mechanisms to overcome
different situations and successfully execute their tasks. Thus, considering the previous
ideas, making autonomous and appropriate decisions is essential to exhibit reasonable
behaviour and operate well in dynamic scenarios.
Decision-making systems provide artificial agents with the capacity of making
decisions about how to behave depending on input information from the environment.
In the last decades, human decision-making has served researchers as an inspiration to
endow robots with similar deliberation. Especially in social robotics, where people expect
to interact with machines with human-like capabilities, biologically inspired decisionmaking
systems have demonstrated great potential and interest. Thereby, it is expected
that these systems will continue providing a solid biological background and improve the
naturalness of the human-robot interaction, usability, and the acceptance of social robots
in the following years.
This thesis presents a decision-making system for social robots acting in healthcare,
entertainment, and assistance with autonomous behaviour. The system’s goal is to
provide robots with natural and fluid human-robot interaction during the realisation of
their tasks. The decision-making system integrates into an already existing software
architecture with different modules that manage human-robot interaction, perception,
or expressiveness. Inside this architecture, the decision-making system decides which
behaviour the robot has to execute after evaluating information received from different
modules in the architecture. These modules provide structured data about planned
activities, perceptions, and artificial biological processes that evolve with time that are the
basis for natural behaviour. The natural behaviour of the robot comes from the evolution
of biological variables that emulate biological processes occurring in humans. We also
propose a Motivational model, a module that emulates biological processes in humans for
generating an artificial physiological and psychological state that influences the robot’s
decision-making. These processes emulate the natural biological rhythms of the human organism to produce biologically inspired decisions that improve the naturalness exhibited
by the robot during human-robot interactions. The robot’s decisions also depend on what
the robot perceives from the environment, planned events listed in the robot’s agenda, and
the unique features of the user interacting with the robot.
The robot’s decisions depend on many internal and external factors that influence how
the robot behaves. Users are the most critical stimuli the robot perceives since they are
the cornerstone of interaction. Social robots have to focus on assisting people in their
daily tasks, considering that each person has different features and preferences. Thus,
a robot devised for social interaction has to adapt its decisions to people that aim at
interacting with it. The first step towards adapting to different users is identifying the user
it interacts with. Then, it has to gather as much information as possible and personalise
the interaction. The information about each user has to be actively updated if necessary
since outdated information may lead the user to refuse the robot. Considering these facts,
this work tackles the user adaptation in three different ways.
• The robot incorporates user profiling methods to continuously gather information
from the user using direct and indirect feedback methods.
• The robot has a Preference Learning System that predicts and adjusts the user’s
preferences to the robot’s activities during the interaction.
• An Action-based Learning System grounded on Reinforcement Learning is
introduced as the origin of motivated behaviour.
The functionalities mentioned above define the inputs received by the decisionmaking
system for adapting its behaviour. Our decision-making system has been designed
for being integrated into different robotic platforms due to its flexibility and modularity.
Finally, we carried out several experiments to evaluate the architecture’s functionalities
during real human-robot interaction scenarios. In these experiments, we assessed:
• How to endow social robots with adaptive affective mechanisms to overcome
interaction limitations.
• Active user profiling using face recognition and human-robot interaction.
• A Preference Learning System we designed to predict and adapt the user
preferences towards the robot’s entertainment activities for adapting the interaction.
• A Behaviour-based Reinforcement Learning System that allows the robot to learn
the effects of its actions to behave appropriately in each situation.
• The biologically inspired robot behaviour using emulated biological processes and
how the robot creates social bonds with each user.
• The robot’s expressiveness in affect (emotion and mood) and autonomic functions
such as heart rate or blinking frequency.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y Automática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Richard J. Duro Fernández.- Secretaria: Concepción Alicia Monje Micharet.- Vocal: Silvia Ross
Recurrent Poisson Factorization for Temporal Recommendation
Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for
recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled
by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson
factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world
recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account
the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential
to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper,
we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes
the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the
implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model and
brings to the table a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. To
elaborate, we instantiate several variants of RPF who are capable of handling
dynamic user preferences and item specification (DRPF), modeling the
social-aspect of product adoption (SRPF), and capturing the consumption
heterogeneity among users and items (HRPF). We also develop a variational
algorithm for approximate posterior inference that scales up to massive data
sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many
state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and large scale real-world
datasets on music streaming logs, and user-item interactions in M-Commerce
platforms.Comment: Submitted to KDD 2017 | Halifax, Nova Scotia - Canada - sigkdd, Codes
are available at https://github.com/AHosseini/RP
Modeling Interdependent and Periodic Real-World Action Sequences
Mobile health applications, including those that track activities such as
exercise, sleep, and diet, are becoming widely used. Accurately predicting
human actions is essential for targeted recommendations that could improve our
health and for personalization of these applications. However, making such
predictions is extremely difficult due to the complexities of human behavior,
which consists of a large number of potential actions that vary over time,
depend on each other, and are periodic. Previous work has not jointly modeled
these dynamics and has largely focused on item consumption patterns instead of
broader types of behaviors such as eating, commuting or exercising. In this
work, we develop a novel statistical model for Time-varying, Interdependent,
and Periodic Action Sequences. Our approach is based on personalized,
multivariate temporal point processes that model time-varying action
propensities through a mixture of Gaussian intensities. Our model captures
short-term and long-term periodic interdependencies between actions through
Hawkes process-based self-excitations. We evaluate our approach on two activity
logging datasets comprising 12 million actions taken by 20 thousand users over
17 months. We demonstrate that our approach allows us to make successful
predictions of future user actions and their timing. Specifically, our model
improves predictions of actions, and their timing, over existing methods across
multiple datasets by up to 156%, and up to 37%, respectively. Performance
improvements are particularly large for relatively rare and periodic actions
such as walking and biking, improving over baselines by up to 256%. This
demonstrates that explicit modeling of dependencies and periodicities in
real-world behavior enables successful predictions of future actions, with
implications for modeling human behavior, app personalization, and targeting of
health interventions.Comment: Accepted at WWW 201
Agents for educational games and simulations
This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications
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