Adaptation of the difficulty level in an infant-robot movement contingency study

19th International Workshop of Physical Agents (WAF). Madrid (22-23 Noviembre 2018)ABSTRACT: This paper presents a personalized contingency feedback adaptation system that aims to encourage infants aged 6 to 8 months to gradually increase the peak acceleration of their leg movements. The ultimate challenge is to determine if a socially assistive humanoid robot can guide infant learning using contingent rewards, where the reward threshold is personalized for each infant using a reinforcement learning algorithm. The model learned from the data captured by wearable inertial sensors measuring infant leg movement accelerations in an earlier study. Each infant generated a unique model that determined the behavior of the robot. The presented results were obtained from the distributions of the participants' acceleration peaks and demonstrate that the resulting model is sensitive to the degree of differentiation among the participants; each participant (infant) should have his/her own learned policy.This work was supported by NSF award 1706964 (PI: Smith, Co-PI: Matarić). In addition, this work was developed during an international mobility program at the University of Southern California being also partially funded by the European Union ECHORD++ project (FP7-ICT-601116), the LifeBots project (TIN2015-65686-C5) and THERAPIST project (TIN2012-38079)

Total synthesis of (±)-halichlorine, (±)-pinnaic acid, and (±)-tauropinnaic acid

The related marine natural products halichlorine, pinnaic acid, and tauropinnaic acid have been synthesized. The described route provided access to all three compounds from a common, late-stage intermediate. The synthesis began with 1-pyrrolidino-1-cyclopentene from which an intermediate possessing the three contiguous stereocenters of the natural products was synthesized in just four steps. Olefin cross metathesis followed by a hydrogenation/hydrogenolysis reaction stereoselectively formed the piperidine ring. Use of a β-lactam group provided internal protection for the highly congested nitrogen atom during side-chain elaboration. The β-lactam was subsequently reduced directly to an amino aldehyde, which after the Horner–Wadsworth–Emmons reaction was elaborated to pinnaic acid. The same amino aldehyde was also transformed into halichlorine after a thiol-mediated cyclization sequence to form the dehydroquinolizidine ring system