Modeling a teacher in a tutorial-like system using Learning Automata

The goal of this paper is to present a novel approach to model the behavior of a Teacher in a Tutorial- like system. In this model, the Teacher is capable of presenting teaching material from a Socratic-type Domain model via multiple-choice questions. Since this knowledge is stored in the Domain model in chapters with different levels of complexity, the Teacher is able to present learning material of varying degrees of difficulty to the Students. In our model, we propose that the Teacher will be able to assist the Students to learn the more difficult material. In order to achieve this, he provides them with hints that are relative to the difficulty of the learning material presented. This enables the Students to cope with the process of handling more complex knowledge, and to be able to learn it appropriately. To our knowledge, the findings of this study are novel to the field of intelligent adaptation using Learning Automata (LA). The novelty lies in the fact that the learning system has a strategy by which it can deal with increasingly more complex/difficult Environments (or domains from which the learning as to be achieved). In our approach, the convergence of the Student models (represented by LA) is driven not only by the response of the Environment (Teacher), but also by the hints that are provided by the latter. Our proposed Teacher model has been tested against different benchmark Environments, and the results of these simulations have demonstrated the salient aspects of our model. The main conclusion is that Normal and Below-Normal learners benefited significantly from the hints provided by the Teacher, while the benefits to (brilliant) Fast learners were marginal. This seems to be in-line with our subjective understanding of the behavior of real-life Students

Model-Based Road Extraction from Images

In this paper we present an approach to the automatic extraction of roads from aerial images. We argue that a model for road extraction is needed in every step of the image interpretation process. The model needs to include knowledge about different aspects of roads, like geometry, radiometry, topology, and context. The main part of this paper discusses the parts of that knowledge that we have implemented so far. It is shown that roads can be successfully detected at various resolution levels of the same image. Furthermore, we show that combining the results obtained in each level helps to eliminate false hypotheses typical for each level. The approach has been successfully applied to a variety of images. 1 Introduction The extraction of roads from images has received considerable attention in the past. Several schemes have been proposed to solve this problem at resolutions that range from satellite images to low altitude aerial images. The strategies proposed fall into two broad cat..

Detection of linear structures in remote-sensed images

Abstract. Over the past decades, considerable progress had been made in developing automatic image interpretation tools for remote sensing. There is, however, still a gap between the requirements of applications and system capabilities. Interpretation of noisy aerial images, especially in low resolution, is still difficult. We present a system aimed at detecting faint linear structures, such as pipelines and access roads, in aerial images. We introduce an orientation-weighted Hough transform for the detection of line segments and a Markov Random Field model for combining line segments into linear structures. Empirical results show that the proposed method yields good detection performance.

M.: Generating Logic Descriptions for the Automated Interpretation of Topographic Maps

Abstract. Automating the interpretation of a map in order to locate some geographical objects and their relations is a challenging task, which goes beyond the transformation of map images into a vectorized representation and the recognition of symbols. In this work, we present an approach to the automated interpretation of vectorized topographic maps. It is based on the generation of logic descriptions of maps and the application of symbolic Machine Learning tools to these descriptions. This paper focuses on the definition of computational methods for the generation of logic descriptions of map cells and briefly describes the use of these logic descriptions in an inductive learning task.