Generating Personas for Games with Multimodal Adversarial Imitation Learning

Reinforcement learning has been widely successful in producing agents capable of playing games at a human level. However, this requires complex reward engineering, and the agent's resulting policy is often unpredictable. Going beyond reinforcement learning is necessary to model a wide range of human playstyles, which can be difficult to represent with a reward function. This paper presents a novel imitation learning approach to generate multiple persona policies for playtesting. Multimodal Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (MultiGAIL) uses an auxiliary input parameter to learn distinct personas using a single-agent model. MultiGAIL is based on generative adversarial imitation learning and uses multiple discriminators as reward models, inferring the environment reward by comparing the agent and distinct expert policies. The reward from each discriminator is weighted according to the auxiliary input. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our technique in two environments with continuous and discrete action spaces.Comment: Published in CoG 202

Improving Generalization in Game Agents with Data Augmentation in Imitation Learning

Imitation learning is an effective approach for training game-playing agents and, consequently, for efficient game production. However, generalization - the ability to perform well in related but unseen scenarios - is an essential requirement that remains an unsolved challenge for game AI. Generalization is difficult for imitation learning agents because it requires the algorithm to take meaningful actions outside of the training distribution. In this paper we propose a solution to this challenge. Inspired by the success of data augmentation in supervised learning, we augment the training data so the distribution of states and actions in the dataset better represents the real state-action distribution. This study evaluates methods for combining and applying data augmentations to observations, to improve generalization of imitation learning agents. It also provides a performance benchmark of these augmentations across several 3D environments. These results demonstrate that data augmentation is a promising framework for improving generalization in imitation learning agents.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Activity maps for location-aware computing

The Problem: Location-based context is important for many applications. Previous systems offered only coarse room-level features or used manually specified room regions to determine fine-scale features. We propose a location context mechanism based on activity maps, which define regions of similar context based on observations of 3-D patterns of location and motion in an environment. We describe an algorithm for obtaining activity maps in real time using the spatio-temporal clustering of visual tracking data. Motivation: In many cases, fine grain location based information is preferred. One example would be to control lights and air conditioning, e.g. the desk lamp might light up and the air conditioning starts whenever a user is sitting at his desk. In addition the phone might become activated and the computer screen get invoked from stand-by mode. Similarly in a small group meeting the system could know where and how many people are in the room and could make appropriate settings for lights, air conditioning, and computer tools. For each of these tasks, location context information is important [3]. Simply considering the instantaneous 3-D location of users is useful, but alone is insufficient as context information. Applications have to generalize context information from previous experience, and an application writer would like to access categorical context information, such as what activity

Communiplay: a field study of a public display mediaspace

ABSTRACT We present Communiplay, a public display media space. People passing by see their own contour mirrored on a public display and can start to play with virtual objects. At the same time, they see others playing at remote displays within the same virtual space. We are interested whether people would use such a public display media space, and if so, how and why. We evaluate Communiplay in a field study in six connected locations and find a remote honey-pot effect, i.e. people interacting at one location attract people at other locations. The conversion rate (percentage of passers-by starting to interact) rose by +136% when people saw others playing at remote locations. We also provide the first quantification of the (local) honey-pot effect (in our case it raised the conversion rate by +604% when people saw others playing at the same location). We conclude that the integration of multiple public displays into a media space is a promising direction for public displays and can make them more attractive and valuable

Mobile Music Business Models in Asia\u27s Emerging Markets

In the telecom business, there has been a heavy competition from Internet, media and handset vendors companies. These over-the-top (OTT) players offer compiling telecom services, cause a transformation in the telecom business ecosystem, and the most challenging services posed here are media services. China, India and Indonesia, as world’s emerging markets in Asia, are predicted to take the largest share in the global mobile traffic explosion by 2015. It is critical for mobile network operators (MNOs) in this region to explore strategy for mobile media services, as mobile broadband is likely preferred compared to fixed broadband. In this paper, we analyze and compare mobile music business models used in these markets and structure the relation models between the key actors, using Actors, Relations and Business Activities (ARA) model. We present the economic models that are emerging, and an insight of why and how these multitudes actors are betting on currently. We found that the MNOs generally have a much stronger position compared to their counterparts in the developed markets, and the personalization services, like ring-back tone, are still a huge success. The actors tend to deliver the services by their own, rather than to collaborate in a horizontal business setting

The mobile Oracle: a tool for early user involvement

This paper describes a novel tool for eliciting user requirements early in the design process of mobile applications. The "Mobile Oracle", as we have called it, is intended to help developers and designers obtain a better understanding of what the user wants at different points in space and time. It is an extension of a lo-fi version of the well-established Wizard of Oz technique, but it adds an "on demand" component to force users to explicitly request the information they need. The technique has been tested in an investigation involving 15 users (sighted, visually impaired, and elderly). Our preliminary results show it to generate valuable information concerning the ways people ask about directions and distances, as well as the services they would like to have in future mobile applications

Residents’ Democratic engagement in public housing and urban areas – structures, formalities and technologies

The workshop gathers people from various sectors inside and outside academia to discuss the current state of, and the prospects for IT in the support of residents’ democratic engagement in, and around, public housing.

Towards CSCW Design in the Scandinavian Tradition (Doctoral dissertation

This thesis is about how to design Computer Supported Cooperative Work systems (CSCW) on the basis of design practice that is established in the Scandinavian model of System Design. The approach of the thesis is to develop an understanding of the design of CSCW environments through a series of case studies. These case studies, the CoDesk system, the AtWork system and the VideoCafé system, cover a variety of methods from the Scandinavian tradition in cooperative design. Studying how these methods have succeeded has been the primary source of inspiration for my thesis. In particular, this thesis will focus on the following issues: Can simulation of realistic work situations be used for cooperative design of CSCW systems by developers and users? And, how can we balance a design based on daily work practice with exploration of innovative CSCW solutions? Furthermore we ar