Towards Institutions for Mixed Human-Robot Societies

We report an exploration into normative reasoning for robots in human societies using the concept of institutions

Towards Norm Realization in Institutions Mediating Human-Robot Societies

Social norms are the understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society. As such, they regulate communication, cooperation and other social interactions. Robots capable of reasoning about social norms are more likely to be recognized as an extension of our human society. However, norms stated in a form of the human language are inherently vague and abstract. This allows for applying norms in a variety of situations, but if the robots are to adhere to social norms, they must be capable of translating abstract norms to the robotic language. In this paper we use a notion of institution to realize social norms in real robotic systems. We illustrate our approach in a case study, where we translate abstract norms into concrete constraints on cooperative behaviors of humans and robots. We investigate the feasibility of our approach and quantitatively evaluate the performance of our framework in 30 real experiments with user-based evaluation with 40 participants

Human Norms for Robotic Minds

Interactions within human societies are usually regulated by social norms. When humans fail to cope with norms, their behavior may be perceived as antisocial, amusing, provocative, dumb, or even uncanny, depending on the intention ascribed to the actor by the observer. Robots cannot yet follow social norms, and often their behavior is judged in such a manner. We claim that acceptance of robots into human societies will critically depend on their ability to represent, reason about, and learn social norms. How to provide these abilities is the main problem addressed in the thesis. We formalize the notion of social context as an institution that encapsulates a set of abstract social norms. Then, we connect these abstract norms to physical execution through an explicit notion of grounding, that puts together three levels of representation: (1) a formalization of normative structures in human-readable terms, (2) a mapping of these formal structures to models of execution in the physical world, and (3) a vector space representation of all these elements suitable for machine learning algorithms. Given this background, we identify computational problems central to reasoning and learning with norms, and provide solutions to several of these problems. We start by considering two reasoning problems: verification, i.e., how to verify whether or not a physical execution (or its interpretation) adheres to a set of norms; and planning, i.e., how to generate plans adherent to norms. We address these problems by reducing them to known problems with known solutions. Specifically, the verification problem is reduced to a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), which, in turn, allows us to address planning as a meta-CSP. We then address two problems related to learning with norms: how to learn policies that generate adherent trajectories; and how to re-use learned policies across physical domains. To do so, we translate the elements of our framework into a vector-space format. We address the former problem by using norm verification mechanisms to guide a reinforcement learning agent. To address the latter problem we break it into two sub-problems: interpreting the current situation in a context, and performing the actual (reinforcement) learning. That puts us in a unique position of combining reasoning and learning by searching in the space of groundings and re-usable policies. We evaluate all our solutions with use-case experiments, both on real robots and on simulated agents. Exploring the concepts of abstraction and of interpretation in physical execution touches upon some general questions about intelligence and computation, hence we complement the technical contributions with a discussion of our work from the perspective of Cognitive Science

CALCULATION OF COSTS AND ECONOMIC RESULTS OF RAINBOW PRODUCTION ON THE BASIS OF DIRECTCOSTING METHOD

This paper is dealing with microeconomic aspects of the rainbow trout production. Although this production is in expansion in Serbia in recent years, it is evident an absence of proper recording, planning and analyzing of economic results and costs in the enterprises and farms dealing with aquaculture. In this paper it is shown one of the possible methodological ways for recording and calculating the economic parameters in this production. Through utilization of direct-costing method i.e. calculation which takes in account only direct and proportional variable costs of production, the economic parameters on one fish farm could be recorded and calculated in one relatively easy and quick way. The direct-costing calculations could be very useful managerial instrument for economic decision-making both in rainbow trout production and in other kind of aquaculture

Towards Institutions for Mixed Human-Robot Societies

We report an exploration into normative reasoning for robots in human societies using the concept of institutions

WO3/TiO2 composite coatings: Structural, optical and photocatalytic properties

WO3/TiO2 and TiO2 coatings were prepared on titania substrates using facile and cost-effective plasma electrolytic oxidation process. The coatings were characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, Raman, UV vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. With increasing duration of PEO process, the monoclinic WO3 phase became dominant and new monoclinic WO2.95 phase appeared. The optical absorption edge in the WO3/TiO2 samples, enriched with WO3/WO2.96 phase, was shifted to the visible region. The photocatalytic efficiency of WO3/TiO2 and pure TiO2 samples was evaluated by performing the photodegradation experiments in an aqueous solution of Rhodamine 6G and Mordant Blue 9 under the visible and UV light. The WO3/TiO2 catalysts are much more efficient than pure TiO2 under visible light and slightly better under UV light. The improvement of photocatalytic activity in the visible region is attributed to better light absorption, higher adsorption affinity and increased charge separation efficiency. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved