A Data-driven Approach Towards Human-robot Collaborative Problem Solving in a Shared Space

We are developing a system for human-robot communication that enables people to communicate with robots in a natural way and is focused on solving problems in a shared space. Our strategy for developing this system is fundamentally data-driven: we use data from multiple input sources and train key components with various machine learning techniques. We developed a web application that is collecting data on how two humans communicate to accomplish a task, as well as a mobile laboratory that is instrumented to collect data on how two humans communicate to accomplish a task in a physically shared space. The data from these systems will be used to train and fine-tune the second stage of our system, in which the robot will be simulated through software. A physical robot will be used in the final stage of our project. We describe these instruments, a test-suite and performance metrics designed to evaluate and automate the data gathering process as well as evaluate an initial data set.Comment: 2017 AAAI Fall Symposium on Natural Communication for Human-Robot Collaboratio

Living in a Transparent Future: Search in a Wired World

ABSTRACT. We present and discuss a likely future world in which advances in search and the wiring of our environment would provide us with ready access to much information. We outline the current status of search and the goals of the semantic web. We argue that much of the information already in electronic format will likely be made accessible through the web. We present a likely future scenario of a wired world, a world in which entities as simple as a bottle of pills to as complex as the human body are wired to the web. This adds much additional information to the web, information that by-and-large is currently not gathered in electronic format. We present and discuss three representative cases which highlight the benefits and drawbacks of ready access to information pertaining to individuals. We suggest that the future scenarios are not too far off in the making and suggest that a dialogue be started, attempting to develop enforceable privacy policies