As computational learning agents continue to improve their ability to learn sequential decision-making tasks, a central but largely unfulfilled goal is to deploy these agents in real-world domains in which they interact with humans and make decisions that affect our lives. People will want such interactive agents to be able to perform tasks for which the agent’s original developers could not pr...

Within this paper, an approach for teaching a humanoid robot is presented that will enable the robot to learn typical tasks required in everyday household environments. Our approach, called Programming by Demonstration, which is implemented and successfully used in our institute to teach a robot system is presented. Firstly, we concentrate on an analysis of human actions and action sequences th...

Currently, most demonstrational systems are built from scratch, typically by individuals, and are all quite unique and distinct from each other. It is still desirable to build more such small-scale systems in the future. However, the key to a larger-scale, collaborative and interdisciplinary effort is in defining a common representation for user tasks, and in defining a common input format for ...

Let p and 2p − 1 be prime powers and p ≡ 3 (mod 4). We describe a construction of a series of Siamese twin designs with Menon parameters (4p, 2p − p, p − p) intersecting in a derived design with parameters (2p − p, p − p, p − p − 1), and a pairwise balanced design PBD(2p − p, {p, p − p}, p − p − 1). When p and 2p − 1 are primes, the derived design and the pairwise balanced design are cyclic. Fu...

Computers reputedly excel at repetitive problems, yet many users find themselves performing the same actions over and over again. Non-programmers have little choice but to perform iterative tasks by hand. Programming by demonstration is an end-user programming technique that lets the user teach the computer a program by showing it examples of what they want done, much as they might teach anothe...

The polynomial birth-death (PBD) distribution on non-negative integers introduced in Brown & Xia (2001) is the equilibrium distribution of the birth-death process with birth rates {αi} and death rates {βi}, where αi ≥ 0 and βi ≥ 0 are polynomial functions of i. The family unifies many well-known distributions such as Poisson, negative binomial and binomial. In this talk, I’ll explain how a nice...

Programming by demonstration techniques facilitate the programming of robots. Some of them allow the generalization of tasks through parameters, although they require new training when trajectories different from the ones used to estimate the model need to be added. One of the ways to re-train a robot is by incremental learning, which supplies additional information of the task and does not req...

Software agents are intended to perform certain tasks on behalf of their users. In many cases, however, the agent’s competence is not sufficient to produce the desired outcome. This paper presents an approach to cooperative problem solving in which a software agent and its user try to support each other in the achievement of a particular goal. As a side effect the user can extend the agent’s ca...

Robot skills are low-level motion and/or grasping capabilities that constitute the basic building blocks from which tasks are built. Teaching and recognition of such skills can be done by Programming-by-Demonstration approach. A human operator demonstrates certain skills while his motions are recorded by a datacapturing device and modeled in our case via fuzzy clustering and Takagi-Sugeno model...

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is an intuitive method to program a robot. The user, acting as a teacher or programmer, shows how a particular task can be performed. The demonstration is monitored using an interface device that allows the measurement and recording of both the applied commands as well as the data simultaneously perceived by robot's sensors. This paper considers the problems o...