The 2007‐2009 U.S. recession led to large increases in the potential duration of unemployment benefits (PBD), which could decrease job search effort. I measure search effort by job applications on the popular website Careerbuilder.com. Using an event study and nonlinearities in the relationship between PBD and the unemployment rate, I find that a one‐week increase in PBD decreases state‐le...

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is a technique for programming robots that holds much promise in making robots more accessible to ordinary, non-technical users. However, a well known difficulty with the method is that a human will often demonstrate the task to be programmed inconsistently or even erroneously, leading to the inclusion of what is essentially noise in the demonstration. A numbe...

Having the computer imitate recorded human actions is the basis for an experimental technology for programming, variously called "Programming by Example" or "Programming by Demonstration". This is an under-appreciated technology that holds the promise of revolutionizing programming and making it more accessible, especially to non-expert programmers. Because imitation is a natural learning strat...

Application histories have been used for a variety of purposes including error recovery, browsing past activities, macro recording and demonstrational interfaces. However, in most systems the history is kept as a simple list of primitive commands, which poorly reflects the user task structure. In this paper we first present Command Trees, a richer representation of command histories that offers...

In this paper we present an approach to reproduce human demonstrations in a reach-to-grasp context. The demonstration is represented in hand state space. By using the distance to the target object as a scheduling variable, the way in which the robot approaches the object is controlled. The controller that we deploy to execute the motion is formulated as a nextstate-planner. The planner produces...

In robot Programming by Demonstration, current approaches for learning motion models rely on encoding the demonstrated trajectories using statistical techniques. In this paper we propose a method for extracting task constraints from demonstrated motions and using them directly as continuously embeddable constraints for controlling the robot. We consider determining the object of interest in eac...

Programming by demonstration is an attractive model for allowing both experts and non-experts to command robots’ actions. In this work, we contribute an approach for learning precise reaching trajectories for robotic manipulators. We use dimensionality reduction to smooth the example trajectories and transform their representation to a space more amenable to planning. Next, regions with simple ...

Hand gestures are important in human communication. It is difficult to transmit visual or spatial concepts only with oral communication (communication human to human) or by regular user interfaces(communication human to machine): keyboard, mouse, etc. The systems of hand gestures recognition are nowadays mainly oriented to the recognition of predefined sets of gestures. This is useful for appli...

We have developed a virtual fish tank in which computer users are represented by animated fish. The actions and interactions of the fish in the tank are meant to reflect the actions of users in the real world. Our first attempt at creating a programming environment that allowed people to customize their own fish did not work very well because users did not want to explicitly write programs to c...

Humanoid robotics requires new programming tools. Programming by demonstration is good for simple movements, but so far the adaptation for fine movements in grasping is too difficult for it. Grasping of natural objects with a natural hand is known as one of the most difficult problems in robotics. Mathematical models have been developed only for simple hands or for simple objects. In our resear...