This work seeks to leverage semantic networks containing millions of entries encoding assertions of commonsense knowledge to enable improvements in robot task execution and learning. The specific application we explore in this project is object substitution in the context of task adaptation. Humans easily adapt their plans to compensate for missing items in day-to-day tasks, substituting a wrap for bread when making a sandwich, or stirring pasta with a fork when out of spoons. Robot plan execution, however, is far less robust, with missing objects typically leading to failure if the robot is not aware of alternatives. In this article, we contribute a context-aware algorithm that leverages the linguistic information embedded in the task description to identify candidate substitution objects without reliance on explicit object affordance information. Specifically, we show that the task context provided by the task labels within the action structure of a task plan can be leveraged to disambiguate information within a noisy large-scale semantic network containing hundreds of potential object candidates to identify successful object substitutions with high accuracy. We present two extensive evaluations of our work on both abstract and real-world robot tasks, showing that the substitutions made by our system are valid, accepted by users, and lead to a statistically significant reduction in robot learning time. In addition, we report the outcomes of testing our approach with a large number of crowd workers interacting with a robot in real time.
The development of early literacy skills has been critically linked to a child's later academic success. In particular, repeated studies have shown that reading aloud to children and providing opportunities for them to discuss the stories that they hear is of utmost importance to later academic success. CloudPrimer is a tablet-based interactive reading primer that aims to foster early literacy skills by supporting parents in shared reading with their children through user-targeted discussion topic suggestions. The tablet application records discussions between parents and children as they read a story and, in combination with a common sense knowledge base, leverages this information to produce suggestions. Because of the unique challenges presented by our application, the suggestion generation method relies on a novel topic modeling method that is based on semantic graph topology. We conducted a user study in which we compared how delivering suggestions generated by our approach compares to expert-crafted suggestions. Our results show that our system can successfully improve engagement and parent-child reading practices in the absence of a literacy expert's tutoring.
We present a simulation model designed for the evaluation of fault tolerance solutions working in large scale distributed systems. This model extends the MONARC simulation model with new capabilities for fault tolerance simulation. The model includes failure behavior and capabilities to detect and react to faults. We also present an implementation of this model in MONARC, together with specific evaluation results. The model's implementation considers permanent and transient failures occurring within processing units, network components, as well as databases. The model is easily extendable, allowing the additions of new failure models, as required by different experiments. The model can be used in conjunction with key performance metrics, being able to easily pinpoint areas of failures within the simulated environments.
CloudPrimer is a tablet-based interactive reading primer that aims to foster early literacy skills and shared parent-child reading through user-targeted discussion topic suggestions. The tablet application records discussions between parents and children as they read a story and leverages this information, in combination with a common sense knowledge base, to develop discussion topic models. The long-term goal of the project is to use such models to provide context-sensitive discussion topic suggestions to parents during the shared reading activity in order to enhance the interactive experience and foster parental engagement in literacy education. In this paper, we present a novel approach for using commonsense reasoning to effectively model topics of discussion in unstructured dialog. We introduce a metric for localizing concepts that the users are interested in at a given moment in the dialog and extract a time sequence of words of interest. We then present algorithms for topic modeling and refinement that leverage semantic knowledge acquired from ConceptNet, a commonsense knowledge base. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms using transcriptions of audio recordings of parentchild pairs interacting with a tablet application, and compare the output of our algorithms to human-generated topics. Our results show that words of interest and discussion topics selected by our algorithm closely match those identified by human readers.
The vision of HIPstIR is that early stage information retrieval (IR) researchers get together to develop a future for non-mainstream ideas and research agendas in IR. The first iteration of this vision materialized in the form of a three day workshop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire attended by 24 researchers across academia and industry. Attendees pre-submitted one or more topics that they want to pitch at the meeting. Then over the three days during the workshop, we self-organized into groups and worked on six specific proposals of common interest. In this report, we present an overview of the workshop and brief summaries of the six proposals that resulted from the workshop.
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