Archive for the ‘Agents’ Category
19
Aug
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning. Tagged: case-based reasoning, creativity, games, interactive drama, meta-reasoning, problem solving, virtual worlds. Leave a comment
Computer games are an increasingly popular application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and conversely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial digital games. AI for non playing characters (NPC) in computer games tends to come from people with computing skills well beyond the average user. The prime reason behind the lack of involvement of novice users in creating AI behaviors for NPC’s in computer games is that construction of high quality AI behaviors is a hard problem.
There are two reasons for it. First, creating a set of AI behavior requires specialized skills in design and programming. The nature of the process restricts it to certain individuals who have a certain expertise in this area. There is little understanding of how the behavior authoring process can be simplified with easy-to-use authoring environments so that novice users (without programming and design experience) can carry out the behavior authoring task. Second, the constructed AI behaviors have problems and bugs in them which cause a break in player expe- rience when the problematic behaviors repeatedly fail. It is harder for novice users to identify, modify and correct problems with the authored behavior sets as they do not have the necessary debugging and design experience.
The two issues give rise to a couple of interesting questions that need to be investigated: a) How can the AI behavior construction process be simplified so that a novice user (without program- ming and design experience) can easily conduct the authoring activity and b) How can the novice users be supported to help them identify and correct problems with the authored behavior sets? In this thesis, I explore the issues related to the problems highlighted and propose a solution to them within an application domain, named Second Mind(SM). In SM novice users who do not have expertise in computer programming employ an authoring interface to design behaviors for intelligent virtual characters performing a service in a virtual world. These services range from shopkeepers to museum hosts. The constructed behaviors are further repaired using an AI based approach.
To evaluate the construction and repair approach, we conduct experiments with human subjects. Based on developing and evaluating the solution, I claim that a design solution with behavior timeline based interaction design approach for behavior construction supported by an understandable vocabulary and reduced feature representation formalism enables novice users to author AI behaviors in an easy and understandable manner for NPCs performing a service in a virtual world. I further claim that an introspective reasoning approach based on comparison of successful and unsuccessful execution traces can be used as a means to successfully identify breaks in player experience and modify the failures to improve the experience of the player interacting with NPCs performing a service in a virtual world.
The work contributes in the following three ways by providing: 1) a novel introspective reasoning approach for successfully detecting and repairing failures in AI behaviors for NPCs performing a service in a virtual world.; 2) a novice user understandable authoring environment to help them create AI behaviors for NPCs performing a service in a virtual world in an easy and understandable manner; and 3) Design, debugging and testing scaffolding to help novice users modify their authored AI behaviors and achieve higher quality modified AI behaviors compared to their original unmodified behaviors.
Read the dissertation:
Construction and Adaptation of AI Behaviors in Computer Games
by Manish Mehta
PhD dissertation, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, August 2011.
smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/42724
27
May
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Education, Health & Wellness, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: cognitive media, educational technology, healthcare, information retrieval, open education, social learning, text cbr. 3 comments
With the advent of open education resources, social networking technologies and new pedagogies for online and blended learning, we are in the early stages of a significant disruption in current models of education. The disruption is fueled by a staggering growth in demand. It is estimated that there will be 100 million students qualified to enter universities over the next decade. To educate them, a major university would need to be created every week.
Universities have responded to this need with Open Education Resources—thousands of free, high quality courses, developed by hundreds of faculty, used by millions worldwide. Unfortunately, online courseware does not offer a supporting learning experience or the engagement needed to keep students motivated. Students read less when using e-textbooks; video lectures are boring; and retention and course completion rates are low.
Therein lies the core problem: How to engage a generation of learners who live on the Internet yet tune out of school, who seek interaction on Facebook yet find none on iTunes U, who need community yet are only offered content. We propose a new approach to this problem: open social learning communities, anchored with open content, providing an interactive online study group experience akin to sitting with study buddies on a world-wide campus quad.
This solution is enabled by state-of-the-art web technologies: really real-time collaboration technologies for a highly interactive experience; intelligent recommender systems to help learners connect with relevant content and other learners; mining and analytics to assess learner outcomes; and reputation techniques to establish social capital. We will discuss these technologies and how they can be combined to address the problem of education in a manner that is highly scalable yet interactive and engaging.
This approach can be used for other types of learning communities. We will show an application to healthcare information access to help consumers learn about their healthcare questions and needs.
Keynote talk at SIPA Conference: Entrepreneurship—Idea Wave 3.0, Mountain View, CA, November 12, 2011.
Keynote talk at the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS-11), Sogndal, Norway, May 27, 2011.
View the talk:
videolectures.net/wims2011_ram_learning
Read the paper:
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-11-04.pdf
View the slides:
7
Apr
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Health & Wellness, Language, Learning, Opinion, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Leave a comment
Social Media is everywhere: photos, videos, news, blogs, art, music, games… even business, finance, healthcare, government, design, and other serious applications are going social. These social media gave given rise to Social Cognition. What began with sharing has moved to creation. Consumers have become producers, and commerce has become a conversation.
Due to these conversations, individuals are no longer alone; whether you’re making a life decision, solving a critical business problem, or merely looking for a restaurant, your social graphs are available to augment your decision making process. These graphs have no geographic boundaries; professional networks are worldwide, and information streams from far corners of the globe into the palm of your hand.
Beyond media and commerce, the next big disruption is innovation. Humans everywhere want to innovate, and Social Cognition can augment human innovation in many everyday and expert domains.
I discuss three human capabilities that are amenable to social augmentation: problem solving, learning, and creativity. I illustrate them with challenge problems from my work: 1) healthcare: helping consumers find relevant health information without search; 2) energy: helping experts troubleshoot complex turbine failures; 3) learning: scaling education to a hundred million people; and 4) creativity: enabling average users to create artificial intelligence agents without programming, and 2) learning: scaling education to a hundred million people.
These technologies blend Cognitive Systems (artificial intelligence) and Cognitive Science (human cognition) in products that both exhibit and support cognition in large-scale social communities. This research not only provides scientific insight but also creates disruptive business opportunities.
Invited talk at PARC, Palo Alto, CA, April 7, 2011.
Invited talk at Wright State University, Center of Excellence in Human-Centered Innovation, Dayton, OH, October 24, 2010.
View the slides:
22
Mar
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents. Tagged: case-based reasoning, cognitive media, problem solving, semantic memory. Leave a comment
The paper describes the first phase of development of a Case-Base Reasoning (CBR) system to support early conceptual design of buildings. As specific context of application, the research focuses on energy performance of commercial buildings, and the early identification of energy-related features that contribute to its outcomes. The hypothesis is that bringing knowledge from relevant precedents may facilitate this identification process, thus offering a significant contribution for early analysis and decision-making.
The paper introduces a proof-of-concept for such a system, proposing a novel integration of Case-Based Reasoning, Parametric Modeling (Building Information Modeling), and Ontology Classification. While CBR provides a framework to store and retrieve cases at an instance level, Parametric Modeling offers a framework for rule-based geometric adaptation and evaluation. The ontology is intended to provide a semantic representation, so that new design concepts can be created, classified and retained for further reuse. Potential advantages and limitations of this three-level integration approach are discussed along with recommendations for future development.
CBArch: A Case-Based Reasoning Framework for Conceptual Design of Commercial Buildings
by Andrés Cavieres, Urjit Bhatia, Preetam Joshi, Fei Zhao, Ashwin Ram
AAAI-11 Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Design
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-11-07.pdf
24
Feb
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning. Leave a comment
In a competitive game it is important to identify the opponent’s strategy as quickly and accurately as possible so that an effective response can be staged. In this vein, this paper summarizes our work in exploring the use of the first order inductive learning (FOIL) algorithm for learning rules which can be used to represent opponent strategies. Specifically, we use these learned rules to perform plan recognition and classify an opponent strategy as one of multiple learned strategies. Our experiments validate this novel approach in a simple real-time strategy game.
Read the paper:
Learning Opponent Strategies through First Order Induction
by Kathryn Genter, Santiago Ontañón, Ashwin Ram
FLAIRS-11 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-11-03.pdf
19
Jul
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, case-based reasoning, games, goal-driven learning, interactive drama, meta-reasoning, problem solving, real-time cbr, rts games, virtual worlds. 1 comment
(Click image to view the video – it’s near the bottom of the new page.)
User-generated content is everywhere: photos, videos, news, blogs, art, music, and every other type of digital media on the Social Web. Games are no exception. From strategy games to immersive virtual worlds, game players are increasingly engaged in creating and sharing nearly all aspects of the gaming experience: maps, quests, artifacts, avatars, clothing, even games themselves. Yet, there is one aspect of computer games that is not created and shared by game players: the AI. Building sophisticated personalities, behaviors, and strategies requires expertise in both AI and programming, and remains outside the purview of the end user.
To understand why authoring Game AI is hard, we need to understand how it works. AI can take digital entertainment beyond scripted interactions into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. I will discuss examples of AI techniques for character-level AI (in embedded NPCs, for example) and game-level AI (in the drama manager, for example). These types of AI enhance the player experience in different ways. The techniques are complicated and are usually implemented by expert game designers.
I propose an alternative approach to designing Game AI: Real-Time CBR. This approach extends CBR to real-time systems that operate asynchronously during game play, planning, adapting, and learning in an online manner. Originally developed for robotic control, Real-Time CBR can be used for interactive games ranging from multiplayer strategy games to interactive believable avatars in virtual worlds.
As with any CBR technique, Real-Time CBR integrates problem solving with learning. This property can be used to address the authoring problem. I will show the first Web 2.0 application that allows average users to create AIs and challenge their friends to play them—without programming. I conclude with some thoughts about the role of CBR in AI-based Interactive Digital Entertainment.
Keynote talk at the Eighteenth Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (RFIA-12), Lyon, France, February 5, 2012.
Slides and video here: rfia2012.liris.cnrs.fr/doku.php?id=pub:ram
Keynote talk at the Eleventh Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI-11), Trondheim, Norway, May 25, 2011.
Keynote talk at the 2010 International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR-10), Alessandria, Italy, July 22, 2010.
GVU Brown Bag talk, October 14, 2010. Watch the talk here: www.gvu.gatech.edu/node/4320
Try it yourself:
Learn more about the algorithms:
View the talk:
www.sais.se/blog/?p=57
View the slides:
10
Jul
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning. Tagged: believable agents, case-based reasoning, games, goal-driven learning, meta-reasoning, real-time cbr, rts games. Leave a comment
AI agents designed for real-time settings need to adapt themselves to changing circumstances to improve their performance and remedy their faults. Agents typically designed for computer games, however, lack this ability. The lack of adaptivity causes a break in player experience when they repeatedly fail to behave properly in circumstances unforeseen by the game designers.
We present an AI technique for game-playing agents that helps them adapt to changing game circumstances. The agents carry out runtime adaptation of their behavior sets by monitoring and reasoning about their behavior execution and using this reasoning to dynamically revise their behaviors. The evaluation of the behavior adaptation approach in a complex real-time strategy game shows that the agents adapt themselves and improve their performance by revising their behavior sets appropriately.
Read the paper:
Meta-Level Behavior Adaptation in Real-Time Strategy Games
by Manish Mehta, Santi Ontañon, Ashwin Ram
ICCBR-10 Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning for Computer Games, Alessandria, Italy, 2010.
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-10-02.pdf
10
Jul
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Health & Wellness, Language, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: case-based reasoning, healthcare, information retrieval, natural language, semantic memory, text cbr. Leave a comment
We introduce a Conversational Interaction framework as an innovative and natural approach to facilitate easier information access by combining web search and recommendations. This framework includes an intelligent information agent (Cobot) in the conversation to provide contextually relevant social and web search recommendations. Cobot supports the information discovery process by integrating web information retrieval along with proactive connections to relevant users who can participate in real-time conversations. We describe the conversational framework and report on some preliminary experiments in the system.
Read the paper:
Conversational Framework for Web Search and Recommendations
by Saurav Sahay, Ashwin Ram
ICCBR-10 Workshop on Reasoning from Experiences on the Web (WebCBR-10), Alessandria, Italy, 2010.
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-10-01.pdf
28
Sep
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, case-based reasoning, games, interactive drama, meta-reasoning, multistrategy learning, planning, problem solving, real-time cbr, rts games, virtual worlds. 3 comments
User-generated content is everywhere: photos, videos, news, blogs, art, music, and every other type of digital media on the Social Web. Games are no exception. From strategy games to immersive virtual worlds, game players are increasingly engaged in creating and sharing nearly all aspects of the gaming experience: maps, quests, artifacts, avatars, clothing, even games themselves. Yet, there is one aspect of computer games that is not created and shared by game players: the AI. Building sophisticated personalities, behaviors, and strategies requires expertise in both AI and programming, and remains outside the purview of the end user.
To understand why Game AI is hard, we need to understand how it works. AI can take digital entertainment beyond scripted interactions into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. I discuss examples of AI techniques for character-level AI (in embedded NPCs, for example) and game-level AI (in the drama manager, for example). These types of AI enhance the player experience in different ways. The techniques are complicated and are usually implemented by expert game designers.
I argue that User-Generated AI is the next big frontier in the rapidly growing Social Gaming area. From Sims to Risk to World of Warcraft, end users want to create, modify, and share not only the appearance but the “minds” of their characters. I present my recent research on intelligent technologies to assist Game AI authors, and show the first Web 2.0 application that allows average users to create AIs and challenge their friends to play them—without programming. I conclude with some thoughts about the future of AI-based Interactive Digital Entertainment.
CMU Robotics & Intelligence Seminar, September 28, 2009
Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
MIT Media Lab Colloquium, January 25, 2010
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Stanford Media X Philips Seminar, February 1, 2010
Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Pixar Research Seminar, February 2, 2010
Try it yourself:
Learn more about the algorithms:
View the talk:
www.sais.se/blog/?p=57
View the slides:
21
Jul
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Health & Wellness, Language, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: healthcare, information retrieval, natural language, semantic memory. Leave a comment
Knowledge and user-generated content is proliferating on the web in scientific publications, information portals and online social media. This knowledge explosion has continued to outpace technological innovation in efficient information access technologies. In this paper, we describe methods and technologies for “Conversational Search” as an innovative solution to facilitate easier information access and reduce the information overload for users.
Conversational Search is an interactive and collaborative information finding interaction. The participants in this interaction engage in social conversations aided with an intelligent information agent (Cobot) that provides contextually relevant search recommendations. The collaborative and conversational search activity helps users make faster and more informed search and discovery. It also helps the agent learn about conversations with interactions and social feedback to make better recommendations. Conversational search leverages the social discovery process by integrating web information retrieval along with the social interactions.
Read the paper:
Collaborative Information Access: A Conversational Search Approach
by Saurav Sahay, Anu Venkatesh, Ashwin Ram
ICCBR-09 Workshop on Reasoning from Experiences on the Web (WebCBR-09), Seattle, July 2009
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-09-05.pdf
View my profile.svg){kind=logo}
Read my bio
Follow me
OpenStudy with me
Cognitive Computing 