Archive for the ‘Talks’ Category

29 Jan

NLP: Not (Just) Language, People

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Language, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: .

As consumers become producers and, now, participants in online social communities, there are new opportunities and challenges in the increasing amounts of textual information and interactions on the web, within enterprises, in government, and in new types of social media and virtual worlds.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers have traditionally regarded language as the object of study. In this talk, I argue that NLP is as much a study of people as of language per se. Doing NLP well requires us to model and reason about Content (domain knowledge), Context (goals and tasks), and Community (social context). I discuss why modeling the three C’s is difficult, and illustrate some approaches to these problems using examples from my recent academic and commercial projects.

Invited talk at PARC (Palo Alto Research Labs), Palo Alto, CA, January 2009

9 Jul

New Directions in Goal-Driven Learning

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Learning, Talks. Tagged: , .

Goal-Driven Learning (GDL) views learning as a strategic process in which the learner attempts to identify and satisfy its learning needs in the context of its tasks and goals. This is modeled as a planful process where the learner analyzes its reasoning traces to identify learning goals, and composes a set of learning strategies (modeled as planning operators) into a plan to learn by satisfying those learning goals.

Traditional GDL frameworks were based on traditional planners. However, modern AI systems often deal with real-time scenarios where learning and performance happen in a reactive real-time fashion, or are composed of multiple agents that use different learning and reasoning paradigms. In this talk, I discuss new GDL frameworks that handle such problems, incorporating reactive and multi-agent planning techniques in order to manage learning in these kinds of AI systems.

About this talk:

New Directions in Goal-Driven Learning

by Ashwin Ram

Invited keynote at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-08) Workshop on Planning to Learn, Helsinki, Finland, July 2008

3 Apr

Case-Based Reasoning for Game AI

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Game AI, Learning, Talks. Tagged: , , , .

Computer games are an increasingly popular application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and conversely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial games. Although games are typically associated with entertainment applications, there are many “serious” applications of gaming, including military, corporate, and advertising applications. There are also what the so called “humane” gaming applications—interactive tools for medical training, educational games, and games that reflect social consciousness or advocate for a cause. Game AI is the effort of taking computer games beyond scripted interactions, however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Such systems learn about the player(s) during game play, adapt their own behaviors beyond the pre-programmed set provided by the game author, and interactively develop and provide a richer experience to the player(s).

In this talk, I discuss a range of CBR approaches for Game AI. I discuss differences and similarities between character-level AI (in embedded NPCs, for example) and game-level AI (in the drama manager or game director, for example). I explain why the AI must reason at multiple levels, including reactive, tactical, strategic, rhetorical, and meta, and propose a CBR architecture that lets us design and coordinate real-time AIs operating asynchronously at all these levels. I conclude with a brief discussion on the very idea of Game AI: is it feasible? realistic? and would we call it “intelligence” if we could implement all this stuff?

View the talk:

Google Tech Talk: Case-Based Reasoning for Game AI

by Ashwin Ram

Google Tech Talk, Mountain View, CA, April 2008
www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9G7DRTuB5s

8 May

Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive Computer Games

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning, Talks. Tagged: , , , , .

Computer games are an increasingly popular application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and conversely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial games. Although games are typically associated with entertainment, there are many “serious” applications of gaming, including military, corporate, and advertising applications. There are also so-called “humane” gaming applications for medical training, educational games, and games that reflect social consciousness or advocate for a cause. Game AI is the effort of going beyond scripted interactions, however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Such systems learn about the player(s) during game play, adapt their own behaviors beyond the pre-programmed set provided by the game author, and interactively develop and provide a richer experience to the player(s).

The long-term goal of our research is to develop artificial intelligence techniques that can have a significant impact in the game industry. We present a list of challenges and research opportunities in developing techniques that can be used by computer game developers. We discuss three Case Based Reasoning (CBR) approaches to achieve adaptability in games: automatic behavior adaptation for believable characters; drama management and user modeling for interactive stories; and strategic behavior planning for real-time strategy games.

Read the paper:

Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive Computer Games

by Ashwin Ram, Santi Ontañón, Manish Mehta

Invited talk at the 20th International FLAIRS Conference on Artificial Intelligence (FLAIRS-07), Special Track on Case-Based Reasoning, Key West, FL, May 2007
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-07-04.pdf

1 Jun

Creative Conceptual Change

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Language, Learning, Robotics, Talks. Tagged: , , , , .

Creative conceptual change involves (a) the construction of new concepts and of coherent belief systems, or theories, relating these concepts, and (b) the modification and extrapolation of existing concepts and theories in novel situations. The first kind of process involves reformulating perceptual, sensorimotor, or other low-level information into higher-level abstractions. The second kind of process involves a temporary suspension of disbelieve and the extension or adaptation of existing concepts to create a conceptual model of a new situation which may be very different from previous real-world experience.

We discuss these and other types of conceptual change, and present computational models of constructive and extrapolative processes in creative conceptual change. The models have been implemented as computer programs in two very different “everyday” task domains: (a) SINS is an autonomous robotic navigation system that learns to navigate in an obstacle-ridden world by constructing sensorimotor concepts that represent navigational strategies, and (b) ISAAC is a natural language understanding system that reads short stories from the science fiction genre which requires a deep understanding of concepts that might be very different from the concepts that the system is familiar with.

Read the paper:

Creative Conceptual Change

by Ashwin Ram, Kenneth Moorman, Juan Carlos Santamaria

Invited talk at the 15th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Boulder, CO, June 1993. Long version published as Technical Report GIT-CC-96/07, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 1996. 
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-93-04.pdf
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