Skip to main content

Home/ Advanced Concepts Team/ Group items tagged agents

Rss Feed Group items tagged

3More

Bold title ..... - 3 views

  •  
    I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cat faces! ...../\_/\ ...(=^_^) ..\\(___) The article sounds quite interesting, though. I think the idea of a "fake" agent that tries to trick the classifier while both co-evolve is nice as it allows the classifier to first cope with the lower order complexity of the problem. As the fake agent mimics the real agent better and better the classifier has time to add complexity to itself instead of trying to do it all at once. It would be interesting if this is later reflected in the neural nets structure, i.e. having core regions that deal with lower order approximation / classification and peripheral regions (added at a later stage) that deal with nuances as they become apparent. Also this approach will develop not just a classifier for agent behavior but at the same time a model of the same. The later may be useful in itself and might in same cases be the actual goal of the "researcher". I suspect, however, that the problem of producing / evolving the "fake agent" model might in most case be at least as hard as producing a working classifier...
  •  
    This paper from 2014 seems discribe something pretty similar (except for not using physical robots, etc...): https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets.pdf
  •  
    Yes, this IS basically adversarial learning. Except the generator part instead of being a neural net is some kind of swarm parametrization. I just love how they rebranded it, though. :))
5More

The Secret of Ant Transportation Networks - Technology Review - 2 views

  • Just how ants create the highly efficient network of trails around their nests has never been fully understood. Now researchers think they've cracked it
  • They say the structure of ant trails can be entirely explained if the ants's response to a pheromone droplet concentration is linear. "One ant will turn to the left in proportion to the difference between the pheromone it has on its left side and the pheromone on its right," say Perna and co. They also point out that this is exactly what Weber's law predicts.
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1201.5827 :Individual Rules For Trail Pattern Formation In Argentine Ants (Linepithema Humile)
  •  
    from the abstract: "Using a novel imaging and analysis technique on experimental data we estimated pheromone concentrations at all spatial positions in the experimental arena and at different times. Then we derived the response function of individual ants to pheromone concentrations by looking at correlations between concentrations and changes in speed or direction of the ants." [...] "agent based simulations based on the Weber's Law response function determined experimentally produced results compatible with those reported in the literature and reproduced the formation of trails."
  •  
    Nice article!
2More

David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face | Alan Rusbridger ... - 0 views

  •  
    During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

    The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

    Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

    The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood
  •  
    Sarah Harrison is a lawyer that has been staying with Snowden in Hong Kong and Moscow. She is a UK citizen and her family is there. After the miranda case where the boyfriend of the reporter was detained at the airport, can Sarah return safely home? Will her family be pressured by the secret service? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23759834
2More

NASA Goddard to Auction off Patents for Automated Software Code Generation - 0 views

  • The technology was originally developed to handle coding of control code for spacecraft swarms, but it is broadly applicable to any commercial application where rule-based systems development is used.
  •  
    This is related to the "Verified Software" item in NewScientist's list of ideas that will change science. At the link below you'll find the text of the patents being auctioned: http://icapoceantomo.com/item-for-sale/exclusive-license-related-improved-methodology-formally-developing-control-systems :) Patent #7,627,538 ("Swarm autonomic agents with self-destruct capability") makes for quite an interesting read: "This invention relates generally to artificial intelligence and, more particularly, to architecture for collective interactions between autonomous entities." "In some embodiments, an evolvable synthetic neural system is operably coupled to one or more evolvable synthetic neural systems in a hierarchy." "In yet another aspect, an autonomous nanotechnology swarm may comprise a plurality of workers composed of self-similar autonomic components that are arranged to perform individual tasks in furtherance of a desired objective." "In still yet another aspect, a process to construct an environment to satisfy increasingly demanding external requirements may include instantiating an embryonic evolvable neural interface and evolving the embryonic evolvable neural interface towards complex complete connectivity." "In some embodiments, NBF 500 also includes genetic algorithms (GA) 504 at each interface between autonomic components. The GAs 504 may modify the intra-ENI 202 to satisfy requirements of the SALs 502 during learning, task execution or impairment of other subsystems."
1More

MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors (IEEE Spectrum) - 0 views

  •  
    (don't forget to turn your hype-filters on...) MoNETA (http://cns.bu.edu/nl/moneta.html) stands for "MOdular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent". It is one of projects participating in the DARPA-funded SyNAPSE project ("Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics"): http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/bio/biologically/synapse/index.htm http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/baa08-28.html
2More

Common ecology quantifies human insurgency : Article : Nature - 0 views

  •  
    nice paper: like especially: To our knowledge, our model provides the first unified explanation of high-frequency, intra-conflict data across human insurgencies. Other explanations of human insurgency are possible, though any competing theory would also need to replicate the results of Figs 1, 2, 3. Our model's specific mechanisms challenge traditional ideas of insurgency based on rigid hierarchies and networks, whereas its striking similarity to multi-agent financial market models24, 25, 26 hints at a possible link between collective human dynamics in violent and non-violent settings1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Top of page
  •  
    There was also this paper ... Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence (http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1216/1?rss=1)
1More

Agent iSolutions - 0 views

  •  
    A tool to model human interactions......
3More

Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards - 3 views

  •  
    Prediction-based method for encouraging reinforcement learning agents to explore their environments through curiosity (reward for unfamiliar states). Learns some games without any extrinsic reward!
  •  
    Fun failure case: agent gets stuck in front of TV.
  •  
    Not read this article but on a related note: Curiosity and various metrics for it have been explored for some time in robotics (outside of RL) as a framework for exploring (partially) unfamiliar environments. I came across some papers on this topic applied to UAVs when prep'ing for a PhD app. This one (http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~yogesh/publications/crv2014.pdf) comes to mind - which used a topic modelling approach.
1More

Water in the supercritical region of the P-T phase diagram (ISS experiment) - 1 views

  •  
    Bringing water to that supercritical phase (high pressurization and temperature) renders it into an oxidation agent of organic material with pure CO_2 and H2O as products. Less waste volume in the ISS. Also, all contained salts precipitate out at that phase.
12More

Will robots be smarter than humans by 2029? - 2 views

  •  
    Nice discussion about the singularity. Made me think of drinking coffee with Luis... It raises some issues such as the necessity of embodiment, etc.
  • ...9 more comments...
  •  
    "Kurzweilians"... LOL. Still not sold on embodiment, btw.
  •  
    The biggest problem with embodiment is that, since the passive walkers (with which it all started), it hasn't delivered anything really interesting...
  •  
    The problem with embodiment is that it's done wrong. Embodiment needs to be treated like big data. More sensors, more data, more processing. Just putting a computer in a robot with a camera and microphone is not embodiment.
  •  
    I like how he attacks Moore's Law. It always looks a bit naive to me if people start to (ab)use it to make their point. No strong opinion about embodiment.
  •  
    @Paul: How would embodiment be done RIGHT?
  •  
    Embodiment has some obvious advantages. For example, in the vision domain many hard problems become easy when you have a body with which you can take actions (like looking at an object you don't immediately recognize from a different angle) - a point already made by researchers such as Aloimonos.and Ballard in the end 80s / beginning 90s. However, embodiment goes further than gathering information and "mental" recognition. In this respect, the evolutionary robotics work by for example Beer is interesting, where an agent discriminates between diamonds and circles by avoiding one and catching the other, without there being a clear "moment" in which the recognition takes place. "Recognition" is a behavioral property there, for which embodiment is obviously important. With embodiment the effort for recognizing an object behaviorally can be divided between the brain and the body, resulting in less computation for the brain. Also the article "Behavioural Categorisation: Behaviour makes up for bad vision" is interesting in this respect. In the field of embodied cognitive science, some say that recognition is constituted by the activation of sensorimotor correlations. I wonder to which extent this is true, and if it is valid for extremely simple creatures to more advanced ones, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless. This being said, if "embodiment" implies having a physical body, then I would argue that it is not a necessary requirement for intelligence. "Situatedness", being able to take (virtual or real) "actions" that influence the "inputs", may be.
  •  
    @Paul While I completely agree about the "embodiment done wrong" (or at least "not exactly correct") part, what you say goes exactly against one of the major claims which are connected with the notion of embodiment (google for "representational bottleneck"). The fact is your brain does *not* have resources to deal with big data. The idea therefore is that it is the body what helps to deal with what to a computer scientist appears like "big data". Understanding how this happens is key. Whether it is the problem of scale or of actually understanding what happens should be quite conclusively shown by the outcomes of the Blue Brain project.
  •  
    Wouldn't one expect that to produce consciousness (even in a lower form) an approach resembling that of nature would be essential? All animals grow from a very simple initial state (just a few cells) and have only a very limited number of sensors AND processing units. This would allow for a fairly simple way to create simple neural networks and to start up stable neural excitation patterns. Over time as complexity of the body (sensors, processors, actuators) increases the system should be able to adapt in a continuous manner and increase its degree of self-awareness and consciousness. On the other hand, building a simulated brain that resembles (parts of) the human one in its final state seems to me like taking a person who is just dead and trying to restart the brain by means of electric shocks.
  •  
    Actually on a neuronal level all information gets processed. Not all of it makes it into "conscious" processing or attention. Whatever makes it into conscious processing is a highly reduced representation of the data you get. However that doesn't get lost. Basic, low processed data forms the basis of proprioception and reflexes. Every step you take is a macro command your brain issues to the intricate sensory-motor system that puts your legs in motion by actuating every muscle and correcting every step deviation from its desired trajectory using the complicated system of nerve endings and motor commands. Reflexes which were build over the years, as those massive amounts of data slowly get integrated into the nervous system and the the incipient parts of the brain. But without all those sensors scattered throughout the body, all the little inputs in massive amounts that slowly get filtered through, you would not be able to experience your body, and experience the world. Every concept that you conjure up from your mind is a sort of loose association of your sensorimotor input. How can a robot understand the concept of a strawberry if all it can perceive of it is its shape and color and maybe the sound that it makes as it gets squished? How can you understand the "abstract" notion of strawberry without the incredibly sensible tactile feel, without the act of ripping off the stem, without the motor action of taking it to our mouths, without its texture and taste? When we as humans summon the strawberry thought, all of these concepts and ideas converge (distributed throughout the neurons in our minds) to form this abstract concept formed out of all of these many many correlations. A robot with no touch, no taste, no delicate articulate motions, no "serious" way to interact with and perceive its environment, no massive flow of information from which to chose and and reduce, will never attain human level intelligence. That's point 1. Point 2 is that mere pattern recogn
  •  
    All information *that gets processed* gets processed but now we arrived at a tautology. The whole problem is ultimately nobody knows what gets processed (not to mention how). In fact an absolute statement "all information" gets processed is very easy to dismiss because the characteristics of our sensors are such that a lot of information is filtered out already at the input level (e.g. eyes). I'm not saying it's not a valid and even interesting assumption, but it's still just an assumption and the next step is to explore scientifically where it leads you. And until you show its superiority experimentally it's as good as all other alternative assumptions you can make. I only wanted to point out is that "more processing" is not exactly compatible with some of the fundamental assumptions of the embodiment. I recommend Wilson, 2002 as a crash course.
  •  
    These deal with different things in human intelligence. One is the depth of the intelligence (how much of the bigger picture can you see, how abstract can you form concept and ideas), another is the breadth of the intelligence (how well can you actually generalize, how encompassing those concepts are and what is the level of detail in which you perceive all the information you have) and another is the relevance of the information (this is where the embodiment comes in. What you do is to a purpose, tied into the environment and ultimately linked to survival). As far as I see it, these form the pillars of human intelligence, and of the intelligence of biological beings. They are quite contradictory to each other mainly due to physical constraints (such as for example energy usage, and training time). "More processing" is not exactly compatible with some aspects of embodiment, but it is important for human level intelligence. Embodiment is necessary for establishing an environmental context of actions, a constraint space if you will, failure of human minds (i.e. schizophrenia) is ultimately a failure of perceived embodiment. What we do know is that we perform a lot of compression and a lot of integration on a lot of data in an environmental coupling. Imo, take any of these parts out, and you cannot attain human+ intelligence. Vary the quantities and you'll obtain different manifestations of intelligence, from cockroach to cat to google to random quake bot. Increase them all beyond human levels and you're on your way towards the singularity.
2More

Crypto-Gram: October 15, 2013 - 2 views

  •  
    interesting blog entry on TOR and the NSA
  •  
    on a somewhat related note. court document from the fbi agent that was chasing that silk road guy a friend sent me the other week. an interesting read if only because i found the content quite unexpected e.g. 2 pages of login instructions http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf
1More

Nature: Spawning rings of exceptional points out of Dirac cones - 3 views

  •  
    Dirac cones, a band-structure of two cones touching each other, are the key to understand graphene exceptional properties. They also appear in the theory of photon waveguides and atoms in optical lattices. In here, the study of a Dirac cone deformation in an open system (a system that is perturbed by external agents) lead to the deformation of the Dirac cone, meaning a change in the fundamental properties of the system. This change is such that strange phenomena such as unidirectional transmission or reflection or lasers with single mode (really single) operation can be achieved. Proved experimentally in photonic crystals. New way for extremely pure lasers?
7More

You know you have been in Finland too long, when... - 4 views

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 23 Jun 10 - Cached
  •  
    How you know you have been to long in xy. The Finnish version. My favorite is 33. You accept that 80°C in a sauna is chilly, but 20°C outside is freaking hot. Quite a lot of them are outdated, esp. about opening hours of shops, and one is definitely missing. Your normal mealtime has shifted to 11am for lunch and 5pm for dinner. But don't worry, it's a really comfy place here, isnt' it Jose??
  • ...4 more comments...
  •  
    well somethings you get used to in a year (like salmiakki or koskenkorva) others don't (seriously, lunch at 11?!?!)
  •  
    But what stage are you in already, Luzi?
  •  
    I would say a 50% Finn. I do have lunch at 11am, every working day, an 80 degrees sauna indeed is just a warm room. But I will never get used to salmiakki (which is just literally eating a cleaning agent!!) and you can imagine that "silence is fun" is not really MY motto...
  •  
    True?? 22. You understand why the Finnish language has no future tense. No, I don't think I ever will understand that one... Finns are quite future-oriented at two particular times of the year. On the day after Midsummer (see above), they say "Well, it's all downhill from now on" and prepare feverishly for winter, and similarly after December 21st they perk up and start thinking about Midsummer - ignoring the fact that they still have to get through January, February and March before the place becomes inhabitable again...
  •  
    ... Finnish language has no future tense. That's true
  •  
    everything expressed with "tomorrow I go to " or "in one year" etc? what about the distinction between to future events, one conditional on the other?
1More

Agent-based computer models could anticipate future economic crisis - 1 views

  •  
    "The Illinois Commerce Commission wanted to make sure that if they deregulated the power market, individual producers of electricity would not be able to manipulate the market during times of high demand by withholding capacity or charging excessive rates. The Argonne model found that during certain times of heavy load such a situation could emerge, which led to the recommendation that independent monitors maintain some oversight of the power market." Interesting this study on power grids !
1More

ACM award concerning the Complexity of Interactions in Markets, Social Networks, and On... - 0 views

  •  
    "The Complexity of Nash Equilibria,", It also suggests that the Nash equilibrium may not be an accurate prediction of behavior in all situations. Daskalakis's research emphasizes the need for new, computationally meaningful methods for modeling strategic behavior in complex systems such as those encountered in financial markets, online systems, and social networks.
1More

Why microbes are smarter than you thought - life - 30 June 2009 - New Scientist - 0 views

  •  
    Single celled organisms may not be able to think, but they can act in remarkable ways
7More

Euroscience Open Forum 2010 - 2 views

shared by Ma Ru on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  •  
    A conference ACT should consider going to.
  • ...4 more comments...
  •  
    Perhaps some of ACTers will find this conference interesting... One of the talks: "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" [Edit] Oh, I see someone has already posted this link... a year ago. Anyway, if anyone of you plans to go, let me know - I'll be around ;-)
  •  
    Just came back from ESOF 2010... I was on look for ACT agents undercover, but either they were not there or the cover was good enough... Anyway here's a few remarks from me (I could write a nice report... if you paid): 1) In general, to say that ESA was underrepresented on the conference as a whole is not enough (I guess ESA just failed to notice the event taking place). For instance, on the GMES presentation, ESA as such was not mentioned at all... at some point I started to wonder if ESA is actually involved in the project, but now I checked the website and apparently it is. On the other hand, GMES presentation was crap anyway, as after 1:15 of talking, I didn't gain any knowledge of what GMES is and what its contributions to the EU community will be. 2) There was a lot of talk about LHC and particle research (well, at least among those that I attended). Some of them were very good, some of them rather crap... 3) "Would Einstein be on Twitter? Exploring the potential and limits of Web 2.0 in science & science communication" talk - quite interesting, but focusing mainly on Science-to-Wide Public and Science-to-Journalists communication. Not really on Science-to-Science (as in Ariadnet). There was quite an extensive discussion with the public. You may be interested that Nature is trying to stimulate Web 2.0 communication, running blog service, but also I think a kind of social network - perhaps you'd like to have a look. In general the conclusion was that Web 2.0 is not so useful for scientific communication because practising it requires TIME (blogs, etc.) and often some professional skills (podcasts/videocasts, etc.), and scientists have neither of these. This can be run on corporation level (like ESA does actually), but then it looses the "intimate" character. 4) "How much can robots learn?" talk... very nicely presented: understandable by the wide public, but conveying the message... which is something like "we can already make the robots do stuff absolutely imp
  •  
    Well, my comment was cut in half, and I don't feel like typing it again... the most important highlight from the rest is that the only presenter from ESA (ESTEC) did not show up on his talk because his department was undergoing some sort of audit on the same day :)
  •  
    Fantastic comment - or better report!! thanks very much Marek! Who was the supposed no-show speaker from ESA?
  •  
    Bernard Foing (he is actually one of the 8 ESA employees who have their own page on Wikipedia)...
  •  
    written almost entirely by a guy called a "quest for knowledge" ... who will this be????? :-)
2More

AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life P... - 0 views

  • Some 1,896 experts responded to the following question: The economic impact of robotic advances and AI—Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?
  •  
    I mainly see neural networks in this... maybe some evolutionary stuff :))
1More

Design of a multi-agent, fiber composite digital fabrication system | Science Robotics - 3 views

  •  
    Swarm-based fabrication of interwoven composite tubes via a fully autonomous, cooperative system can help create architectural-scale structures in effective and efficient ways, including in remote environments.
1 - 20 of 20
Showing 20 items per page