http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US8468209 patent on “Method of rescinding previously transmitted e-mail messages”!  Is this something that should be allowed to be patented?  Doesn’t google have a labs feature that does this?

http://freelanmachinelearning.blogspot.com/

 

David Freelan’s blog has some ML thoughts

I’ll write about this then…

Well I published that above on Feb 21 2014 and now its May 19 2014!  I am just now taking the time to right about how things went.  It was a busy semester.  So, I’ll just go right into it.

So, as part of CS 880 (Multi-Robotics) we volunteered at one of three underprivileged middle schools (initially 4 but one of them pulled out) Jefferson Houston, Kramer and TranSTEM Academy (which is I think is Cardoza) to teach robotics and prepare a team to enter the Botball competition.  I got to volunteer at Kramer Middle school, since while at the initial Botball workshop I worked with that middle school teacher and student.  At Kramer Middle school I worked with Jesse Hatfield (another PhD student that was in CS880).

Things that were interesting about Kramer:

1. “99% Black and 1% mixed race” (http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Kramer+Middle+School).  The first time I went to the school one of the students was like “Look there’s a white guy!”.

2. The students wear a uniform White shirt and black/dark blue khakis.  I didn’t notice this until about the third time I went.  Interesting, I never had to wear a uniform and I went to public school in middle school…

3. They separated the classes by gender.

So, back to botball…  Our primary contact teacher at Kramer was Ms. Jefferson, however, later it became Ms. Daniels.  Our first day there we enter Ms. Daniels class room and the kids were wild.  Ms. Daniels is trying to settle the kids down, but to no avail.  So, she ignores them and asks us present!  So, in shock (neither Jesse or I expected to have to present Botball to the entire class of like 25 students) I pull out my laptop and get a video ready.  I connect it to the projector and start the Botball movie.  All of a sudden the room goes silent!  I could hardly believe it.  The movie is only 3 minutes and as soon as its over it is back to chaos.  Everyone is asking questions and wants to know why we are here, what other things can robots do, can we make robots that play football, etc…  So, we try and answer some of the questions and we finally ask Ms. Daniels where the Botball team is and where we are to meet.  Because there was no way could teach all 25 students robotics.

 

 

 

MRL = Multirobot Learning

A quote from Multiagent Learning in Large Anonymous Games (Kash, Ian A et al.)

“With more learners, the noise introduced into pay- offs by exploration and mistakes becomes more consistent. Second, having more information typically improves performance. Publicly available statistics about the observed behavior of agents can allow an agent to learn effectively while making fewer local observations.”

So, for auctioning task would it be wise to be continuously auctioning off tasks to the robots even though they won’t actually be doing them so that they can learn how to bid more accurately in the different situations?  Use Dyna architecture.

 

 

 

We had freezing rain in Fairfax overnight and this morning and the ice expanded the seam of two panels on the back drivers side of my car which cracked the bottom panel!

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1VRNvbyjAiI8JXjfe7sgV21VzoN2LI3OiBFmPuZRzE-g/edit?usp=sharing — for pic red box is where it happened.  Ugh…

 

https://app.box.com/s/fi1c3wccxjrwtan9hq69 is a very interesting article I’ll write a bit about it later.

 

http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~dale/godel/godel.html descriptions of a couple paradoxes and theorems important to computer science and mathematics.

I posted every month this year!  Of course this is a pretty small one….

http://xkcd.com/378/ 🙂

Yesterday I learned about a real life online job shop scheduling problem.  In the HVAC business calls come in to the office where the office person schedules the job and calls the guys out on the road to tell them where they go next.  Sometimes those calls require immediate attention so assigning and saying when on the same day is an important problem to save money and customers.

I also was reading about influence diagrams.  I am trying to come up with a way to have succinct universal communication that can easily be transformed into something humans can understand, have powerful expressions and be easily programmed.  They don’t seem like they would be terribly useful because the text within the nodes still has to be generated somehow.

I also was considering Morphological analysis, a problem solving tool that is useful for problems where it is not possible (or feasible) to perform causal modeling or simulation (ie Wicked problems).  However, I think that I may have to modify the goal slightly because it will be intractable since the number of variables may not be known.  Either way it is still interesting.