I’m Engaged!

On June 29th 2016 I formally asked Leslie Ann Brown to marry me.  She said “Yes!”.  In a couple days, July 3rd, that will be our four month anniversary for how long we have been dating.  Before that we knew each other from seeing each other at church for the past four years.  The past four months involved a lot of skype conversations while Leslie was in Germany.  And a number of dates, double dates, cooking together, geocaching, driving around and going on adventures together both before she left for Germany and after.  We are now committing to spend the rest of our lives together.  To love each other, help each other, and care for each other.

So, today Leslie came to the lab and she worked on her stuff and I worked on things I needed to get done at the lab.  But I had in mind that I would propose to Leslie in the afternoon.  I wanted to take Leslie to the parking lot of where I sat in the car with her waiting for the rest of my friends to get there to look at the stars at GMU’s observatory.  Also, it was where she first kissed me.  But to get her to the parking lot there is a Giant in the same shopping center and it was being renovated and I thought it was finished.  However, when I got there it was still closed.  So, I was like “I didn’t come over here just to get groceries to make the meatball sub.”  So, I pulled into a spot close to where we sat in my car those many months ago and asked “Will you marry me?”.  She said “Yes!”.  And then I got out a diamond necklace and put it on her.  That necklace has been passed down from my grandmother to my mother and now down to my future wife.  So, now that parking lot is also where I proposed to Leslie.  We have many good memories in that parking lot.

I love you Leslie!

Leslie’s Birthday!

My girlfriend, Leslie, had her birthday today :)!  I didn’t get to celebrate it with her because she is in Germany with her sister and brother-in-law.  She baked herself her special chocolate cake, took care of her niece, worked on applying for a job, and had fun doing some digital art for Beyond Porch and Portal (the book she is working on) while listening to a podcast.  So, I think all in all she had a pretty nice birthday, although I wish she was with me!  Planning on spending as much time with her as possible when she gets home :).  I can’t wait!

Bounty Electricity

What if each appliance posted a bounty for providing in real time the amount of electricity it needed to function.  The bounty would first be attempted by the house itself and if the house did not have any spare electricity in its batteries then it would post a bounty out for that electricity.  The first to supply the needed electricity would win the bounty.  Would not limit it to only the power stations supplying the electricity.  Could be houses nearby that could provide the electricity.  By using a bounty hunting system and using a first to supply mechanism or something similar it would be essentially like the cloud robotics except instead of putting a bounty out for the servo positions we are putting a bounty out to receive electricity!

Machine Learning and History

I’ve had this idea for doing clustering and data mining of history texts.  Would be interesting to creating learning algorithms that can learn timelines and context.  Essentially history textbooks are structured possibly geographically and as a time series of events.  Then doing graphical analysis and social analysis on these structures.  Could compare history texts and see what is left out and maybe what each text places more emphasis on what events.  Also, doing this across time to see how history texts have changed in what the historians themselves find interesting.  Possibly finding patterns in history itself that were not evident or obvious without such algorithms that can crunch large large volumes quickly.  Doing the normal sentiment analysis as well.

This could then lead to producing a better picture of different countries and people groups and how they were formed.  Possibly doing anomaly analysis or creating other types of filters to uncover gaps in the history texts themselves.

This of course seems like it should have been done.  Main issue is getting digital copies of the history books for the algorithm to work with.  So, it may not have been studied.  Creating learning algorithms that can understand human history seems like an important area of research.  Especially as we are writing history now it is important to maintain a grasp of the entire picture and how everything fits together.

Research and Math :)

The IROS paper was submitted 10 minutes before the deadline on March 1st.  The paper was okay, but I’m not thrilled about it because it is only the beginning stages of the work.  So, it doesn’t really use the bounty hunting stuff to its fullest.  Future papers will hopefully provide that.  We also had to create a video.  Ermo and I got the footage of the Pioneer doing the visual servoing on the ball both indoors and semi-successfully outdoors (either due to lighting or to the massively long ping times was not able always stop in time before running into the ball).

Now that is over I’m taking a bit of a break from working with robots and am working with Ermo to do some research in continuous action multiagent learning (CAMAL our acronym, don’t steal it!).  It has been a ton of fun!  I’ve been doing derivations and learning new math (and re-learning some old math!).  Getting to work out how the equations and proofs of convergence happen I believe will aid me in my work with doing proofs of convergence with bounty hunting in the future.  So, it is benefiting Ermo and me at the same time and we are having fun in the process :)!  We are working on this for a paper in NIPS.  If our algorithm concept is successful and we can show some convergence we should have a very strong NIPS paper.  David is also trying to join in and we can greatly use his help as it is a very challenging problem.  Main issue is he is still taking classes.  Can’t wait for his classes to be done!

Dan wants us to write up a paper for the Robocup Symposium on how we were able to adjust the behaviors to work with a robot that could not turn that well using HiTAB (our learning from demonstration software).  That is due March 25!  He just told us about it this monday.  Thankfully though we won’t have to produce any experiments or results we just need to write about what we did.  So we are actually pushing that off until the 22nd because Ermo and I need to make a poster and a slide for GMU’s first CS symposium.  Just what we need, not!  The really frustrating part is that it is mandatory for all CS PhD students to attend and those selected to present are required to present!  So, it is not optional.  I guess they figured no one would show up otherwise.

 

Starting on IROS 2016 paper

I got the rejection email from AAMAS last week for my paper on task abandonment for my bounty hunting system.  However, I sort of was expecting this as it needs some more theoretical basis.  So, I have to work on that.

In the mean time there is still IROS!  That is in Korea :).  The paper is due March 1st and I just started working on getting the code written for that.  But this is a fun paper as it is combining cloud robotics (can’t stand that name!) and my bounty hunting work.  So, I’m giving myself a lightning fast tutorial on ROS, raspberry pi, and the pioneer 3dx robot!  Plan is to get the base system working by friday so next week we can start doing experiments and collecting results.  Then the week before the paper is due we can write it!  So, I think we will have just enough time to pull it off.  At least this paper seems likely to be accepted as it both cloud robotics and bounty hunting are very cutting edge and putting it all on an actual robot should seal the deal :)!  So, hopefully I’ll be going to Korea in October!

Cooking when Sick

When feverish and hungry, follow your instincts.  They are raw and ready to be used when sick.

  1. Moist, piping hot chicken slathered in a spicy bbq sauce
  2. Wrap in a soft, refrigerated taco shell nestled in a bed of snappy spinach
  3. Drink warm water or tea

Eat when fluctuating between hot and cold.  The meal matches your symptoms and most likely your disposition.  The effect it has is almost immediate.  It sends you into a blissful state of peace knowing that you are not the only thing here with such a crazy temperature differential.

 

Of course your appetite quickly vanishes though.  Not really sure why.  Can’t wait to be better.

Emotions and AI

Love and multiagent systems and AI in general…  Love can motivate and inspire us.  The affects are incorporated into an agent’s utility function and it affects the perceived costs versus actually costs.  It is a lens with which agents could view the world.  Is this emotion necessary for AI to function appropriately?  What emotions are necessary?

I think this could be an allegory.  And maybe it could be related somehow to autism and people that have a hard time with emotions.  It might already be a movie or book.
I found an article on what its like to have never felt an emotion:

Spelling

A friend of mine shared a link to an article about why children have a hard time learning to spell.  They argue that we are teaching spelling incorrectly.  We should be teaching how words are formed and the etymology not how to sound the word out to spell it.  They claim that about “12% of words in english are spelt the way they sound” [1].  No wonder I’m bad at spelling in english because that is usually how I spell things.  At least in Italian, words are spelt the way they sound!  Also, I was taught how to spell mainly as they described with spelling tests and memorization.  However, I did also learn definitions for each word.  However, I was really good at remembering the definitions, I guess I just didn’t think to associate the definitions with the spelling!  Although, I do sometimes do that.

So, maybe I should try learning to spell again using this method as I still struggle to spell and rely heavily on spell check.

[1] https://theconversation.com/why-some-kids-cant-spell-and-why-spelling-tests-wont-help-20497