TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in the potential benefits of ‘intelligent’ autonomous machines such as robots. Honda’s Asimo humanoid robot, iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and Google’s driverless cars have fired the imagination of the general public, and social media buzz with speculation about a utopian world of helpful robot assistants or the coming robot apocalypse! However, there is a long way to go before autonomous systems reach the level of capabilities required for even the simplest of tasks involving human-robot interaction especially if it involves communicative behaviour such as speech and language. Of course the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made great strides in these areas, and has moved on from abstract high-level rule-based paradigms to embodied architectures whose operations are grounded in real physical environments. What is still missing, however, is an overarching theory of intelligent communicative behaviour that informs system-level design decisions in order to provide a more coherent approach to system integration. This chapter introduces the beginnings of such a framework inspired by the principles of Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). In particular, it is observed that PCT has hitherto tended to view perceptual processes as a relatively straightforward series of transformations from sensation to perception, and has overlooked the potential of powerful generative model-based solutions that have emerged in practical fields such as visual or auditory scene analysis. Starting from first principles, a sequence of arguments is presented which not only shows how these ideas might be integrated into PCT, but which also extend PCT towards a remarkably symmetric architecture for a needs-driven communicative agent. It is concluded that, if behaviour is the control of perception (the central tenet of PCT), then perception (at least for communicative agents) is the simulation of behaviour.

SOLUTION: PCT and Beyond: Towards a Computational Framework for ‘Intelligent’ Communicative Systems

PROBLEM: The subpath planning problem is a branch of the path planning problem, which has widespread applications in automated manufacturing process as well as vehicle and robot navigation. This problem is to find the shortest path or tour subject for travelling a set of given subpaths. The current approaches for dealing with the subpath planning problem are all based on meta-heuristic approaches. It is well-known that meta-heuristic based approaches have several deficiencies. To address them, we propose a novel approximation algorithm in the O(n3) time complexity class, which guarantees to solve any subpath planning problem instance with the fixed ratio bound of 2. Beside the formal proofs of the claims, our empirical evaluation shows that our approximation method acts much better than a state-of-the-art method, both in result and execution time. Note to Practitioners—In some real world applications such as robot and vehicle navigation in structured and industrial environments as well as some of the manufacturing processes such as electronic printing and polishing, it is required for the agent to travel a set of predefined paths. Automating this process includes three steps: 1) capturing the environment of the actual problem and formulating it as a subpath planning problem; 2) solving subpath planning problem to find the near optimal path or tour; 3) command the robot to follow the output. The most challenging phase is the second one that this paper tries to tackle it. To design an effective automation for the aforementioned applications, it is essential to make use of methods with low computational cost but near optimal outputs in the second phase. According to the fact that the length of the final output has a direct effect on the cost of performing the task, it is desirable to incorporate methods with low complexity that can guarantee a bound for the difference between length of the optimal path and 1 ar X iv :1 60 3. 06 21 7v 1 [ cs .R O ] 2 0 M ar 2 01 6 the output. Current approaches for solving subpath planning problem are all meta-heuristic based. These methods do not provide such a bound. And plus, they are usually very time consuming. They may find promising results for some instances of problems, but there is no guarantee that they always exhibit such a good behaviour. In this paper, in order to avoid the issues of metaheuristics methods, we present an approximation algorithm, which provides an appropriate bound for the optimality of its solution. To gauge the performance of proposed methods, we conducted a set of experiments the results of which show that our proposed method finds shorter paths in less time in comparison with a state-of-the-art method.

SOLUTION: An Approximation Approach for Solving the Subpath Planning Problem

PROBLEM: Data quality assessment and data cleaning are context-dependent activities. Motivated by this observation, we propose the Ontological Multidimensional Data Model (OMD model), which can be used to model and represent contexts as logic-based ontologies. e data under assessment is mapped into the context, for additional analysis, processing, and quality data extraction. e resulting contexts allow for the representation of dimensions, and multidimensional data quality assessment becomes possible. At the core of a multidimensional context we include a generalized multidimensional data model and a Datalog± ontology with provably good properties in terms of query answering. ese main components are used to represent dimension hierarchies, dimensional constraints, dimensional rules, and dene predicates for quality data specication. ery answering relies upon and triggers navigation through dimension hierarchies, and becomes the basic tool for the extraction of quality data. e OMD model is interesting per se, beyond applications to data quality. It allows for a logic-based, and computationally tractable representation of multidimensional data, extending previous multidimensional data models with additional expressive power and functionalities.

SOLUTION:
Ontological Multidimensional Data Models and Contextual Data Quality