In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

第12次 아시아ㆍ太平洋 矯政局長會議 參加記

Although the statistical tools most often used by researchers in the field of psychology over the last 25 years are based on frequentist statistics, it is often claimed that the alternative Bayesian approach to statistics is gaining in popularity. In the current article, we investigated this claim by performing the very first systematic review of Bayesian psychological articles published between 1990 and 2015 (n = 1,579). We aim to provide a thorough presentation of the role Bayesian statistics plays in psychology. This historical assessment allows us to identify trends and see how Bayesian methods have been integrated into psychological research in the context of different statistical frameworks (e.g., hypothesis testing, cognitive models, IRT, SEM, etc.). We also describe take-home messages and provide "big-picture" recommendations to the field as Bayesian statistics becomes more popular. Our review indicated that Bayesian statistics is used in a variety of contexts across subfields of psychology and related disciplines. There are many different reasons why one might choose to use Bayes (e.g., the use of priors, estimating otherwise intractable models, modeling uncertainty, etc.). We found in this review that the use of Bayes has increased and broadened in the sense that this methodology can be used in a flexible manner to tackle many different forms of questions. We hope this presentation opens the door for a larger discussion regarding the current state of Bayesian statistics, as well as future trends. (PsycINFO Database Record

/pdf/a-systematic-review-of-bayesian-articles-in-psychology-the-2n71hyi83q.pdf

A systematic review of Bayesian articles in psychology: The last 25 years.

Automatic vehicle classification is crucial to intelligent transportation system, especially for vehicle-tracking by police. Due to the complex lighting and image capture conditions, image-based vehicle classification in real-world environments is still a challenging task and the performance is far from being satisfactory. However, owing to the mechanism of visual attention, the human vision system shows remarkable capability compared with the computer vision system, especially in distinguishing nuances processing. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) model of visual attention for image classification. A visual attention-based image processing module is used to highlight one part of an image and weaken the others, generating a focused image. Then the focused image is input into the CNN to be classified. According to the classification probability distribution, we compute the information entropy to guide a reinforcement learning agent to achieve a better policy for image classification to select the key parts of an image. Systematic experiments on a surveillance-nature dataset which contains images captured by surveillance cameras in the front view, demonstrate that the proposed model is more competitive than the large-scale CNN in vehicle classification tasks.

Deep Reinforcement Learning With Visual Attention for Vehicle Classification

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) through remote control of the robot in so-called Wizard of Oz (WoZ) ...

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/pjbr-2017-0002/pdf

How to build a supervised autonomous system for robot-enhanced therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder

This review intends to provide an overview of the state of the art in the modeling and implementation of automatic attentional mechanisms for socially interactive robots. Humans assess and exhibit intentionality by resorting to multisensory processes that are deeply rooted within low-level automatic attention-related mechanisms of the brain. For robots to engage with humans properly, they should also be equipped with similar capabilities. Joint attention, the precursor of many fundamental types of social interactions, has been an important focus of research in the past decade and a half, therefore providing the perfect backdrop for assessing the current status of state-of-the-art automatic attentional-based solutions. Consequently, we propose to review the influence of these mechanisms in the context of social interaction in cutting-edge research work on joint attention. This will be achieved by summarizing the contributions already made in these matters in robotic cognitive systems research, by identifying the main scientific issues to be addressed by these contributions and analyzing how successful they have been in this respect, and by consequently drawing conclusions that may suggest a roadmap for future successful research efforts.

/pdf/attentional-mechanisms-for-socially-interactive-robots-a-11a548nlsl.pdf

Attentional Mechanisms for Socially Interactive Robots–A Survey

In this paper, we present a Bayesian framework for the active multimodal perception of 3-D structure and motion. The design of this framework finds its inspiration in the role of the dorsal perceptual pathway of the human brain. Its composing models build upon a common egocentric spatial configuration that is naturally fitting for the integration of readings from multiple sensors using a Bayesian approach. In the process, we will contribute with efficient and robust probabilistic solutions for cyclopean geometry-based stereovision and auditory perception based only on binaural cues, modeled using a consistent formalization that allows their hierarchical use as building blocks for the multimodal sensor fusion framework. We will explicitly or implicitly address the most important challenges of sensor fusion using this framework, for vision, audition, and vestibular sensing. Moreover, interaction and navigation require maximal awareness of spatial surroundings, which, in turn, is obtained through active attentional and behavioral exploration of the environment. The computational models described in this paper will support the construction of a simultaneously flexible and powerful robotic implementation of multimodal active perception to be used in real-world applications, such as human-machine interaction or mobile robot navigation.

/pdf/a-bayesian-framework-for-active-artificial-perception-45h737misk.pdf

A Bayesian framework for active artificial perception

In this text we present the real-time implementation of a Bayesian framework for robotic multisensory perception on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). As an additional objective, we intend to show the benefits of parallel computing for similar problems (i.e. probabilistic grid-based frameworks), and the user-friendly nature of CUDA as a programming tool. Inspired by the study of biological systems, several Bayesian inference algorithms for artificial perception have been proposed. Their high computational cost has been a prohibitory factor for real-time implementations. However in some cases the bottleneck is in the large data structures involved, rather than the Bayesian inference per se. We will demonstrate that the SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) features of GPUs provide a means for taking a complicated framework of relatively simple and highly parallelisable algorithms operating on large data structures, which might take up to several minutes of execution with a regular CPU implementation, and arrive at an implementation that executes in the order of tenths of a second. The implemented multimodal perception module (including stereovision, binaural sensing and inertial sensing) builds an egocentric representation of occupancy and local motion, the Bayesian Volumetric Map (BVM), based on which gaze shift decisions are made to perform active exploration and reduce the entropy of the BVM. Experimental results show that the real-time implementation successfully drives the robotic system to explore areas of the environment mapped with high uncertainty.

https://ap.isr.uc.pt/archive/fulltext.pdf

Bayesian real-time perception algorithms on GPU

In this article, we present a hierarchical Bayesian framework for multimodal active perception, devised to be emergent, scalable and adaptive. This framework, while not strictly neuromimetic, finds its roots in the role of the dorsal perceptual pathway of the human brain. Its composing models build upon a common spatial configuration that is naturally fitting for the integration of readings from multiple sensors using a Bayesian approach devised in previous work. The framework presented in this article is shown to adequately model human-like active perception behaviours, namely by exhibiting the following desirable properties: high-level behaviour results from low-level interaction of simpler building blocks; seamless integration of additional inputs is allowed by the Bayesian Programming formalism; initial 'genetic imprint' of distribution parameters may be changed 'on the fly' through parameter manipulation, thus allowing for the implementation of goal-dependent behaviours (i.e. top-down influences).

https://ap.isr.uc.pt/archive/ADB434662AnnotatedProofsBD.pdf

A hierarchical Bayesian framework for multimodal active perception

In this paper, we introduce the main components comprising the action-perception loop of an overarching framework implementing artificial attention, designed to fulfil the requirements of social interaction (i.e., reciprocity, and awareness), with strong inspiration on current theories in functional neuroscience. We demonstrate the potential of our framework, by showing how it exhibits coherent behaviour without any inbuilt prior expectations regarding the experimental scenario. Current research in cognitive systems for social robots has suggested that automatic attention mechanisms are essential to social interaction. In fact, we hypothesise that enabling artificial cognitive systems with middleware implementing these mechanisms will empower robots to perform adaptively and with a higher degree of autonomy in complex and social environments. However, this type of assumption is yet to be convincingly and systematically put to the test. The ultimate goal will be to test our working hypothesis and the role of attention in adaptive, social robotics.

/pdf/designing-an-artificial-attention-system-for-social-robots-496t7wkcx2.pdf

João Filipe Ferreira

Papers

Attentional Mechanisms for Socially Interactive Robots–A Survey

A Bayesian framework for active artificial perception

Bayesian real-time perception algorithms on GPU

A hierarchical Bayesian framework for multimodal active perception

Designing an artificial attention system for social robots