This paper presents and analyses existing taxonomies of virtual and augmented reality and demonstrates knowledge gaps and mixed terminology which may cause confusion among educators, researchers, and developers. Several such occasions of confusion are presented. A methodology is then presented to construct a taxonomy of virtual reality and augmented reality applications based on a combination of: a faceted analysis approach for the overall design of the taxonomy; an existing taxonomy of educational objectives to derive the educational purpose; an information systems analysis to establish important facets of the taxonomy; and two systematic mapping studies to identify categories within each facet. Based onUsing thisthe methodology a new taxonomy is proposed and the implications of its facets (and their combinations of facets)are demonstrated. The taxonomy focuses on technology used to provide the virtual or augmented reality as well as the content presented to the user, including the type of gamification and how it is operated. It also takes into accountaccommodates a large number of devices and approaches developed throughout the years and for multiple industries, and proposes and developsprovides a way to categorize them in order to clarify communication between researchers, developers and as well as educators. Use of the taxonomy and implications of choices made during their development is then demonstrated ion two case studies:, a virtual reality chemical plant for use in chemical engineering education and an augmented reality dog for veterinary education.
Technology has evolved over the years, making our lives easier. It has impacted the healthcare sector, increasing the average life expectancy of human beings. Still, there are gaps that remain unaddressed. There is a lack of transparency in the healthcare system, which results in inherent trust problems between patients and hospitals. In the present day, a patient does not know whether he or she will get the proper treatment from the hospital for the fee charged. A patient can claim reimbursement of the medical bill from any insurance company. However, today there is minimal scope for the Insurance Company to verify the validity of such bills or medical records. A patient can provide fake details to get financial benefits from the insurance company. Again, there are trust issues between the patient (i.e., the insurance claimer) and the insurance company. Blockchain integrated with the smart contract is a well-known disruptive technology that builds trust by providing transparency to the system. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-enabled Secure and Smart HealthCare System. Fairness of all the entities: patient, hospital, or insurance company involved in the system is guaranteed with no one trusting each other. Privacy and security of patients' medical data are ensured as well. We also propose a method for privacy-preserving sharing of aggregated data with the research community for their own purpose. Shared data must not be personally identifiable, i.e, no one can link the acquired data to the identity of any patient or their medical history. We have implemented the prototype in the Ethereum platform and Ropsten test network, and have included the analysis as well.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant success across a wide range of domains, such as game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics and finance. However, DRL and deep MARL agents are widely known to be sample-inefficient and millions of interactions are usually needed even for relatively simple game settings, thus preventing the wide application in real-industry scenarios. One bottleneck challenge behind is the well-known exploration problem, i.e., how to efficiently explore the unknown environments and collect informative experiences that could benefit the policy learning most. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on existing exploration methods in DRL and deep MARL for the purpose of providing understandings and insights on the critical problems and solutions. We first identify several key challenges to achieve efficient exploration, which most of the exploration methods aim at addressing. Then we provide a systematic survey of existing approaches by classifying them into two major categories: uncertainty-oriented exploration and intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration. The essence of uncertainty-oriented exploration is to leverage the quantification of the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to derive efficient exploration. By contrast, intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration methods usually incorporate different reward agnostic information for intrinsic exploration guidance. Beyond the above two main branches, we also conclude other exploration methods which adopt sophisticated techniques but are difficult to be classified into the above two categories. In addition, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of exploration methods for DRL on a set of commonly used benchmarks. Finally, we summarize the open problems of exploration in DRL and deep MARL and point out a few future directions.
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
Two types of knowledge, triples from knowledge graphs and texts from documents, have been studied for knowledge aware open-domain conversation generation, in which graph paths can narrow down vertex candidates for knowledge selection decision, and texts can provide rich information for response generation. Fusion of a knowledge graph and texts might yield mutually reinforcing advantages, but there is less study on that. To address this challenge, we propose a knowledge aware chatting machine with three components, an augmented knowledge graph with both triples and texts, knowledge selector, and knowledge aware response generator. For knowledge selection on the graph, we formulate it as a problem of multi-hop graph reasoning to effectively capture conversation flow, which is more explainable and flexible in comparison with previous work. To fully leverage long text information that differentiates our graph from others, we improve a state of the art reasoning algorithm with machine reading comprehension technology. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on two datasets in comparison with state-of-the-art models.
Two types of knowledge, factoid knowledge from graphs and non-factoid knowledge from unstructured documents, have been studied for knowledge aware open-domain conversation generation, in which edge information in graphs can help generalization of knowledge selectors, and text sentences of non-factoid knowledge can provide rich information for response generation. Fusion of knowledge triples and sentences might yield mutually reinforcing advantages for conversation generation, but there is less study on that. To address this challenge, we propose a knowledge aware chatting machine with three components, augmented knowledge graph containing both factoid and non-factoid knowledge, knowledge selector, and response generator. For knowledge selection on the graph, we formulate it as a problem of multi-hop graph reasoning that is more flexible in comparison with previous one-hop knowledge selection models. To fully leverage long text information that differentiates our graph from others, we improve a state of the art reasoning algorithm with machine reading comprehension technology. We demonstrate that supported by such unified knowledge and knowledge selection method, our system can generate more appropriate and informative responses than baselines.
Recent progress in deep learning is revolutionizing the healthcare domain including providing solutions to medication recommendations, especially recommending medication combination for patients with complex health conditions. Existing approaches either do not customize based on patient health history, or ignore existing knowledge on drug-drug interactions (DDI) that might lead to adverse outcomes. To fill this gap, we propose the Graph Augmented Memory Networks (GAMENet), which integrates the drug-drug interactions knowledge graph by a memory module implemented as a graph convolutional networks, and models longitudinal patient records as the query. It is trained end-to-end to provide safe and personalized recommendation of medication combination. We demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of GAMENet by comparing with several state-of-the-art methods on real EHR data. GAMENet outperformed all baselines in all effectiveness measures, and also achieved 3.60% DDI rate reduction from existing EHR data.
We survey research on self-driving cars published in the literature focusing on autonomous cars developed since the DARPA challenges, which are equipped with an autonomy system that can be categorized as SAE level 3 or higher. The architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars is typically organized into the perception system and the decision-making system. The perception system is generally divided into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as self-driving-car localization, static obstacles mapping, moving obstacles detection and tracking, road mapping, traffic signalization detection and recognition, among others. The decision-making system is commonly partitioned as well into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as route planning, path planning, behavior selection, motion planning, and control. In this survey, we present the typical architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars. We also review research on relevant methods for perception and decision making. Furthermore, we present a detailed description of the architecture of the autonomy system of the UFES's car, IARA. Finally, we list prominent autonomous research cars developed by technology companies and reported in the media.
Effective task management is essential to successful team collaboration. While the past decade has seen considerable innovation in systems that track and manage group tasks, these innovations have typically been outside of the principal communication channels: email, instant messenger, and group chat. Teams formulate, discuss, refine, assign, and track the progress of their collaborative tasks over electronic communication channels, yet they must leave these channels to update their task-tracking tools, creating a source of friction and inefficiency. To address this problem, we explore how bots might be used to mediate task management for individuals and teams. We deploy a prototype bot to eight different teams of information workers to help them create, assign, and keep track of tasks, all within their main communication channel. We derived seven insights for the design of future bots for coordinating work.
In this paper, we introduce DuReader, a new large-scale, open-domain Chinese machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset, aiming to tackle real-world MRC problems. In comparison to prior datasets, DuReader has the following characteristics: (a) the questions and the documents are all extracted from real application data, and the answers are human generated; (b) it provides rich annotations for question types, especially yes-no and opinion questions, which take a large proportion in real users' questions but have not been well studied before; (c) it provides multiple answers for each question. The first release of DuReader contains 200k questions, 1,000k documents, and 420k answers, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the largest Chinese MRC dataset so far. Experimental results show there exists big gap between the state-of-the-art baseline systems and human performance, which indicates DuReader is a challenging dataset that deserves future study. The dataset and the code of the baseline systems are publicly available now.