Machines of Loving Grace
Spring 2008	MW 2:00-3:15	Room: CSB 632
Instructor: Henry Kautz	Office: CSB 709	Office Hours: Thursdays 10:00am 12:00pm and by appointment

Description

The combination of widely deployed sensor technology (cameras, RFID, GPS, etc.) and reasoning methods from artificial intelligence enable the creation of systems that monitor many aspects of human behavior. Although monitoring often invokes Orwellian fears, this course will explore positive current and potential applications of such technology to health care, aging in place, and support for persons with disabilities. We will examine the technological underpinnings of automated behavior recognition, social trends that impact and are impacted by the technology, and how the concept of AI-based care giving has appeared in speculative literature. Assignments will include significant writing, and this course It will fulfill one upper-level writing experience in Computer Science. 190 is open to students in all majors with no prerequisites. Computer science majors taking this course as 290 will be required to complete a significant programming project, with the required prerequisite of 172 (Data Structures) and the recommended perquisite of 242 (Artificial Intelligence).

Class List

Grading & Assignments

All students will complete three short essays, each about 4 pages long. Students enrolled in 190B will also complete a longer writing project at least 15 pages long. Students enrolled in 290B will also complete three programming assignments. Everyone will be required to make short presentations to the rest of class approximately every other week. In addition, everyone will present a formal 20 minute lecture describing their final writing project or one of programming assignments. Grades for 190B will be calculated 1/3 for the short essays, 1/3 for the presentations, and 1/3 for the final writing project. Grades for 290B will be calculated 1/4 for the essays, 1/4 for the presentations, and 1/2 for the programming assignments. All assignments must be turned in on time. Extensions will be granted only if the student applies to instructor with an acceptable reason at least two days before the assignment is due.

Calendar

• Wed 16 January
  • Slides: Introduction to the course
  • First day survey
  • Reading assignment, due Wed 23 Jan: The Use of an Intelligent Prompting System for People with Dementia, by A. Mihailidis et al. Come to classed prepared with at least three questions or comments about the work.
  • Literary essay, due Wed 30 Jan.
  • The poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan
• Wed 23 January
  • Slides: COACH and POMDPs
  • Reading assignment, due Mon 28 Jan: Inferring ADLs from Interactions with Objects.
  • Reading assignment, also due Mon 28 Jan: Wikipedia articles on Hidden Markov Models and the Viterbi Algorithm. For more in-depth discussion, see A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and. Selected Applications in Speech Recognition by L. R. Rabiner.
• Mon 28 January
  • In class exercise: model a navagation-aid robot as a POMDP
  • Literary essay due Wednesday
• Wed 30 January
  • Slides on SHARP, human activity recognition using RFID tagged objects
  • Reading for Monday: Work from PlaceLab at MIT and the Aware Home at Georgia Tech
• Mon 4 February
  • Slides on Hidden Markov Models
  • Slides on smoothing models to deal with novel objects
• Wed 6 February
  • Slides on PlaceLab
  • Slides on the Aware Home
  • Reading for Monday: Papers by M. Pollack: Autominder: A Planning, Monitoring, and Reminding Assistive Agent and Planning Technology for Intelligent Cognitive Orthotics
  • Programming assignment (290B only): Interpreting RFID data using an HMM. Due in class February 27.
• Mon 11 February
  • Slides on Autominder
  • Reading for Wednesday: Papers by R. Levinson: Human Frontal Lobes and AI Planning Systems and The Planning and Execution Assistant and Trainer (PEAT)
  • Writing assignment (190B only): Prepare a 3 to 4 page summary of memory aids that are now commerically available. Your presentation should be concise and well organized, and summerize the benefits and disadvantages of the various systems you find. (Note that not all the aids need be electronic.) Due in class February 27.
• Wed 13 February - Class cancelled
• Mon 18 February
  • Slides on PEAT, Memex, and SenseCam
  • Additional papers for today:
    • As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, 1945 (!)
    • Jim Gemmell, Gordon Bell and Roger Lueder, MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything
    • Sellen, A., Fogg, A., Hodges, S. and Wood, K. Do life-logging technologies support memory for the past? An experimental study using SenseCam. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’07, Irvine, CA, (2007), 81-90.
• Wed 20 Feburary
  • No lecture; instead, help session on how to complete the programming assignment
• Mon 25 February
  • Lecture and demonstration of multi-camera tracking and activity recognition by Sangho Park.
• Wed 27 February
  • Paper for today: Opportunity Knocks: a System to Provide Cognitive Assistance with Transportation Services. Donald J. Patterson, Lin Liao, Krzysztof Gajos, Michael Collier, Nik Livic, Katherine Olson, Shiaokai Wang, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz. Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Nottingham, England, 2004.
• Mon 3 March
  • Assignment: Interview Essay, due 19 March
• Wed 5 March
  • Topic: Privacy
  • Paper: Pervasive Computing, April-June 2002 (Vol. 1, No. 2) pp. 8-12, Pervasive Health Care Applications Face Tough Security Challenges, Vince Stanford
  • Slides on Security for Pervasive Health Monitoring Sensor Applications
  • Slides on Video Obfuscation . Neustaedter, C., Greenberg, S., and Boyle, M., (2006) Blur Filtration Fails to Preserve Privacy for Home-Based Video Conferencing, In ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interactions (To CHI).
  • Slides on Video Inpainting . Heung, S.-C., J. Zhao and M. V. Venkatesh. 2006. Efficient Object-based Video Inpainting. Submitted to IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP 2006, October 8-11, Atlanta, GA.
• Mon 17 March
  • Topic: Autism
  • Slides: Autism overview, work by Rosalind Picard, work by Justine Cassell
  • Paper: RANA el KALIOUBY, ROSALIND PICARD, SIMON BARON-COHEN (2006) Affective Computing and Autism, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1093 (1) , 228–248
    • For more pointers to the work of Prof. Picard and her students at M.I.T.. For more information about her work, see http://affect.media.mit.edu/.
  • Paper: Tartaro, A. and Cassell, J. (in press). Using Virtual Peer Technology as an Intervention for Children with Autism. In J. Lazar (Ed.), Towards Universal Usability: Designing Computer Interfaces for Diverse User Populations. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons.
    • For more work by Justine Cassells and her students at Northwestern, see http://articulab.northwestern.edu/.
• Wed 19 March
  • Discussion of essays.
• Mon 24 March
  • Topic: autism, continued
  • Paper: Julie A. Kientz, Gillian R. Hayes, Tracy L. Westeyn, Thad Starner, Gregory D. Abowd, "Pervasive Computing and Autism: Assisting Caregivers of Children with Special Needs," IEEE Pervasive Computing ,vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 28-35, January-March, 2007.
  • Slides on the work by Abowd et al.
  • The ActivityDesigner assignment.
    • Overvew of ActivityDesigner and the project
      • Video clip: http://dub.washington.edu/projects/activitydesigner/media/
      • Download and install the system: http://dub.washington.edu/projects/activitydesigner/download/
      • Read the paper: http://dub.washington.edu/pubs/chi2008/activitydesigner-chi08.pdf.
      • Deadlines: 1 paragraph: March 31; demo initial prototype: April 7; final prototype & report: April 14
• Wed 26 March
  • Topic: Ethics of Affective Computing
  • Paper (handout): Introduction from Computer Power and Human Reason, by Joseph Weizenbaum.
  • Kazuyoshi Wada, Takanori Shibata: Living With Seal Robots - Its Sociopsychological and Physiological Influences on the Elderly at a Care House. IEEE Transactions on Robotics 23(5): 972-980 (2007).
  • Computerized cognitive-behaviorial therapy: The Depression Program
• Mon 31 March
  • Discussion of ideas for ActivityDesigner
  • Topic: Games for Health
  • Paper: Albert Bandura, Health Promotion by Social Cognitive Means, Health Education & Behavior, Vol. 31, No. 2, 143-164, 2004.
• Wed 2 April
  • Introduction to Neural Networks
  • Reading: Artificial Neural Networks: A Tutorial. Anil K. Jain and Jianchang Mao. IEEE Spectrum, March 1996.
  • Character recognition demo.
• Mon 7 April
  • Review and discussion of ActivityDesigner prototypes
  • Lecture: Robotic Exoskeletons
  • The Rise of the Body Bots, By Erico Guizzo and Harry Goldstein, IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 2005
• Wed 9 April
  • Class cancelled.
• Mon 14 April
  • Demonstration of ActivityDesigner prototypes
  • Final assignment, due April 30th:
    • For 290B: Neural networks for face and expression recognition
    • For 190B (and for 290B taking course for writing credit): Book review
• Wed 16 April: CLASS CANCELLED
• Mon 21 April
  • Lecture: Neurorobotics video clips: Aliens_Loader_5000.mpg monkey_arm.arvi monkey_walks.avi
  • Dellon, B.T.; Matsuoka, Y. “Robotic Systems for Rehabilitation, Exoskeleton, and Prosthetics: Now and for the Future,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Magazine, 14(1), pp.30 – 34, 2007.
  • Brain Machine Interfaces: Past, Present and Future: Lebedev MA and Nicolelis MAL. Trends in Neurosciences 29: 536-546, 2006.
• Wed 23 April
  • Brain control and Aumentation video clips: bull.avi rat.avi
    • Nature 417, 37-38 (2 May 2002) Behavioural neuroscience: Rat navigation guided by remote control. Sanjiv K. Talwar1, Shaohua Xu1, Emerson S. Hawley1, Shennan A. Weiss1, Karen A. Moxon2 & John K. Chapin
    • Hippocampal-cortical neural prostheses to restore lost cognitive function. IEEE EMBS Special Issue: Toward Biomimetic Microelectronics as Neural Prostheses, 2005. By Theodore Berger et al. (University Southern California)
• Mon 28 April
  • Google, Microsoft, and the Future of Medical Informatics
• Wed 30 April
  • Final assignments due
  • Presentations of final assignments