{"id":1561,"date":"2016-09-11T12:26:43","date_gmt":"2016-09-11T12:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=1561"},"modified":"2016-09-11T12:26:43","modified_gmt":"2016-09-11T12:26:43","slug":"hcc-2016-human-centred-computing-summer-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=1561","title":{"rendered":"HCC 2016: Human Centred Computing Summer School"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I was invited to present at the first Human Centred Cognition<\/a>\r\nsummer school, near Bremen in Germany. Summer schools are a key part of the\r\npostgraduate training experience, and involve gathering together experts to\r\ndeliver graduate level training (lectures, tutorials and workshops) on a\r\nparticular theme. I’ve been to summer schools before as a participant, but\r\nnever as faculty. We’re at a crossroads in AI at the moment: there’s been a\r\nconflict between “good old fashioned AI” (based upon logic and the symbol\r\nmanipulation paradigm) and non-symbolic or sub-symbolic AI (neural networks,\r\nprobabilistic models, emergent systems) for as long as I have known, but right\r\nnow with deep machine learning in the ascendant it’s come to a head again. The\r\nsummer school provided us participants with a great opportunity to think about\r\nthis and to talk about it with real experts.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Typically, a summer school is held somewhere out of the way, to encourage\r\nparticipants to talk to each other and to network. This was no different, so we\r\ngathered in a small hotel in a small village about 20 miles south of Bremen.\r\nThe theme of this one was human centred computing – cognitive computing, AI,\r\nvision, and machine learning. The students were properly international (the\r\nfurthest travelled students were from Australia, followed by Brazil) and were\r\nmostly following PhD or Masters programs; more than half were computing\r\nstudents of one kind or another, but a few psychologists, design students and\r\narchitects came along too.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

The view from my room<\/small><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The bit I did was a workshop on OpenCV, and I decided to make it a hands-on\r\nworkshop where students would get to code their own simple vision system. With\r\nthe benefit of hindsight this was a bit ambitious, particularly as a BYOD\r\n(Bring Your Own Device) workshop. OpenCV is available for all main platforms,\r\nbut it’s a pain to install, particularly on macs. I spent a lot of time on the\r\ncontent (you can find that here: http:\/\/github.com\/handee\/opencv-gettingstarted<\/a>)\r\nand not so much time on thinking about infrastructure or thinking about\r\ninstallation. I think about half of the group got to the end of the tutorial,\r\nand another 5 or 10 managed to get someway along, but we lost a few to\r\ninstallation problems, and I suspect these were some of the less technical\r\nstudents. I used jupyter notebooks to create the course, which allow you to\r\nintersperse code with text about the code, and I think this may have created an\r\nextra layer of difficulty in installation, rather than a simplification of\r\npracticalities. If I were to do it again I’d either try and have a virtual\r\nmachine that students could use or I’d run it in a room where I knew the\r\nsoftware. I certainly won’t be running it again in a situation where we’re\r\nreliant on hotel wifi…<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

The class trying to download and install OpenCV<\/small><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The school timetable involved a set of long talks – all an hour or more –\r\nmixed between keynote and lecture. The speakers were all experts in their\r\nfield, and taken together the talks truly provided a masterclass in artificial\r\nintelligence, machine learning, the philosophical underpinnings of logic and\r\nrobotics, intelligent robotics, vision, perception and attention. I really\r\nenjoyed sitting in the talks – some of the profs just came for their own\r\nsessions, but I chose to attend pretty much the whole school (I skipped the\r\nsession immediately before mine, for a read through of my notes, and I missed a\r\ntutorial as I’d been sat down for too long and needed a little exercise).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

It’s hard to pick a highlight as there were so many good talks. Daniel Levin\r\nfrom Vanderbilt (in Tennessee) gave an overview of research in attention and change\r\nblindness, showing how psychologists are homing in on the nature of selective\r\nattention and attentional blindness. I’ve shown Levin’s videos in my lectures\r\nbefore so it was a real treat to get to see him in person and have a chat.\r\nStella Yu from Berkeley gave the mainstream computer vision perspective, from\r\nspectral clustering to deep machine learning. Ulrich Furbach from Koblenz\r\npresented a more traditional logical approach to AI, touching on computability\r\nand key topics like commonsense reasoning, and how to automate background\r\nknowledge. <\/p>\r\n\r\n

One of my favourite presenters was David Vernon from Skövde. He\r\nprovided a philosophical overview of cognitive systems and cognitive\r\narchitectures: if we’re going to build AI we have a whole bunch of bits which\r\nhave to fit together; we can either take our inspiration from human\r\nintelligence or we can make it up completely, but either way we need to think\r\nat the systems level. His talk gave us a clear overview of the space of\r\narchitectures, and how they relate to each other. He was also very funny, and\r\nnot afraid to make bold statements about where we are with respect to solving\r\nthe problem of AI: “We’re not at relativistic physics. We’re not even\r\nNewtonian. We’re in the dark ages here<\/i>“. <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Prof Vernon giving us an overview of the conceptual space of cognitive architectures<\/small><\/p>\r\n

When he stood up I thought to myself “he looks familiar<\/i>” and it turns out I actually bought a copy of his book<\/a> a couple of weeks ago. Guess I’d better read it now.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Kristian Kersting of TU Dortumund, and Michael Beetz of Bremen both\r\npresented work that bridges the gap between symbolic and subsymbolic reasoning;\r\nKristian talked about logics and learning, through Markov Logic Networks and\r\nthe like. Michael described a project in which they’d worked on getting a robot\r\nto understand recipes from wikihow, which involved learning concepts like\r\n“next to<\/i>” and “behind<\/i>“. Both these talks gave us examples of\r\nreal-world AI that can solve the kinds of problems that traditional AI has had\r\ndifficulty with; systems that bridge the gap between the symbolic and the\r\nsubsymbolic. I particularly liked Prof. Beetz’s idea of bootstrapping robot\r\nlearning using VR: by coding up a model of the workspace that the robot is\r\ngoing to be in, it’s possible to get people to act out the robot’s motions in a\r\nvirtual world enabling the robot to learn from examples without real-world\r\ntraining. <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Prof Kersting reminding us how we solve problems in AI<\/small><\/p>\r\n

Each night the students gave a poster display showing their own work, apart from the one night we went into the big city for a conference dinner. Unfortunately the VR demo had real issues with the hotel wifi.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The venue for our conference dinner, a converted windmill in the centre of old Bremen<\/small><\/p>\r\n

In all a very good week, which has really got me thinking. Big thanks to Mehul Bhatt of Bremen for inviting me out there. I’d certainly like to contribute to more events like this, if it’s possible; it was a real luxury to spend a full week with such bright students and such inspiring faculty. I alternated between going “Wow, this is so interesting, Isn’t it great that we’re making so much progress!<\/i>” and “Oh no there is so much<\/b> left to do!<\/i>“.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Hotel Bootshaus from the river<\/small><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I was invited to present at the first Human Centred Cognition summer school, near Bremen in Germany. Summer schools are a key part of the postgraduate training experience, and involve gathering together experts to deliver graduate level training (lectures, tutorials and workshops) on a particular theme. I’ve been to summer schools before as a participant, but never as faculty. We’re at a crossroads in AI at the moment: there’s been a conflict between “good old fashioned AI” (based upon logic and the symbol manipulation paradigm) and non-symbolic or sub-symbolic AI (neural networks, probabilistic models, emergent systems) for as long as I have known,Read More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,89,93],"tags":[98,75,97,74],"class_list":["entry","author-handee","post-1561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-geekiness","category-research","category-vision","tag-bremen","tag-research","tag-summer-school","tag-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1561"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1564,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions\/1564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}