John Laird - US grants

Dr. Laird will collaborate on this joint project with Dr. Bruce Carney at the University of North Carolina to begin four new observational programs which are dedicated to studies of the disk and outer halo of our Galaxy and to the Large Magellanic Cloud. (1) Several thousand dwarf stars will be identified in selected directions in the Galactic plane to determine the local density ratio of thin disk and thick disk populations of stars. (2) The outer disk of our Galaxy will be studied for information relevant to the formation timescale of the disk and for chemical and kinematic information about the outer disk. (3) The metallicities of red giant stars in globular clusters in the outer halo of our Galaxy and of dwarf spheroidal galaxies will be determined. (4) Metallicities and radial velocities of about 1000 giant stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud will be determined. This will reveal the history of the chemistry and kinematics of the older stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. These principal investigators will also compute synthetic spectra for cooler stars and lower gravity stars in order to derive the mean matallicities from high resolution spectra obtained from observations.

The goal of this project is to incorporate state-of-the-art observing into all levels of the astronomy curriculum, from introductory courses to advanced senior research projects. A strong foundation is already in place--an extensive curriculum, a modern planetarium, dedicated teachers, and a relatively large (0.5-meter), new telescope--and this project builds on it. observing opportunities for students are being greatly expanded through the use of a CCD camera for the 0.5m telescope. In introductory classes the project enables the capture of student interest with images and observing projects possible only with the sensitivity and immediate output of the CCD. The best projects and labs are those that invite students to make their own observations, and a CCD camera makes that possible. Basic projects are made available to all students, and a new introductory lab section provides more extensive hands-on experience for the best students.For more advanced students a new lab course on modern CCD detectors and observing techniques is being created. Hands-on experience is a necessary and vital part of this course. For the most advanced and serious students among our physics majors and astronomy minors, independent study offers more extended access to the telescope, and the opportunity to gain additional observing experience and to pursue serious research.

This award is for the purchase of equipment for the high speed acquisition of images and for manipulator end-effector hardware. The image equipment is needed for real-time performance and the end-effector hardware is needed for experimentation with manipulation tasks. The equipment is also used in integrating vision and manipulation tasks incorporating perception, cognition, and action. Applied robotics involves the integration of many areas including vision research, control research, sensor integration, and planning algorithms. This proposal requests funds for the purchase of equipment to support vision research and manipulator research. The vision equipment will allow real time processing of visual data while the manipulators (grippers, etc.) will allow the testing of manipulator algorithms with the robot arm connected to actual manipulators.

Ages, Kinematics, and Chemistry of Stellar Populations. A program begun in 1991 will be carried to completion in the solar neighborhood wherein Dr. Laird, together with Dr. Bruce Carney at the University of North Carolina, will identify several thousand G dwarf stars, then determine accurate radial velocities and metallicities to test the discrete versus continuum models of the thick disk and thin disk populations. The local sample will be complemented by an on-going program aimed at the outer Galactic disk, now detected in the direction of the southern Galactic warp. The age of the thin disk relative to the thick disk and halo will be derived using field binary stars. The study of the nearest neighboring extragalactic disk population, that of the Large Magellanic Cloud, will be studied from high precision radial velocities and metallicities of giant stars.

AST 9988247
Laird

Dr. Bruce Carney at the University of North Carolina and Dr. John Laird at Bowling Green State University are pursuing a series of observational projects which are meant to reveal how the thin disk, the thick disk, and the halo star populations of our Galaxy were assembled. For the halo population, they will study s-process and r-process abundances in normal and extreme velocity field stars that were identified in a survey of high proper motion stars they recently completed. For the thick disk, they will measure stellar radial velocities and metallicities to obtain a clearer view of the relation between three-dimensional motions and Galactic orbits with metallicity. For the thin disk, they will obtain spectra of metal-poor and metal-rich stars for direct comparison with the thick disk stars. From the data sets, these investigators will obtain a homogeneously studied sample from which to achieve a much clearer view of the chemical evolution of these stellar populations. This award is made through the Galactic Astronomy Program in the Division of Astronomical Sciences.
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This is a proof of concept project in which software modules that support the development of a variety of computer game genres are developed. These software modules can be used to teach undergraduates computer game design and development. The software can also be used as a shell for explorations of many computer science disciplines for undergraduates where students can replace one of the modules with their own, thereby allowing them to concentrate on specific CS disciplines ranging from basic data structures and algorithms, to database management, issues in concurrent programming, design of network protocols, distributed systems and security, graphics programming, user interface design, and design of artificial intelligence algorithms; but still having the ability to create a computer game. The computer gaming context provides a very strong motivational construct to which most computer science students have a natural affinity. Placing these disciplines within the construct of a computer game helps students concretize and apply the concepts studied. The software is developed by University of Michigan undergraduate and graduate students. The results and software of this project are disseminated to the broader computer games and computer science community via appropriate conferences and the Internet. At the University of Michigan, the PI has been offering a Computer Games course since 1997 and the coPI has been teaching a Computer Networks course. Both PIs have developed pedagogical software packages in their respective fields that have been used by faculties in other universities nationwide.

AST 0307340
PI: John Laird
INSTITUTION: Bowling Green State University


Dr. John Laird, in collaboration with Bruce Carney of UNC, Chapel Hill, will carry out a suite of projects that are aimed at developing a better understanding of the stellar populations in our galaxy. They will pursue research activities in four broad areas: 1) following up on their recent observations that suggest that the surprisingly high fraction of field red horizontal branch and red giant branch stars that rotate may be linked to planet accretion, 2) the exploration of the mass-luminosity relationship for binary stars to constrain the stellar helium abundance, 3) a study of metal-poor subgiant stars to refine metallicities and determine ages, and 4) a study of local G dwarfs to investigate the chemical and dynamical evolution of the thin and thick disk populations in the solar neighborhood, and their full metallicity distribution functions, from which follow-up studies will provide details on the element-to-iron ratios as a function of [Fe/H].

Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the research. The research activities and results will be integrated into K-16 science education through a masters program for in-service physical science teachers that emphasizes modeling research-based teaching strategies, and explicitly includes an astronomy component and a collaboration in northwest Ohio of 7-12 educators, colleges, and community and business partners to enhance recruiting, preparation, and support of 7-12 math and science teachers.
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This project aims to extend the Soar architecture to include episodic and reinforcement learning. Although Soar is a mature and widely known cognitive architecture, the extensions will enhance Soar by providing it an episodic memory of prior events that can improve future decision making and the ability to improve its behavior in response to rewards. This research will explore possible synergies between these learning mechanisms including using reinforcement learning for learning memory encoding and recall strategies, using internal episode-based models to boost reinforcement learning and using a model of emotions for affecting learning rates. Given that episodic memory is an important aspect of human cognition, this project will also strengthen Soar as a cognitive model. Besides building on on-going work on Soar, this project will build on results from closely allied fields such as Case-Based Reasoning.

The University of Michigan CSE Scholars Program recognizes and supports high achieving and high potential students in computer science and computer engineering by creating a community of scholars along the entire undergraduate curriculum. The CSE Scholars Program uses a multi-faceted approach to provide a comprehensive educational environment, both curricular and co-curricular, for students, including underrepresented students, in computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE). It permits the integration of current student support and academic initiatives at Michigan with new and innovative approaches to provide a comprehensive, exciting and supportive experience for students in CS and CE.

High potential high school and first year undergraduate students, with special attention to underrepresented students, are identified and recruited to CS/CE fields and the CSE Scholars Program at Michigan. A combination of personalized letters, career information and workshops, mentoring, supplemental instruction, tutoring, hands-on computer workshops, and speakers clearly illustrate to students the potential and excitement of a CS/CE concentration and subsequent career. Declared CS/CE majors who have demonstrated high achievement and potential are invited to be members of the CSE Scholars Program. As such, they are formally recognized, eligible to apply for scholarships, attend professional development workshops, and assume leadership roles within the program.

The CSE Scholars Program creates an intellectually exciting, mutually supportive community between prospective CS/CE students, current CS/CE students, faculty and staff within the College of Engineering and the College of LSA, and information technology partners. It provides much needed financial aid, allowing students to concentrate solely on the academic experience. It brings together the skills, experiences and resources of several university offices and departments as well as expertise from the corporate IT world. It provides a well-coordinated infrastructure of recruitment and retention while fostering success and achievement along the entire undergraduate educational pipeline in CS and CE disciplines. In addition, the evaluation and assessment of the CSE Scholars model provides insight and data on combined student support and academic systems that can be applied to other STEM disciplines both at the University of Michigan as well as other universities nationally. The CSE Scholars infrastructure can be adapted to support students in other disciplines, particularly in fields where there are large numbers of underrepresented students. This infrastructure will last far beyond the duration of the NSA CSEMS support. This much broader impact of the CSE Scholars Program not only benefit students at the University of Michigan, but can also impact the disciplines of Computer Science and Computer Engineering itself.

Proposal 0712792
"RI: Doctoral Consortium for International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, 2007"
PI: John E. Laird
University of Michigan



ABSTRACT


This award partially subsidizes the participation of approximately 10 doctoral student's in a one-day consortium that will precede the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM) to be held July 27-29, 2007 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ICCM is the premier conference for research on computational models and computation-based theories of human behavior. The Doctoral Consortium will bring together top graduate students in cognitive modeling, enable them to present their ongoing research, and to receive feedback and mentoring from senior leaders in the field. By contributing to the doctoral research and education of the participants and introducing them to the network of other scientists in the field of cognitive modeling, this award has significant Intellectual Merit and Broad Impact.

This project is developing computational agents that operate for extended periods of time in rich and dynamic environments, and achieve mastery of many aspects of their environments without task-specific programming. To accomplish these goals, research is exploring a space of cognitive architectures that incorporate four fundamental features of real neural circuitry: (1) reinforcing behaviors that lead to intrinsic rewards, (2) executing and learning over mental, as well as, motor actions, (3) extracting regularities in mental representations, whether derived from perception or cognitive operations, and (4) continuously encoding and retrieving episodic memories of past events. A software framework called Storm facilitates this exploration by enabling the integration of independent functional subsystems, allowing researchers to easily plug in and remove different subsystems in order to assess their impact on the overall behavior of the system.


Cognitive architectures are being tested by exposing them to a wide variety of novel environments with unpredictable (and non-repeatable) extrinsic rewards, but in which many actions could lead to intrinsic rewards (e.g., surprise). To assess flexibility, an automated environment generator exposes agents to environments that are unknown in advance to the artificial agent or human researcher. To assess robustness, cognitive systems are being exposed to many variants of the same environment to ensure that the systems can learn from past experience and generalize when appropriate. And to assess autonomy, systems' must operate effectively for extended periods of time in a dynamic environment.

In the longer term, flexible and robust cognitive architectures being devloped under this research will have application as the 'brains' of robotic and software systems in emergency, miltary, and a wide variety of other societal and service realms.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This study investigates a new line of research into the "taskability" of cognitive agents. Taskability is the ability of an agent to accept high level, task-oriented instructions from a human and translate those goal-oriented directives into a suitably decomposed plan of sensing, reasoning, or action. Little to no research has been conducted on this subject to date. This research defines taskability in a manner sufficiently formal to allow for scientific research, establishes some of the initial conditions needed to evaluate taskable agents, and advances theories and prototype agents that meet those requirements. Specifically, the four research activities being undertaken in this study include: 1. A review, analysis, and synthesis of prior work from multiple disciplines that that can lay groundwork for focused cognitive systems research in this area; 2) An analysis of the different types of tasks and their structure, as well as the associated types of knowledge that must be learned by taskable agents; 3) Research on how people use instruction with taskable agents for such activities, performing user studies to determine the required task knowledge and agent capabilities; and 4) An extension of current cognitive agent capabilities to support the behaviors observed in the aforementioned studies, resulting in a software system that can be evaluated and co-developed with theory.

The current state of the art in research for cognitive systems and agents in general allows human handlers to issue directions to agents either in terms of lower level action primitives that correspond to the agent's particular design, or constrained by a higher-order action language (or even visual repertoire) that is engineered to suffice as a shorthand for some sequence of the same kinds of agent-specific behaviors. Taskability requires that an agent be able to interpret a richer, less constrained set of instructions from a user and, despite a lack of precompiled task decomposition instructions, dynamically formulate an accurate representation of the task to be performed, and even learn new tasks via this sort of interaction. Taskable agents would fundamentally change the way humans interact with intelligent agents and robotic systems in a broad range of disciplines and environments, leading to richer interactions with more capable cars, phones, and almost any device containing a computer, all of which might respond to human interaction without resort to preprogrammed interaction modes. This in turn promises transformational advances in a range of application domains such as health care, industry, government, and home automation.

This workshop concerns the "taskability" of cognitive agents, meaning the ability of an intelligent and adaptable system to accept high level, task-oriented instructions from a human and translate those goal-oriented directives into a suitably decomposed plan of sensing, reasoning, or action. The current state of the art in research for cognitive systems and agents in general allows human handlers to issue directions to agents either in terms of lower level action primitives that correspond to the agent's particular design, or constrained by a higher-order action language that is engineered to suffice as a shorthand for some sequence of the same kinds of agent-specific behaviors.

This workshop is addressing four key considerations for this emergent topic: 1) defining this new research area with sufficient clarity that research agendas can proceed productively; 2) identifying the science and technology issues that most be addressed to create systems that meet that definition of taskability; 3) decomposing that further into research and development needs that are the precursors to such research; and 4) exploring the formation of a research community on taskability. Taskability holds the potential to transform the way humans interact with intelligent systems. The ability to instruct a wide variety of agents to perform tasks that are not preprogrammed will have a profound effect on the broader AI enterprise, and eventually on the technologies that will enrich the daily lives of people.