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Open-ended learning of skills in robots: insights from looking at the brain
No full textThe capacity to learn an increasing number of ?exible sensorimotor skills in an open-ended autonomous fashion is one of the most remarkable features of human intelligence. How can we design robot controllers that exhibit the same capability? We start from the idea that to accomplish this objective one needs to design a complex architecture formed by multiple components, rather than single algorithms. The decisions at the high-level are critical for the speci?cation of the single components and their interplay, and hence for the overall success of the system. Here we look at the brain architecture and functioning possibly underlying open-ended development in humans and claim that it suggests two possible principles that can be exploited to build open-ended learning robots: (a) The sensorimotor hierarchy underlying motor behaviour should have three speci?c levels of organisation rather than a continuously graded granularity; (b) Intrinsic motivations should guide the formation of speci?c goals, and regulate the skill learning processes pivoting on them, rather than guiding learning processes at ?ne spatial and temporal scales. Here we draw from the biology to support these principles and present our past and current work implementing and testing their utility for open-ended learning robots
User Perspective and Project Evaluation Strategies
No full textThe goal of this document is to answer specific requests made by the project reviewers in the first year review report. In particular the consortium reports here the results of the activities put in place in the past few months in order to: . clarify the needs and expectation of the Learn PAd users . clarify the strategies for evaluation of project achievements that will be conducted at the two PAs partners (Marche Region and Unicam). This document is the result of further investigations conducted by the consortium as a whole to address both aims. For both cases, related literature has been scrutinized in detail to derive suggestions from experts. Moreover a questionnaire has been defined and submitted to more than one hundred PA employees in order to gather further requirements from final users. The answers to the questionnaire have been successively analysed to define further interesting indications on different aspects of the Learn PAd platform. In addition the consortium analysed the results of those projects, selected on a complete list of EU projects funded under FP7 or FP6 frameworks in the area of Technology Enhanced Learning, that have been considered the most relevant since focused on aspects more closely related to Learn PAd. It is worth noting that the results reported in this document are in some case only partial, and the consortium intends to reflect further on the collected information in the next months to check if interesting correlation in the answers provided by the employees could lead to the discovery of interesting requirements/needs
Quality Assessment Strategies for Contents
No full textIn this deliverable we identify the quality assessment strategies for the natural language content associated to the Business Process Models (BP Models), within the Learn PAd project. The deliverable presents an in-depth domain analysis, including literature review, interviews with public administration (PA) stakeholders, and questionnaires submitted to PA stakeholders. Moreover, it defines a set of guidelines for editing natural language content in Learn PAd, and a quality model with associated rule-based and algorithmic strategies for computing the quality of such content. An experimental evaluation is presented concerning the potential usage of machine-learning techniques as a complementary tool for quality evaluation. The deliverable also introduces some technical details that pave the basis to successively create the content analysis component of the Learn PAd platform
Mining correlations of ATL model transformation and metamodel metrics
No full textModel transformations are considered to be the "heart" and "soul" of Model Driven Engineering, and as a such, advanced techniques and tools are needed for supporting the development, quality assurance, maintenance, and evolution of model transformations. Even though model transformation developers are gaining the availability of powerful languages and tools for developing, and testing model transformations, very few techniques are available to support the understanding of transformation characteristics. In this paper, we propose a process to analyze model transformations with the aim of identifying to what extent their characteristics depend on the corresponding input and target metamodels. The process relies on a number of transformation and metamodel metrics that are calculated and properly correlated. The paper discusses the application of the approach on a corpus consisting of more than 90 ATL transformations and 70 corresponding metamodels
An Operational Semantics of BPMN Collaboration
No full textIn the last years we are observing a growing interest in formalising the execution semantics of business process modelling languages that, despite their lack of formal characterisation, are widely adopted in industry and academia. In this paper, we focus on the OMG standard BPMN 2.0. Specifically, we provide a direct formalisation of its operational semantics in terms of Labelled Transition Systems (LTS). This approach permits both to avoid possible miss-interpretations due to the usage of the natural language in the specification of the standard, and to overcome issues due to the mapping of BPMN to other formal languages, which are equipped with their own semantics. In addition, it paves the way for the use of consolidated formal reasoning techniques based on LTS (e.g., model checking). Our operational semantics is given for a relevant subset of BPMN elements focusing on the capability to model collaborations among organisations via message exchange. Moreover, one of its distinctive aspects is the suitability to model business processes with arbitrary topology. This allows designers to freely specify their processes according to the reality without the need of defining well-structured models.We illustrate our approach through a simple, yet realistic, running example about commercial transactions
Modelling Method Design: A Model-Driven Approach
No full textThe importance of Modelling Method Engineering is equally rising with the importance of Domain Specific Languages and individual modelling approaches. In order to capture the most relevant semantic primitives that address domain specifics needs, it is necessary to involve both, the method engineers as well as domain experts. Based on practical experience in business, more than twenty EU projects and other research initiatives, this paper analyses current approaches in domain specific modelling method specification and introduces a model-driven approach to support the design of a modelling method. The realized modelling tool is introduced and evaluated by two projects in the context of e- Learning, and Business and IT-Cloud Alignment. The paper discusses the evaluation results and derived outlooks
Il monitoraggio della fauna ittica nei laghi: obbligatorio o anche utile?
No full textAbstract not availabl
Learn PAd Dissemination and Standardization
No full textThis document presents a status report of the dissemination activities, planning how Learn PAd project achievements will be disseminated towards target audiences and how Learn PAd partners intend to exploit the project outcomes to obtain an effective impact. This is a first iteration version, revising what has been done in the first half of the project duration period and refining plans for the remaining months. The dissemination strategy identifies target audiences, channels, and dissemination content. It also provides and revises Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their target values for M15 (now passed) and M30 that will be used to track and assess progresses. Moreover all involved partners present their own individual dissemination plan and how it will contribute to achieve the planned KPIs values. The initial exploitation strategy briefly presents some common principles and the expected exploitation items, which will be refined during the project. Also the initial individual exploitation plans presented by each partner will be refined and better detailed during the course of the project
Metamodeling Architectures for Business Processess in Organizations
No full textThis paper presents the working version of Learn PAd metamodel that captures the concepts that are used to model process-centric business architecture (process, motivation, organization structure, measurements, etc.) in sufficient detail to be useful for on-the-job learning in public administrations. We provides detailed concepts and relationships reusing selected parts of the modeling standards such as BMM, BPMN, and CMMN when possible. The interrelationships between the concepts in different metamodels are captured in a separate weaving model in order to enable encapsulation of separate views that could be specified using isolated standard metamodels
Extending Feature Models to Express Variability in Business Process Models
No full textIn complex organizations Business Processes tends to exist in different variants that typically share objectives and part of their structure. In recent years it has been recognized that the explicit modeling of variability can brings important benefits to organizations that can more easily reflect on their behavior and more efficiently structure their activities and processes. Particularly interesting in this respect is the situation of the Public Administration that delivers the same service using many different and replicated processes. The management of such complexity ask for methods explicitly supporting the modeling of variability aspects for Business Processes. In this paper we present a novel notation to describe variability of Business Processes and an approach to successively derive process variants. The notation takes inspiration from feature modeling approaches and has been implemented in a real tool using the ADOxx platform. The notation, and the corresponding approach, seems particularly suitable for the Public Administration context, and it has been actually experimented in a complex real scenario