Project description
Cognitive Systems and Robotics
New tools for the collaborative development of very complex machine learning systems.
The MASH project aims at creating new tools for the collaborative development of very complex machine learning systems. Machine learning is concerned with the design of software able to learn from example. Since machine learning methods remain far from their biological counterpart in terms of performance, MASH will investigate a new strategy, by developing new theoretical tools and software to help large groups of individuals design large families of feature extractors. The idea is to combine several types of features developed by independent teams in order to improve performance. Because they exploit different sources of information, different modules mutually compensate their weaknesses.
This project aims at developing new machine learning methods relying on very large number of hand-designed heuristics, together with statistical tools to facilitate the design of these heuristics in an open and collaborative framework.We define an heuristic to be any algorithm processing raw inputs to produce values relevant to the problem at hand. This purposely very general definition encompasses techniques spanning from simple signal processing to symbolic modeling or locally trained predictors. Since we assume high performance can only be achieved by combining hundreds of such heuristics, we propose to develop them collaboratively, in a way similar to the successful development process of open-source software or collaborative encyclopedia.We will assess the performance of that strategy on the control of an avatar in a realistic 3D simulator and on the control of a real robotic arm, and we aim at creating a generic software platform usable on alternative applications.Hence the key aspects of this proposal are to:- develop novel statistical techniques for prediction and goal-planning with a very large heterogeneous set of features,- develop statistical tools such as similarity measures in the space of features to help the design of very large sets of heuristics by many contributors,- assess the efficiency of this approach on a series of complex tasks in a realistic simulated 3D environment and with a real robot arm.The five partners of the consortium are from the fields of applied and theoretical statistical learning, reinforcement learning, artificial vision and robotics.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsignal processing
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learningreinforcement learning
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligenceheuristic programming
Call for proposal
FP7-ICT-2009-4
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator
1920 Martigny
Switzerland