Sam's Technical Blog

Awesome Google Python Workshop and Windows Issues

2012-02-10T23:15:00.001-08:00

The Google Python Workshop is an awesome way to start learning Python, however some of the advanced exercises come a bit unstuck on windows, since certain standard *nix things like wildcards on the command line don't quite work as expected.

For example the way to use wildcards in the babynames exercise at the windows cmd prompt is in fact this:

FOR %G IN ("baby*.html") DO "python" babynames.py --summaryfile "%G"

FOR %G IN ("*.summary") DO "findstr" Trinity "%G"

See http://ss64.com/nt/for2.html for more details on that syntax

There are also a couple of issues in the copyspecial exercise the windows zip program linked to on the site no longer being available (I got it wot work with 7zip)

http://www.7-zip.org/

[note that you'll need to ensure 7z is on the path once you've downloaded it]

and then there is an issue that the commands.getstatusoutput call doesn't work on windows:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1193583/what-is-the-multiplatform-alternative-to-subprocess-getstatusoutput-older-comma

subprocess.Popen appears to be required on Python 2.7.2 on Windows, so the final code for this was:

def zip_to(path, zip):
#zip the file in path into "zip" the filename
  command = '7z a ' + zip + ' ' + ' '.join(path)
  print "Command I'm going to do:" + command
  pipe = subprocess.Popen(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True, universal_newlines=True)
  output = pipe.stdout.readlines()
  sts = pipe.wait()
  print sts
  print output

There is also a discussion forum to address issues like these. At least the commands.getstatusoutput issue is mentioned there. However, it would be great if the original documentation could be updated to save a few more unfortunate windows users burning time on this when they want to be learning Python :-)

And for those searching by errors here are the three relevant to the above solutions:

babynames: IOError: [Errno 22] invalid mode ('rU') or filename: 'baby*.html'

copyspecial: '{' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

copyspecial: 'zip' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file

Cryptographically signed streaming video recognition

2011-12-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

I just had this idea about doing away with passwords. I was talking to a Toshiba Fellow Alumni who was describing how retinal scans etc. don't work well for remote security, so he was suggesting an n of m of personal possessions with RFID tags. However I was just thinking of combining face recognition of a live video stream, while having each frame of the video signed cryptographically with the current date using a private key belonging to the consumer ... would that give some degree of remote security ...?

Measuring Emotional Involvement in Games

2011-12-02T23:54:00.000-08:00

Just reading the interview with Doug Church of Ultima UnderWorld, System Shock, Thief fame in Richard Rouse's Game Design book and grooving on what they were saying about the high emotional intensity of more scripted games (CoD, MoH), versus the greater memorability, but higher risk of more open system games (GTA) and again it takes me back to playing Red Dead Redemption and feeling that there was some great stories and subplots in there, but that sometimes too many of them were thrown at me at once.

I was just thinking again about the mission I got to go save some missing boy, and how when I wandered off in the direction I thought I was supposed to go how I bumped into some prospector mission thing and then a stop-a-lynching mission which got me killed, with both the latter sub-plots seeming unrelated, and I started thinking how maybe I had gone off in the wrong direction and so I was implicitly telling the system I wasn't interested in the lost boy sub-plot (although I think I had accepted the mission), and wouldn't it be great if there was a better proxy for games to tell how emotionally involved a player was in different sub-plots. Of course we're still a ways off from measuring emotions with electrodes, but I wonder if some proxy or correlate could be extracted from game data - although of course that is at least partly what balancing a game is all about.

Of course the reality of real life is that all sorts of "sub-plots" keep popping up and getting in the way, but reality can often conflict with having a good narrative. In the first instance a simple heuristic for keeping track of the number of sub-plots being thrown at a player might be good, however surely RockStar will come up with this and more and throw it into their latest and greatest, and I am unlikely to be hired as narrative consultant any time soon, and I don't have the resources to make those sorts of games, but I wonder if text based narrative games could be made to take advantage of this idea, which brings me back to Zach Tomaszewski and Marlinspike, which I think I really must implement a game in ...

Confusing Mathematics Definitions

2011-11-29T06:57:00.000-08:00

What is it with mathematical defintions? Are they deliberately trying to be obtuse? Consider Rosen's definition of a primitive root:

A "primitive root" modulo a prime p is an integer r in Zp such that every nonzero element of Zp is a power of r.

Wikipedia was no clearer

a primitive root modulo n is any number g with the property that any number coprime to n is congruent to a power of g modulo n. In other words, g is a generator of the multiplicative group of integers modulo n. That is, for every integer a coprime to n, there is an integer k such that g^k ≡ a (mod n). Such k is called the index or discrete logarithm of a to the base g modulo n.

When after I had unpacked these definitions and looked at several examples my idea of a clear definition would be:

Given a prime p, a “primitive root modulo p” is an integer r such that all of the integers from 1 to p-1 appear in the set Zp. The set Zp consists of powers of r modulo p.

Of course, none of these definitions really make much sense without an example:

Example: Since all the integers from 1 to 10 appear in Z11 when r=2, 2 is a primitive root of 11. Powers of 2 modulo 11: 2^1 = 2, 2^2 = 4, 2^3 = 8, 2^4 = 5, 2^5 = 10, 2^6 = 9, 2^7 = 7, 2^8 = 3, 2^10 = 1.

Taxonomy of Game Mechanisms

2011-11-25T02:49:00.000-08:00

I've been intrigued by a parallel I've noticed between games created by my students and some concepts from the Stanford AI class, e.g. partial observability

In general in some basic 2d games partial observability of the environment makes the game a lot more fun and I was just playing a sidescroller by one student that imported a somewhat similar mechanism to the old missile command arcade game, and I was wondering if one could create a game mechanism taxonomy like they have for AI agents/environments and use it to predict which sorts of game mechanism combination would be fun and which would not ...

http://www.ferzkopp.net/joomla/science-mainmenu-15/9-ferzkopps-philosophy-work/77-a-heuristic-taxonomy-of-computer-games

http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Video_Game_Taxonomy

but I'm thinking of something finer grained that might link up to the abilities and types of agents playing the games ...

It also makes me think about why watching certain types of sports are compelling. Watching people dodge each other seems to set off interest centers in our brain related to our evolutionary development; being able to dodge away from a sabre-tooth tiger being highly advantageous; which also makes me think of genetic algorithm simulations that show the evolution of rabbits dodging foxes or similar from a talk at the University of Sussex back in the day ...

Stanford AI Class Midterm

2011-11-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Here's my notes on the Stanford AI midterm

Q.1

a) There exists (at least) one environment in which every agent is rational

I take this to mean one environment in which all agents regardless of behavior will optimally achieve their goals, which i think must be false since if you have two agents and we set it up to the first doesn't move and the second does. I guess if we set up so that every action incurs no cost, and every agent is rewarded maximally independent of its behavior

so I am making both the first two true, although I have a strong feeling the instructors wand the first one to be answered false, but I haven't come up with the necessary counter example

regarding the 15 puzzle

a lookup reflex agent will need to have moves for 16! positions that the puzzle can be in, i.e. > 2 trillion, an agent that searches will look at the starting state and consider all the possible moves branching out from there. A depth first search agent will only store a single route to the solution, and then discard that not taking up much space.

There is an upper bound of 4 moves in each state, so the max branching factor of the tree is 4, so depending on the number of steps in the solution there will be #steps^4 nodes in the tree? maximum path to the solution? maximum of 15 moves to get to solution? I think not.., more like 15 moves*16moves, but even then it's much less than 2 trillion.

So I'm probably not reasoning soundly here, but still the answer feels right, i.e. that the lookup table will be larger in terms of memory, but the agent that searches will not do any better ...

Q.2

A*

always expand the the node with the minimum value of the function f = g+h
g(path) = path cost
h(path) = h(state) = estimated distance to the goal

layer 2 is labelled a1-5 from left to right and layer 3 is labelled b1-6 also from left to right

f(top-node) = 0+15 Expanded 1st

f(a1) = 10+11 = 21
f(a2) = 10+8 = 18 Expanded 4th
f(a3) = 10+7 = 17 Expanded 3rd
f(a4) = 10+6 = 16 Expanded 2nd
f(a5) = 10+10 = 20 Expanded 5th

f(b4) = 20+5 = 25
f(b5) = 20+20 = 40

f(b2) = 20+3 = 23
f(b3) = 20+9 = 29

f(b6) = 20 + 0 = 20 Expanded 6th

My checking seems to match my initial guess

Admissible --> h(s) < true cost, i.e. h never overestimates the distance to the goal

and I think this heuristic is not admissible since f(b5) heuristic is 20 when it is only 10 away from the goal, although one might also question whether other b nodes can actually reach the goal node, but they are all underestimating under any assumptions I can think off.

Q.3

P(H) = 0.3
P(F) = 0.7

Q.4

unfair coin
P(HH) = 0.04 + P(H) * P(H) --> P(H) = 0.2
--> P(T) = 0.8
--> P(TT) = 0.64

Q.5

P1(H) = 0.5
P2(H) = 1

pick a coin at random and see a head, what is P(P2|H)

So i think this should be Bayes rule

P(P2|H) = P(H|P2)P(P2)/P(H) where P(H) = P(H|P2)P(P2) + P(H|P1)P(P1)
= 1*0.5/[1*0.5+ 0.5*0.5]
= 0.5/[0.5+0.25]
= 50/75 = 2/3

sense of multiple worlds here very strong. There is the world where we chose the fair coin and a world where we chose the loaded coin. There are two possible coin flip results in the fair world, and only 1 in the loaded world. The evidence suggests we may be in either of two of these three possible states --> but the loaded world must be equally likely to the fair world, so we are twice as likely to be in the loaded world than the fair world ...

now if we see two heads in a row, what is P(P2|HH)

P(P2|HH) = P(HH|P2)P(P2)/P(HH) where P(HH) = P(HH|P2)P(P2) + P(HH|P1)P(P1)
= 1*0.5/[1*0.5+ 0.25*0.5]
= 0.5/[0.5+0.125]
= 500/625 = 8/10

now there is still only one possible loaded world situation, but in the fair world we have four possible coin outputs we might have seen. If we are in the fair world we are in precisely 1 of those four. The chances of being in the loaded world is now four times more likely than being in the fair world

Not sure if I was supposed to be drawing a bayes net here, or if that would help and/or adjust the answer ...

Q.6

very confused now - need to rematch all on C.I.

3.34 D-separation series is the key here

"Any two variables are independent if they are not linked by just unknown variables"

re-looked at all quizzes and homeworks, and changed my initial answer slightly to indicate that A was not conditional independent of C given G, because G tells us about E and E links A and B ERROR HERE SINCE QUESTION IS ABOUT A & C

I am still on the fence about whether A should be conditionally independent of B given F, but in 3.36 F was independent of A given knowledge of H which told us about a child var that linked A and F, but that didn't tell us about the parent of the child var that linked A and F

Q.7

So Hmwk 2.3. explanation is my friend here:

P(B|C) = P(B|C,A)P(A|C) + P(B|C,!A)P(!A|C)
P(B|C) = P(B|A)P(C|A)P(A)/P(C) + P(B|!A)P(C|!A)P(!A)/P(C)
P(B|C) = 0.2*0.8*0.5/0.6 + 0.2*0.4*0.5/0.6 = 0.2

P(C) = P(C|A)P(A) + P(C|!A)P(!A)
P(C) = 0.8*0.5 + 0.4*0.5 = 0.6

P(C|B) = P(C|B,A)P(A|B) + P(C|B,!A)P(!A|B)
P(C|B) = P(C|A)P(B|A)P(A)/P(B) + P(C|!A)P(B|!A)P(!A)/P(B)
P(C|B) = 0.8*0.2*0.5/0.2 + 0.4*0.2*0.5/0.2

P(B) = P(B|A)P(A) + P(B|!A)P(!A)
P(B) = 0.2*0.5 + 0.2*0.5 = 0.2

again, unsure of calculation error but looks like knowledge of each other does not help

Q.8

so my intuition for P(OLD) was actually the MaxLikelihood answer

I redid my spreadsheet for this, eventually getting to what I hope is the right answer. The fractions work out reasonable which suggests to me it might be right as that is what I saw thrun doing in Hmwk 3.2a and b. Feels like I should be able to do this with just pencil and paper, but I don't trust myself to make minor mistakes which is why I put it in the spreadsheet - although I still worry I will have spreadsheet errors ...

ERROR HERE SINCE I DID 4/7 INSTEAD OF 5/7

Q.9

rewatched the K-Nearest Neighbor 5.33 videos, but my initial guess of 7 still seems correct - the suggestion about ties just seems to be confusing since they were never mention in the lecture and superficially all the points seem at different distances from the query point

Q.10

now first time through I just drew a graph and guessed the numbers ... how about linear regression in octave?

octave-3.4.0:2> A = [1,2;3,5.2;4,6.8;5,8.4;9,14.8]
octave-3.4.0:5> X = A(:,1)
octave-3.4.0:6> Y = A(:,2)
octave-3.4.0:10> sum((Y-X).^2)
ans = 58.880

gives me sum of square of differences, but not sure what to do next ...

Going back to 5.36 in the lectures I see thrun deriving

w_0 = 1/M * sum(y) - w_1/M * sum(x)

and

w_1 = M * sum(x*y) - sum(x)*sum(y) * [M * sum(x.^2) - (sum(x))^2]^-1

and I didn't trust myself to derive these correctly

so I can vectorize these:

M = size(X)(1)
w_0 = 1/M * sum(Y) - w_1/M * sum(X)
w_1 = (M * X'*Y - sum(X)*sum(Y)) * [M * sum(X.^2) - (sum(X))^2]^-1

gives
w_1 = 1.6 guessed 0.642
w_0 = 0.40000 guessed 1

so plotting those I get an exact match suggesting I could have intuited this without the math if I had drawn it precisely ... :-) my first guess based on hand plot was well off ... :-)

plot(X,Y)
hold on
XT = [0;1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9]
YT = w_0 + w_1 * XT
plot(XT,YT,'r')

still pondering over relation between NNs, linear regression and statistical significance

Q.11

initial intuition appears wrong after watching 6.5 on k means clustering which suggests the initial division of the space is done by drawing a line of equidistance between C1 and C2 indicating that only one point will get associated with C1

Q.12

so this should be straightforward

Valid --> always true
Satisfiable --> true or false
Unsatisfiable --> always false

My initial guess on (A&&!A)->(B->C) appears wrong as I, as usual, incorrectly remembered the logical form of implication

Truth table appears to confirm my intuition that (A->B)&&(B->C)&&(C->A) is satisfiable - my intuition based on finding cases where it would be false and where it would be true

My intuition about the equivalence of A->B&&B->C and A->C seems disproved by truth table - if A is true and B is false and C is true then A->B is false and A->C is true COUNTEREXAMPLE

Q.13

seemed possible to answer this from common sense rather than applying any particular knowledge from the course

my second pass on it including review of the clarifications doesn't throw up anything of concern ...

Q.14

could spin wheels here and the answer from value iteration might well be my best guess, which is subtract five going back into each of the states

actually explanation in 9.18 quiz gives solution for deterministic case giving me higher confidence here.

Q.15

mental mistake - thought that laplacian smoothing would involve +4 on the denominator since there are four possible transitions, but it is only +2 as we are simply considering possible transitions from a single state in a two state model?

Also I had them grouped wrong initially - need to group by state we are coming from

AAAAB

F(A|A) = 3
F(B|A) = 1
F(A|B) = 0
F(B|B) = 0

P(A_0) = (1+1)/(1+2)
P(A|A) = (3+1)/(4+2)
P(A|B) = (0+1)/(0+2)

intuitive motion specifier

2011-11-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

I keep having an idea in slightly different forms about how it would be cool to be able to move elements in some GUI and then have the code for doing that appear automatically. I was first thinking about this in the context of having my young son learning to program. I tried Alice and Scratch and a few other kid friendly software kits, but surprisingly none of them had the ability for the user to move an element around, i.e. intuitively specify what it's behaviour should be, and then have that stored as a behaviour that could be repeated, reversed etc.

The same idea came to me again in the context of game design, e.g. in a game editor like GameMaker or Unity3D is would be great to be able to "show" the system what kind of motion you wanted, and have the corresponding behaviour appear in the editor in a form that could be manipulated. Of course it wouldn't work simply for all behaviours. Getting one object to follow another would be trickier.

The thing at the moment is that I can't see how to add such functionality to any of the existing systems that I have looked at without geting very deeply involved in them. I could build a demonstration interface in JavaScript, but by itself it wouldn't be able to do very much. I have the feeling that eventually this functionality will appear somewhere and some people will go "oh cool" and I will be kicking myself for having not done anything with the idea, or it is already present in some software somewhere that I just haven't found yet ...

HPU Internet Programming Student Project Showcase

2011-08-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

I've put together a showcase of some student projects from last years internet programming course. Check it out:

https://sites.google.com/site/hpustudentprojectshowcase/csci3632-internetprogramming

I'm teaching the same course again this fall:

http://www.techhui.com/events/csci-3632-internet-programming

and the course is open to non-HPU students in case anyone is interested :-)

Londroid tablet hackathon

2011-05-27T10:48:00.001-07:00

Just had a great chat with friedger of openintent fame

Test blog from iPhone app blogspace

2011-05-27T08:19:00.001-07:00

Wonder if this supports georss? Apparently not, but it seems I can add a location using the draft blogger web interface. I am guessing that means I probably can't access that from the blogger API?

http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#CreatingPublicEntries

No mention of it above. Guess it might work - should definitely try the android blogger app first, but my motorola droid will not play nice with any of the BT wireless hubs I have tried. It would connect but then kill my BTHomeHub, and now it just repeatedly connects very briefly, disconnects and the re-connects on my BTBusinessHub. But it works just fine on the public WiFi I have tried at coffee shops in the UK. Motorola Droid and BT Wifi just don't seem to mix well. Maybe I will have to buy a new droid phone in the UK ...

Of course, what I really, really, really want, is a mobile app that allows me to voice record a blog post, post it to blogger with a georss tag, and then have that auto-published into MyMaps so that everyone can view a Sam's blog layer on their Google Android Map apps ...

Google MyMaps does more!

2011-05-27T02:40:00.001-07:00

So along with some friends I have been tinkering with mobile GeoRSS ideas for a while. George Lee published iGeoRSS to the iPhone app store after some discussions we had. I have been talking about doing an Android version for a while, and the other day I saw someone beat me to it:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kcInc.newsSurfer&feature=search_result

Although in principle there would still be room for others. However I just updated Google Maps on my Android phone, partly because I had read in a Distimo report that:

Google Maps is the only application with more than 50 million downloads in the Google Android Market, making it the all-time most popular application in this store

One of the disincentives for creating a map app for either iPhone or Android, is that pretty much everyone is using the Google maps app anyway, and there also have been restrictions about 3rd party developers adding things like direction support to their map apps, which is like the most mega-useful thing; and so it feels like pushing out a map app will mean always lagging behind Google's own app.

Not that that is a reason to give up completely, but I just noticed two (relatively?) new features in Google MyMaps. One is the ability to import GeoRSS feeds into your Google MyMaps, and the other is the ability to open up editing of MyMaps to anyone. So in principle all the things that I was hoping to achieve with a mobile GeoRSS app are in place, as you view all your Google MyMaps as layers in the Google Maps app on android.

So for example I just created a Google MyMap called "Sam's Restaurant Recommendations", which I can see on my android Google Map app. I might actually keep this one just for me to edit :-) but I have made a local news MyMap and opened it for anyone to edit, as well as making it public. Now of course, that's going to scale poorly and probably hit Google MyMap size limits if everyone in the world were to throw in all their local news, and I still haven't found many news sources spitting out geotagged feeds.

I did find this geotagged press release feed, and I tried importing it into my local news MyMap, and it grabbed at least the first item:

http://www.earthpublisher.com/georss.php

and when I viewed it on my android phone, I could see the whole feed. Now in principle anyone could keep adding to this, and everyone could see it on their phones, and we would have a shared geo-overlay system, which is probably Google's intention ...

What I'd really want is an API access to the MyMaps data so that old news could be moved off to an archive etc., and I'm not sure if that's available yet. Also, it's not clear to me how public mymaps can actually be discovered, and whether I would specifically have to invite people to a map for them to access it on their android phone ...

Sexbot Turing Test

2011-05-23T02:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Robert Brewer sent me a link to this Sexbot Turing test:

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2011/05/lets_get_this_p.php

which reminded me of a chapter from "Parsing the Turing Test" by Mark Humphrys called "How My Program Passed the Turing Test" in which he describes a chatbot called Jenny18 that apparently brought a user to orgasm; arguably an alternate form or Turing Test.

http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~humphrys/eliza.html

http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Eliza/eliza.anon.html

It certainly seems like the Porn/Sex industry will be quick to adopt any advances in chatbot technology. Makes me start thinking that any breakthrough in natural language could lead to an explosion in sophisticated bots taking advantage of a larger and larger proportion of the population. Once the AIs are smarter than we are there will be no more "send money to Nigeria" scams, but more sophisticated bots that will engage you in conversation and pin down your needs and desires before fleecing you :-)

MySQL Logging

2011-05-20T02:32:00.000-07:00

Getting MySQL logging turned on in OSX turned out to be rather time-consuming.

Some key sticking points were working out that the mysql config was in /etc/my.cnf and that my attempts to restart the MySQL server were actually being ignored. It was not until I killed all the mysql processes and then "started" them again that the logging started working.

I found various helpful posts:

http://serverfault.com/questions/71071/how-to-enable-mysql-logging

Entries in the MySQL documentation:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/query-log.html

However part of the problem was that although in principle logging can be turned on and off from within the running MySQL instance, there is a bug in 5.0 that prevents this, and although it has been fixed in 5.1, I was unclear about how to upgrade. My previous attempt at getting ports to start working again after my transition to Snow Leopard had ending up installing a completely new instance of MySQL in a new location and with no access to my old data.

Scooba gives birth to a ... Roomba!

2011-01-20T22:31:00.000-08:00

So given that I was reasonably impressed with our Scooba floor washing robot, I used the simple breeding technique of placing an order for a Roomba at irobot.com and lo and behold several days later a stork arrived with another bundle of joy. Well, I say stork, okay, okay, so it was a guy in a van, but the Roomba is pretty much a bundle of joy.

While I was assembling the new toy storage unit from Ikea my 3 helpers had a great time disassembling the polystyreen packaging that came with it, to the cries of "Snow! Snow!" and so although the Ikea unit was ready, the boys bedroom needed a thorough hoovering before the unit could be installed. To my wife's annoyance I had purchased the Roomba, but not a vacuum cleaner. However the Roomba proved pretty adept at picking up the polystyrene, as well as keeping the children entertained during the process.

This Roomba comes with its own charging station; although I have yet to test its supposed ability to get to the charing station by itself. It was very helpful and it felt like much less effort to use than the Scooba. No need to fill it with water and cleaning solution; no cryptic warnings about overnight charging. Just charge and go. It also seemed to cope with rough terrain better than the Scooba, and was pretty effective at telling me (via recorded audio) when it got indigestion from scooping up the odd child's toy. Emptying it was pretty easy, although I made a few more messes before I completely understood the process, which I reccommend performing inside a plastic bag. Fortunately the Roomba was there to clean up those messes, and I think it avoided falling down the stairs, although I didn't actually see that bit ...

Anyhow, lots more testing (and ultimately pimping) to do here, but now I am fully equipped to do a couple of weeks Roomba hacking as part of the my online AI course that starts next week.

Comparing iOS, Android, Windows Mobile 7

2011-01-19T06:51:00.000-08:00

So as part of the preparation for the online mobile programming and mobile design courses I am about to teach I re-created a simple iPhone calculator app in Android and WindowsMobile7.

The interface design was definitely the easiest for the iPhone, with Apple's "Inteface Builder" making it very easy to get a good layout of keys without too much fuss, and the only one to support direct editing of the labels on the keys themselves. Having linked up the first calculator key so that copied and pasted ones had the same code linkage meant that associating key presses with actions was simpler for iPhone, but the Objective C code did seem to end up a little more convoluted than either Java or C#.

The windows mobile interface construction, strongly remeniscent of Visual Basic, was second best. Not quite as good as for the iPhone, but definitely better than Android. Unsurprsingly the C# and Java code was nearly identical.

The up side for Android was that the refactoring tools (part of the Eclipse IDE) are definitely the best. There is some support for refactoring in VisualStudio, but I believe it is more fully featured in Eclipse, and practically non-existant in Xcode for the iPhone.

Can a Machine win at Jeopardy?

2011-01-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

So it turns out that on Valentines day this year that Watson, a computer system designed by IBM will be taking part as a contestant in a special televised edition of Jeopardy during which Watson will compete against two Jeopardy champions.

IBM has some very excited videos and website. I think the video I've embedded below is a great teaser video. It took me a while to find their slightly calmer FAQ that reveals more about the background of Watson than is in most of videos, including the open source framework that is Watson's principal infrastructure for assembling, scaling-out and deploying its analytic components. This special Jeopardy challenge event takes place just three weeks into the Artificial Intelligence course I'm teaching this semester and you can bet I'll spend a week on it and some of the open source components behind it!

Pimp my robot!

2011-01-11T07:19:00.002-08:00

So I was having ideas about how I could improve my Scooba and whether I could hack it up, and I stumbled across this very very cool book/website. Now I am not a big fan of the new Battlestar Gallactica but a Cylon Roomba is just awesome!

In Hacking Roomba, Tod Kurt apparently shows us how to drive a Roomba, make it sing, turn it into a painter, put it on your Wifi network, add webcams and install Linux, amongst other things. I am totally adding this to the textbook list for the AI course I am teaching online this semester. Would love to see some students doing AI Roomba projects!

Hacked up Roomba Obeys your commands via XBox Kinect

2011-01-11T07:19:00.001-08:00

I love this video of the KinectBot that my friend Wilson Tang sent me on Facebook. An MIT robotics student has hacked up a Roomba and added an Xbox Kinect sensor so that the Roomba can obey gestural commands from humans and put together a 3D model of the environment. If I can get more details we'll certainly include them in my online AI course this semester.

Living with a Robot

2011-01-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

So we've used floor washing Scooba robot a few nights in a row now. In fact we've used up all the free cleaner that came with the robot and are now planning to switch to the alternative "60ml of vinegar". Some issues have come up in that it often gets stuck on an uneven portion of our kitchen floor. When this happens it makes a childish "uh-oh" sound, and you have to go free it. Not such a big deal although when it does that three times in a row it's a bit of a pain.

Part of the issue for me is that I run it at the end of day, so I want to go off and watch some comedy on telly and fold the laundry and try to relax, and it's irritating to have to go help the robot, and even more irritating if I don't hear it getting stuck and then come to find it hasn't finished cleaning and I have to reset it and can't go to bed at the time I want because I have to wait for it to finish so that I can drain the tanks and leave all the different parts out to try. I imagine this is a particular issue for the Scooba that the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot owners don't encounter; will have to get a Roomba and report back!

Also I am having trouble working out a good charging cycle for the battery. The first overnight charge gave fine performance for the first clean, but the second clean the following day failed half way through due to lack of battery power. The manual says don't leave it charging over night except the first time, which is fair enough, but then when should I charge it and for how long? The most convenient for me would be to leave it charging when the tanks are drying, which based on how long I sleep is about 7 hours. Too long? I tried an hour charge previously and that wasn't enough. My options appear to be either to remember to start a charge before supper each day, or just give it an overnight 7 hour charge each day. Having the Scooba run out of power is just as irritating as it getting stuck un-noticed; means I have to stay up, or throw away half a tank of cleaning solution.

I have resolved the getting stuck on raised tiling problem by leaving a heavy box (of beer) on the place where the Scooba often runs aground. Interesting that before coming up with that solution that I might have argued that the Robot should learn a map of the kitchen and work out to avoid the sticking point, but now I could almost argue that would be wasted effort on the part of the engineers. To the extent that I have a good model of what the robot is doing (spinning, wall following and room crossing), I can adjust its behaviour effectively by small changes to the environment. The Scooba/Roomba really is an a very interesting intersection point between the two of the courses I am teaching this semester. Mobile Design at least partially inspired by Don Norman's "Design of Everyday Things" for which understanding users conceptual models is very important, and Artificial Intelligence, which covers the ongoing fight between high level mental models and low-level behaviour based robots and AI systems.

Scooba robot cleans my kitchen floor, fairly well ...

2011-01-07T02:23:00.000-08:00

So I went out and bought the iRobot Scooba, floor washing robot. Well I say went out and bought, I got it online, so no going out needed. I had been thinking about this for a while since I seemed to spend at least five minutes a night on my hands and knees clearing up food debris by my five year old and two year old twins. The Scooba cost me 400GBP, which is a chunk, but if it works well it will pay for itself in terms of my time in about a month and a half; based on my consulting fee of approx 100GBP an hour.

It did a reasonable job last night, although it did miss a few hard to reach spots such as just next to where the washing machine sticks out from the other shelving, but overall I'm pretty pleased. There was some good ground in food debris, most of which came up. It will be interesting to see how clean it can get things if we use it daily.

We didn't save much time last night as we spent a good half an hour watching the Scooba move around the kitchen. We saw all the behaviours described in the instructions including spiraling, wall following and room crossing. This is a great example of behaviour-based robotics which we'll be covering in the Artificial Intelligence course I'm teaching online at Hawaii Pacific University this Spring.

JavaScript Closure Examples

2010-10-06T22:41:00.001-07:00

So I am listening to Douglas Crockford's lecture on JavaScript functions. And I need to get this really straight in my head and separate from Java :-)

Crockford defines "Closure" as follows:

The context of an inner function includes the scope of the outer function.
An inner function enjoys that context even after the parent functions have returned.

Crockford presents the following example that includes a global variable, which I renamed slightly and ran in the Google Chrome console:

var names= ['zero','one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
var global_digit_name = function (n) {
return names[n];
};
global_digit_name(3);
"three"
typeof global_digit_name
"function"

I am using the JavaScript "typeof" operator to inspect what is being generated. Crockford make the point that this function is making use of a global variable, and that global variables are evil, which I guess I go along with; although I wonder if this example isn't already demonstrating closure, i.e. the global variables are just variables in the global function scope that the local function is getting access to, but perhaps that's not how global scope works in JavaScript, but anyway ... before moving on, let's think how we would so the same thing in Java:

static String[] names = {"zero","one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine"};

static String global_digit_name(int n) {
return names[n];
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(global_digit_name(3));
}

Here I am using static scopes to create a "global" variable and a "global" method. I can't assign the method to a variable in Java, so I just call it in the main function. Anyhow, back to the JavaScript example, in the name of removing the evil global variable Crockford the presents a slow alternative:

var slow_digit_name= function (n) {
var slow_names= ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
return slow_names[n];
};
slow_digit_name(3);
"three"
typeof slow_digit_name
"function"
slow_names
ReferenceError: slow_names is not defined

So the JavaScript advantage here is that the names variable is safely inside the function and can't interfere with other global variables. The Java equivalent is straightforward:

static String slow_global_digit_name(int n) {
String[] slow_names = {"zero","one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine"};
return slow_names[n];
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(slow_global_digit_name(3));
}

In both Java and JavaScript cases the slowness results from reallocating the array each time the method is called which is a bit wasteful. Now comes the JavaScript example that Crockford labels "closure":

var closure_digit_name= (function () {
var closure_names= ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
return function (n) {
return closure_names[n];
};
}());
closure_names
ReferenceError: closure_names is not defined
typeof closure_digit_name
"function"

So again we avoided the nasty global variable, but now the object literal closure_names is not allocated each time. Interestingly I can get definitions of the functions defined so far from the Chrome console:

closure_digit_name
function (n) {
return closure_names[n];
}
slow_digit_name
function (n) {
var slow_names= ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
return slow_names[n];
}

Which allows us to see clearly that closure_digit_name is not reallocating the object literal each time. Where I am perhaps confusing myself is that I thought by assigning the return of a call to a function to closure_digit_name that we were turning closure_digit_name into an object, but not according to the Google Chrome console which still gives the type of closure_digit_name as a function. I think it is me just confusing myself. Crockford doesn't mention objects being returned, here's what he says (with my minor edit to make it apply to my example - unfortunately I don't have his colour highlighting):

We assign the return value of the outer function to closure_digit_name. The outer function has now returned, digit_name now contains a function, which is the green function. That green function still has access to names, even though names is a private variable of a function that's already returned. That's closure: one function closes over the variables of another function. This turns out to be one of the most important features in JavaScript; this is the thing that it got amazingly right. This is the thing that makes JavaScript one of the world's brilliant programming languages.

In my own words it seems like we are defining a function on the fly that happens to have a variable and a function, so the following longer version should be exactly equivalent:

var my_function = function () {
var closure_names= ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
return function (n) {
return closure_names[n];
};
}
var closure_digit_name= my_function();

which Google Chrome confirms, and gives me the advantage of being able to check the contents of my_function:

my_function
function () {
var closure_names= ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
return function (n) {
return closure_names[n];
};
}

Which reassures me slightly as at least I can now see where closure_names is, sort of :-) It really does seem to me to say that by calling my_function() that we get back some sort of object with a function and a variable, but I guess that's part of the JavaScript power, that functions can have other functions and variables, but it does seem slightly odd that the consequence of calling a function is to return a function. Quoting from Crockford's book:

A function always returns a value. If the return value is not specified, then undefined is returned. If the function was invoked with the new prefix and the return value is not an object, then this (new object) is returned instead.

According to which, I would have thought that my_function as I define it above, should return "undefined" and not the function that it contains, but that is what seems to happen. On closer inspection I see that my_function is not just containing the sub-function, it is returning the sub-function, so everything starts to make sense, and the example can be unobfuscated further like so:

var my_function = function () {
var closure_names= ['zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine'];
var my_sub_function = function (n) {
return closure_names[n];
};
return my_sub_function;
}

var closure_digit_name= my_function();

and Google Chrome confirms for me that this does exactly the same thing, and as far as I know there is no simple equivalent in Java. Interestingly I can't access the closure_names variable from the reference I now have to my_function:

my_function.closure_names
undefined

And I guess that is because this really is a function and not an object ..., but it certainly seems to have an object like nature, at least the way I think about them :-)

Google App Inventor

2010-10-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

Had great fun with Google App Inventor over the weekend. Got my beta invite and was able to do wysiwyg interface design and program creation with my app live updating to the phone. It has a very similar programming interface to Scratch, the program from MIT designed to teach programming to kids. I had been playing with Scratch and others with my 5 year old son, and had been disappointed to hear that Apple yanked a Scratch clone from the iPhone because they don't want any other mechanisms for creating apps other than Objective C.

Would be nice if App Inventors layout interface were as good as interface builder for iPhone in the Xcode, and would be great if you could see the java code that was compiled from the Scratch visual programming. Would be interesting to see if I could use this in the mobile programming class I will teach in the Spring ...

So, great fun, although I still think there could be an easier programming interface that would work well for even younger children. Seems to me that you could be able to do things like move sprites and then capture that activity in a macro format, that would then show up as a procedure that could be manipulated. Maybe Google will open source appinventor and then something like that could be created ...

Learning ChatBots

2010-09-30T23:24:00.000-07:00

Chapter 26 in "Parsing the Turing Test" was "Who Fools Whom? The Great Mystification, or Methodological Issues on Making Fools of Human Beings" by Eugene Demchenko and Vladimir Veselov, which had some great suggestions for bot techniques, and made a point about bot learning being hard.

'Teachable bots is an idea that looks logical at first glance, but becomes almost impossible to implement ... let us look at easy examples:

"John's birthday is January 1st, 1980, What is John's birthday?"

It seems so clear! But let's say this another way:

"Bob is 35. How old is Bob?"

Well, now he is 35 and, according to the educated bot, he will be 35 forever! Birthday is a constant date while "age" is a value that changes in time ... we find ourselves in a vicious circle: to be able to learn, a bot should know much more than it is possible to teach it "manually"'

The authors go on to talk about how Cyc might be reaching this critical threshold to actually start learning, but it seems to me that the problem is one of meta-learning. The authors seem to be focused on bots that learn facts of the type "X is Y", which can be queried through "what is X?" type questions. If this were the only type of learning available then there would be no alternative than to "manually" program the bot to know the difference between birthdays and ages. However could the bot not learn, as human children do, that one is constant and the other is variable? The concept I am wrangling at present is that idea that you could have a dialogue with the bot like so:

Sam: Bob is 35. How old is Bob?

Bot: Bob is 35

[A year later]

Sam: How old is Bob?

Bot: Bob is 35

Sam: No, he is 36

Bot: You previously said "Bob is 35".

Sam: Yes, he was 35, he is now 36 because a year has past.

Bot: So "Bob is 36", will that change again?

Sam: Yes, every year on his birthday his age will increase by 1.

Of course the obvious flaw with my idea is that the bot needs to be intelligent enough to understand my explanation, but the idea of a bot that can learn through explanation should be clear. I imagine the teaching new type of knowledge to the bot would be challenging, but am reminded of that paper (which I now can't find!) by Guy Steele which assumes knowledge of all single syllable words, and defines every word of more than one syllable in terms of words of one syllable or other polysyllabic words that have previously been defined.

Anyhow, this method of boostrapping bot knowledge needs a lot of work, and there's probably some critical reason why it just won't work period, but I'm still intrigued by the idea.

MegaHAL, Jason Hutchens and AI Ltd (NV?)

2010-09-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

So I just read a very interesting chapter by Jason Hutchens in "Parsing the Turing Test", in which he talked a little about his work at AI Ltd (NV?) on mixing a reinforcement learning paradigm with some stochastic word frequency modeling to train an AI. I remember reading about that 10 years ago or so and was really interested to get an update. There was a tantilizing transcript of a HAL/Trainer dialogue where HAL (the computer) was effectively simulating a 15 month old's speech. A quick web search turned up that dialogue in an academic paper:

Treister-Goren, A., Hutchens, J.L.: Creating AI: A unique interplay between the development of learning algorithms and their education. In: Proceeding of the First International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics (2001)

Trainer: where is daddy?
HAL: daddy gone
Trainer: daddy is at work
HAL: daddy work bye bye
Trainer: yes daddy has gone to work
HAL: daddy work bye bye bye bye
Trainer: do you want to go to the park?
HAL: yes bye bye
Trainer: ok we can go to the park
HAL: take car bye bye
Trainer: we will take the car because the park is far.
let’s pack some things in a bag
HAL: ball now park
Trainer: yes we should put the ball in the bag
HAL: ball now park mommy
Trainer: wait hal, we need to take something to eat
HAL: bananastory? night now
Trainer: we need to take something to eat
HAL: bananas
Trainer: ok we can take some bananas
HAL: monkeys eat bananas
Trainer: you’re so smart hal. do you want to take a
book?
HAL: juice mommy
Trainer: sure we will take some juice as well

Jason's chapter didn't have any references and there were a few points he made that I would have liked further details on, specifically:

"... findings which indicate that appropriate guidance may strongly influence ... aspects of the child's language development ... these findings have spawned evaluation and treatment programs in areas that border on the question of intelligence with developmental language data enabling the treatment of some developmentally delayed populations. It has also proven itself a valuable tool in treating schizophrenic thought disorder where clinicians often find themselves unable to capture the communicative problem of patients to assess their intelligence."

Anyhow the chapter ended on saying there was an exciting future ahead, but a quick web search revealed that Jason left the company in 2001, and I had a little trouble finding more about the company, although finally I found this website:

http://www.a-i.com/

Where I had a reasonable conversation with a chatbot that seemed more advanced than the 15-month old one, but the conversation was not disimilar to an original HAL or Eliza program. The website has lots more to explore including an iPhone app, and apparently the ability to train your own bot and make it public; but I couldn't immediately find what I was looking for, which was something about how the program of training infant AIs was progressing. I'd love to see more recent peer-reviewed papers on this stuff. Maybe I'll find it with a bit more looking.

Cyc: Parsing the Turing Test

2010-09-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

So I just bought my first book on Kindle. Something I had been putting off, since I don't particularly like the Digital Rights Management that allows Amazon to suspend my access to books that I have paid for. And basically I hate paying for things when I can possibly avoid it, however I was gagging to read Parsing the Turing Test, and my impatience, and lack of luggage allowance on my upcoming trip from Japan to the UK, and so I shelled out $50. I feel a little bad about that, although I console myself that some great work has gone into the book and the author's certainly deserve compensation (although I wasn't able to determine that until after I started reading it) and kudos to Amazon for making the book I bought seemlessly available on my MacBook Pro, Kindle, iPad and iPhone. Now that's handy.

Anyhow, so this will likely be the first of many posts related to particular chapters from the book, but first off I was fascinated to read Chapter 16 "Building a Machine Smart Enough to Pass the Turing Test: Could We, Should We, Will We?" by Douglas Lenat; which describes a series of hurdles apparently overcome in phase 1 of the Cyc project such as dropping absolute truth, consistency, reasoning in particular contexts etc; that have allowed them to complete phase 1.

Lenat goes on to talk about now they are priming the knowledge pump to allow the system to learn by itself, but it's not clear to me why the knowledge pump has to be primed so much first. I find myself wondering why can't all knowledge be provided through interactive dialogues with the system, i.e. have the system proffer answers and explain when it is incorrect. In the chapter Lenat gives an example of a computer trying to decide whether "fear" or "sleepiness" is appropriate for the victim of a robbery, and gives first order logic predicates that allows the answer to be inferred. Could the required predicates be inferred by the machine from a human explanation of which emotion is appropriate? I guess that explanations are often more complicated that the questions they answer, raising further questions in turn ...

Lenat refers a number of times to Cyc learning by itself, certain machine learning issues being as yet unsolved. It seems to me the key is some form of representation and learning process that allows the system to have incorrect assertions explained to it in natural language, and have the system update its model accordingly. I am sure I am being hopelessly naive here, but will have fun testing my ideas.

Any which way, this is certainly making me see Prolog in a new light :-) Can't wait to get started on building a system to enter the Loebner prize competition next year. Although there are many more chapters to read and each is turning over sets of my own assumptions. Lenat already lists the "human frailty" deceptions that would be effective/appropriate for passing the test ...

Live ScreenCast Solution

2010-09-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

So I (sort of) successfully used UStream to broadcast a lecture for my Internet Programming class last night. After realizing (again) that the Ustream Producer standalone audio doesn't work (at least for me and a few others ), I switched to recording through the browser and that created a stream that my students were able to see, and I was even able to screencast by using CamTwist, and I was subsequently able to download. Woot!

Unfortunately the resolution was such that the students were only able to read the largest of my powerpoint fonts, and it wasn't really practical to see any of the code examples. Fortunately I had cunningly distributed my slides in advance, so the students were just using the ustream screencast to know where to look in the slides, and for synced audio. Somewhat ridiculously the Ustream comments were only available in the live stream, not in the broadcast window, and I didn't want to have the live stream window open, although I guess I could have muted it, but I worried about my browser crashing. Anyhow, we ended up using Skype for chat and backup audio, but that means that the chat is not synced with the recording, which is a shame for those who were not present.

Anyway, I would really like to broadcast in slightly higher definition, and it seems I could pay ~$200 for UStream Producer Pro, but I am worried that the audio will not work, as in the free version of Producer, and that I won't even get a sufficient boost in resolution from the point of view of the students.

So what I would really like to know is if anyone has managed to successfully live screencast from OSX with a resolution sufficient for handling code examples. Either in UStream or some other solution ...

REXML and WADL issues in Chapter 2 of OReilly's RESTful Webservicesw

2010-09-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

So I am teaching a course on RESTful webservices and using Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson's OReilly book as the main text. It's a great book, but things have probably changed in a few Ruby libraries since the book's publication in 2008, so a couple of examples in chapter 2 seem to have some problems. I am on OSX 10.6.4 using ruby 1.8.7

The first issue was:

$ ruby delicious-sax.rb tansaku
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/source.rb:227:in `position': undefined method `stat' for # (NoMethodError)
from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/parsers/baseparser.rb:144:in `position'
from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/parsers/sax2parser.rb:176:in `parse'
from delicious-sax.rb:21:in `print_my_recent_bookmarks'
from delicious-sax.rb:30

I had been searching around for anything on this error, including looking at the source, but had made no progress. I tried to subscribe to the REXML mailing list described here:

http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/index.html#id2248285

but got no response, so thought I would try ruby-talk. Unfortunately while I am subscribed to ruby-talk and don't seem to be able to unsubscribe I don't seem to be able to post there. I found at least a partial resolution by chatting with capnregx on ruby-lang irc at Freenode. The solution was to call xml.string to dump out a String object rather than passing in a StringIO which the REXML I am using is, somewhat surprisingly, unable to handle.

I also found a problem in the same chapter with another example involving WADL:

$ ruby delicious-wadl-ruby.rb tansaku
./wadl.rb:1248:in `lookup_param': No such param post (ArgumentError)
from ./wadl.rb:1255:in `each_by_param'
from delicious-wadl-ruby.rb:22

I took a brief look at the source and didn't have any immediate insight. After some more support from capnregex I identified a good approach of running the entire program in irb to see what was being passed back from the server. This is the annoying thing about del.icio.us as a programming example, since it is all over https, so no tracing it with tcpdump.

I got as far as seeing that the appropriate data did seem to be returned, but was residing in get.format rather than get.representation which was a REXML:Element rather than a WADL::XMLRepresentation as one would intuitively expect from the 'each_with_params' method call. get.headers.string appeared to contain the desired XML but not in a format (StringIO) that could be parsed the way the program was attempting. Tabbing on get.headers. suggested that each_by_param was an appropriate method, but gave an undefined method error so I gave up there and decided to drop the WADL example for the moment. We'll come back to WADL in a later chapter, but I am becoming increasingly dubious about it's value. At least the REST community does not seem to have sprung into action around it after the effort the book's authors put in to getting it off the ground.

All files required to run the above are in pastebin:

delicious-sax.rb http://pastebin.com/029SnVEW

delicious-wadl-ruby.rb: http://pastebin.com/Nz5hFGRN
wadl.rb (required by above): http://pastebin.com/AKRAETG8
delicious.xml (required by above): http://pastebin.com/7hUH7uwy

Of course you will need to use your own deli.icio.us username/password combinations for the examples to work :-)

SmartFM Android Study Dictionary v1.1 released

2010-08-30T16:12:00.001-07:00

So I even managed to find time for a few performance fixes and have released version 1.1 of the SmartFM Android Study Dictionary to the Android Market.

The main difference is pretty much on the back end with the app using a separate Java client to consume JSON (instead of XML) from the new "unofficial" SmartFM API. This necessitated a performance fix on the main item list view since checking whether there was a sound for an item required a separate HTTP request. This creates the main noticeable different, that you'll briefly see progress indicators for the sound icons when you first get a set of results back.

I was pleased that using ProgressBar, AsyncTask and a cache of my own design was effective in making the list scroll smoothly and I went on to use the same approach for image loading in the sentence list that is part of each individual item view. That's something that was always a performance issue in earlier versions, but only came up for items with more than 3 or 4 sentences.

I'm disappointed not to have been able to add more functionality or fix other minor gripes, but the old version one XML SmartFM API is being discontinued today or tomorrow, so I thought it better to kick out a version that works with the new API, and leave everything else for subsequent releases. "Release Early, Release Often".

Anyhow, I am moving house and starting a new job, so will probably be restricted to bugfixes for the next couple of months, but hope to release some new features and fixes by Christmas. I think my main goals are making the voice search go straight to results without requiring a second click, and pre-loading lots of content so users don't have to wait to download sounds. I think the multiple HTTP requests associated with each individual items could be put into AsyncTasks, to make the item display more responsive ...

The two most frequently requested features are support for some study, and OpenID. I do hope to include a study feature soon. As for OpenID, we'll see ... :-)

To follow my progress subscribe to this blog or the associated Google Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/smartfm-android

Another SmartFM Android Study Dictionary Beta, all media upload now supported

2010-08-26T19:24:00.001-07:00

So I've managed to get all the media upload functionality working against the new API, I think ... If anyone is interested in helping me test the new beta it is available here:

http://www.neurogrid.net/public_html/smart_fm.apk

There are still some performance issues, but I think I have an angle of attack on those (AsyncTasks and some caching structure), so if I'm lucky I can put those in place before the August 31st deadline. Final beta before then I hope ...

One interesting note is that SmartFM now has some pretty impressive automated text-to-speech for Japanese Sentences. Words and sentences now have audio added automatically and at least to my untrained ears it sounds pretty good. Makes all the effort to support sound upload on the Android a little redundant ...

The problem with Java, or null-proof logging in Android

2010-08-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

So this is really irritating. I keep getting exceptions in Android when my logging string happens to be null, e.g.

Log.d("DEBUG", my_string);

if my_string is null, then I get an exception and execution halts. Not what I want. I want the null nature of my_string to be reported and execution to continue.

The verbose location solution is:

if (my_string != null) {
Log.d("DEBUG", my_string);
}

or:

Log.d("DEBUG", my_string == null ? "NULL":my_string);

but really I'd like to modify the Log.d static method so that check is included by default. Something I could easily do in ruby, but no equivalent I know of in Java that doesn't involve creating some new class and then modifying all my existing calls to this method throughout my code ...

Early Beta of Smart.fm Study Dictionary v2 available for testing

2010-08-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

So I've created a stand-along Java client library for the new version 2 of the smart.fm API. I've now used that successfully to create an early beta of the Smart.fm Study Dictionary v2, which is available here:

http://www.neurogrid.net/public_html/smart_fm_2.apk

If you want to help by beta-testing this application you can download directly to your phone by browsing to the above link (ensuring you have set your android phone to allow non-market installs).

I've re-implemented everything that was in the original except the creation & media upload functions - those are planned for next week :-)

Some issues I am aware of are the slowness when downloading or scrolling item lists, and that some items may have sentences from multiple languages inserted. These are due in part to changes in the API and I am working on fixes. I would be most grateful to hear of any other issues or suggestions for changes. My current work TODO list is available at the following link for your perusal:

http://groups.google.com/group/smartfm-android/web/smartfm-v2-todo-list

Android Speech Recognition

2010-08-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

The Android speech recognition module is great (I use it in my SmartFM Study Dictionary), but it doesn't have much flexibility. I'd really love to be able to use the audio recording component in it for my own audio recording needs, and also be able to submit my own audio rather than being forced to use the existing audio recording component. I think ideally the speech recognition and recording components would be split up. There are a few enhancement requests already filed with Google that I added stars to in order to increase the chances of this happening. If you have a moment please star them as well.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4541

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6930

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=10022

Towards Tatoeba on Android

2010-08-06T14:32:00.001-07:00

Great multi-lingual example sentences project at Tatoeba.org. Wish they had an API, but they very kindly provide a dump of their database. 3rd party projects are currently using that. I'm chatting with the Tatoeba guys about an API and hearing that it is an issue of expense, since they are a "a free project run by a student". Makes me wonder if there is a way to use Google App Engine or other cloud computing platform to help them support an API, or Mashery or 3scale something ...

So anyway, I used RazorSQL to take their csv sentences file and convert that into an SQLite database. The conversion took about 10 hours once I had figured out an issue with RazorSQL trying to always find closing double quotes. So then I got an INSTALL_FAILED_INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE error trying to load an Android app with Tatoeba's full set of sentences stored in an sqlite db that was 25 Mb. I was considering that the better approach would be to download the file from a remote location and store on the SDCard, when I realized the problem was actually that I had left the 50Mb SQL Inserts file in the same folder. It got automatically folded into the Android APK file. I removed that and the application ran. Well I say ran, it had the new problem that it couldn't find the Sentences table, but that was my Android SQLite plumbing and not the file size :-)

Fixing that I got a new error, Data exceeds UNCOMPRESS_DATA_MAX (24825856 vs 1048576), which happened when I tried to import the Tatoeba database from resources into the file system. A little research suggested there was a hard limit of 1Mb on resource and asset files in Android packages. So I moved straight to the network download which is what we would need for market release of an app of this kind anyway.

Download from Google docs worked after I added support for 302 redirect, took a long time - but database did get stored on file system, although the DDMS client died, so I couldn't check the details.

Started to feel like it would be faster to wrap my own rails REST layer around db dump ...

So I got the thing displaying a list of sentences but unfortunately on first attempt the UTF-8 characters were mangled. SQLite appears to support UTF-8, so I wondered if this was an android issue. Android is also UTF-8 compliant, so it seems like it was actually another RazorSQL issue. Although the SQL inserts had been created in UTF-8 when I ran them through RazorSQL the double byte encoding had been lost. I was able to re-generate an SQLite file with intact double byte encoding by running the SQL inserts from the command line - which had the added benefit of being hugely faster.

A bit of jiggery pokery later and I had the entire sentences db of Tatoeba displaying in an Android app. Nice to see the ListActivity performantly handling the display of a table with over 400,000 rows.

So that was a fun day, but still to do are:

1) Work out the best option for download; Google Sites has 20Mb limit, and Google docs stared doing some weird virus redirects on the latest file ...
2) Add some basic search to the app
3) Drop in the relations csv and get things all prettied up :-)

Forking Codebases

2010-08-04T13:44:00.001-07:00

So Cerego is going to discontinue official support of their version 1 SmartFM API as of August 31st, which is a shame, as I use that API in my SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary app (available in the Android marketplace).

I'm going to be switching over to the unofficial version 2 SmartFM which is JSON rather than XML based, so I'm trying to rework the app before the August 31st deadline. I managed to get some preliminary JSON communications going, and since the android test harness is too damn slow I created a separate standalone non-android Java SmartFM JSON client library. So now I'm just about ready to blast through all the old XML communications and change to JSON, but first I wanted to check that this separate library was actually going to work as an android plugin, particularly since I had pulled in a different JSON library to get the standalone test framework to work.

So I created a brand new Android Shell to check that the linkage worked, and it was good, but I started wondering if I shouldn't be forking my existing codebase since I want to be able to apply small fixes to that, and perhaps pull them directly into the new codebase. Also, I need to work quickly to get this all done by the August 31st deadline, so I likely don't have time for the complete rewrite I would like ("release early, release often"), however maintaining a long term fork seems rather involved. I found a walk through of how to do that:

http://programblings.com/2008/07/21/setting-up-a-long-term-fork-with-git/

On balance it seems more trouble that its worth, so I'm going to work with a new repository and move things over piecemeal. Still I'll try and move code over without trying to fix too much, as experience tells me that trying to fix too many issues at once is asking for trouble. The main issues I want to address are removing global variables and unsightly spaghetti code, making the voice recognition auto search, and streamline the content creation process. Better get that JSON stuff working first though :-)

Teaching Internet Programming at HPU Fall 2010

2010-07-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a course on Internet Programming this fall at Hawaii Pacific University (HPU). If you are interested is understanding more about how fantastically useful webservices from Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook can be consumed by 2D web browser Javascript, Mobile Phones, Second Life 3D scripting language and others to create cool mashups, do sign up for this course. I'll cover as many new topics as I can fit in, including HTML5, JQuery, selling goods on the Second Life marketplace, etc.

The full course materials will be online so you can take the course from anywhere in the world, and even if you are not enrolled full time in HPU, you can sign up for single courses by going to the following link:

http://www.hpu.edu/index.cfm?contentID=373

Here's the official course blurb:

CSCI 3632, Internet Programming: Fall 2010

Discover how webservices are changing the programming game. Stop rewriting the same tired code and outsource the heavy lifting to Google, Amazon, Yahoo and others. This course will focus on RESTful webservices, as promoted by the open source community. We'll look at how multiple clients, such as browser-embedded javascript and 3D World Second Life embedded Linden Scripting Language, can access RESTful web services to quickly create useful mashups from the Google Maps & Document APIs, Facebook/Twitter APIs. By the end of this course you'll be fully versed in how to make your own webservices using Ruby on Rails, and how to script light-weight components that leverage them in online 2D and 3D clients.

Taught online by Samuel Joseph, Ph.D.

TextBooks:

RESTful Web Services: Web services for the real world by Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby. O'Reilly Media. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260

Scripting Your World: The Official Guide to Second Life Scripting (Paperback) by Dana Moore et al. Sybex. http://syw.fabulo.us/

JavaScript: The Good Parts Unearthing the Excellence in JavaScript, by Douglas Crockford. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748

Collaborative Telepresence using Skype

2010-02-18T12:59:00.001-08:00

So I've been thinking about what I call "Collaborative Telepresence" for a while now. Basically the idea is that you are mobile and you send a video feed to your friend at their desktop (or also mobile). Your friend sees something of interest in your video feed, indicates it (with a cursor or similar) and that video feed comes back to you in real time so you can see what they are pointing at.

I see this as being useful when you are at the grocery store and your better half is at home and want's to point out what you should buy, but it should work for any situation where you have a "field operative" and an "expert" who is trying to advise from a another location. What will totally rock is when we can do this over mobile phones.

I worked out a way to jury rig a system like this by using Skype. Skype allows you to both transmit video feed from a webcam and also to share your screen. To set things up, start a Skype call and have the "field operative" broadcast video. Once the "expert" can see the video feed, have them share their screen back to the field operative. Specifically the part of the screen that has the incoming video. Then, when the "expert" moves their mouse cursor (sometimes you might need to have them grab a file icon if the cursor is too small) over a part of the incoming remote feed it can be seen by the "field operative".

In order to get the mobile "field operative" flavour I ran a demo that involved strapping a UMPC to my chest - running skype on it, and outputting the video to a pair of heads up display built into a pair of Oakley sunglasses (see image). This allowed me to operate as a "field operative" in my yard with my wife (the "expert") telling me which Mangos were ready to pick off our tree and which were not.

Skype is on Android and iPhone, but doesn't have video support yet. Here's hoping that will come soon so my wife can instruct my activities at numerous remote locations :-)

Mobile Social Navigation apps

2009-12-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

I recently read two mobile social navigation studies, Barkhuus et al (2008) and Bilandzic et al (2008), that I wish I had conducted myself (particularly Barkhuus et al). Although the results from Bilandzic et al that people were unlikely to phone complete strangers for help finding coffee shops did seem somewhat obvious :-) Interestingly the solution to this problem that Bilandzic et al suggest is similar to the awareness approach taken by Barkhuus et al. So a very interesting couple of papers to read in parallel.

Furthermore some interesting notes about recent commercial technological developments. The CityFlocks system developed by Bilandzic et al has for the most part been replicated by the default google maps application on android phones, in that if you now search for a restaurant on an android phone you get an aggregated list of the reviews of that restaurant from multiple review sites, which includes some information about the reviewer (i.e. their name), if not their contact details. This functionality is not yet available on the iPhone google maps, although it is slated to become available in the future. Latest updates about google mobile stuff here: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/

Similarly the functionality developed for Connecto by Barkhuus is almost completely replicated by Google Latitude (http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html) in that you can see the locations of your friends, and you can set your location manually or automatically. The big thing missing from Google latitude (which runs on iPhone (in browser) and Android) when compared with Connecto is that it doesn't appear to run in the background (at least on the iPhone) and doesn't integrate the information about friend status into the contact list, which I think is one of Connecto's great features. I'm assuming that this kind of integration (friend location and contact list) will be hard on the iPhone, potentially easy on android. Here's a nice blog post showing you what google latitude looks like on the android:

http://androidcommunity.com/google-latitude-location-sharing-app-hitting-android-20090204/

Also of potential interest is that google maps on the android now supports layers, e.g. wikipedia, traffic, your google my maps and more. Here's a link on that:

http://www.streetmapmobile.com/20091203/google-maps-for-mobile-layers-2

We live in "interesting times", and it seems like Google is behind a lot of it :-)

Economic Thoughts

2009-11-28T01:20:00.001-08:00

Probably due to listening to NPR again I have been having economic thoughts about how odd it is that people's willingness to expose themselves to debt affects the bottom line of many businesses, which in turn affects the disposable income of people who might be employed by those businesses, which links back to consumer spending power.

Seems like a steady state might not be possible, i.e. just endless cycles of boom and bust. Still I wonder if there is some way to quantify the value produced by working for a lifetime, or for just one hour, that would allow us to calculate the extent to which an individual or a society is overexposing themselves in terms of debt? Problem is that it is highly non-static and that value is in the eye of the beholder.

However, perhaps we can think of our monthly icomes as indicative of the worth that society places on what we are doing. Money is strange. I guess it is straightforward to work out debt exposure based on monthly income, but somehow the relationship between money and value seems a little broken ... e.g. We can be doing all sorts of things that we don't immediately get paid for, but produce longer term benefits, like raising children, or networking with colleagues. Guess I'm just wondering if there are any economic alternatives to money ...

Mobile Programming @HPU Spring 2010

2009-11-02T15:56:00.000-08:00

I'm teaching a mobile programming course at Hawaii Pacific University (HPU) in the Spring. Will focus on iPhone and Android. Here's the link to sign up for single courses at HPU if you're not already enrolled there:

http://www.hpu.edu/index.cfm?contentID=373

I'll be teaching in HPU's mac lab so we'll cover both iPhone and Android programming. The plan is for every class member (or team) to have an app published in the iPhone app store and the Android marketplace by the end of the course.

Gravity thought experiments

2009-10-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

For some reason (probably reading my son "The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System"), I started wondering about gravity. I was wondering why my sensation of gravity is just being pulled down, and not to the sides as well. I guess the mass to either side of me in the Earth is roughly equal and thus cancels itself out. Which made me wonder how something would fall if you happened to be standing on the edge of a hemisphere, or if there was a cylindrical space running through the center of the Earth. In the later case I would have thought that something might fall down past the Earth's center overshoot, and them fall back, oscillating until it eventually came to rest a the center. Not sure about the hemisphere example. Seems like something dropped might actually fall diagonally. Of course the natural rest state of objects large enough to have noticeable gravity is a sphere, so such toroidal or hemispherical objects would not occur without some kind of intervention. The funny thing about gravity is that all matter attracts other matter. I don't notice being sucked towards the computer because it has so little mass, but the mass of the Earth is huge and sucks me towards it. I wonder if there are objects in the universe massive enough for gravity to be noticed, but in different shapes so that the force of gravity is felt in directions other than straight down ...?

SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary Upgrade

2009-10-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

So I released an upgrade (1.0.1) of the SmartFM android client, adjusting the media type for audio uploads (although the AMR uploads are still only audible on the phone and not the main site) and disabling the voice input when the google speech recognition package is not available. This latter was in response to a marketplace comment from Zom-B about force closing on voice button.

Of course this makes me want to say a few things about the marketplace comments, which are potentially a great resource, but are kind of odd in that they can be signed under any name, and there is no way to reliably communicate back with the people who made the comments. For example, originally SuaveAfro made the comment that the app should support downloading other people's lists. I replied to SuaveAfro in my own comment explaining that that functionality was included. Subsequently SuaveAfro became Havoc, and so I updated my own comment accordingly, but that moved my comment away from the one it was referring to. I guess the solution is that I should update my comment to reflect whatever is my response to the most recent comment, but it seems less than optimal. Would be nice if the commenting framework could link directly to a discussion forum on that app, but I guess that's overkill. Comments are a simple solution - would be nice if they were at least linked to a user's email so I could have a fighting chance of getting responses back to users who are unlikely to look at the comments again after their first download ...

SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary live in Android Marketplace!

2009-09-17T10:15:00.001-07:00

So shortly after my last blog post, I managed to get my SmartFm mobile study dictionary app live in the Android Marketplace. I think I finally managed to set it up so it won't conflict with the ADC version of the same app.

In less than 24 hours the app jumped into the the 100-500 downloads range, and we got some great feedback and ratings. Steve O's comment that it was "Very easy to use and definitions are very accurate. Excellent!" was music to my ears. I can't accept that praise without thanking Robert Brewer, George Lee, Viil Lid, Karhai Chu and Kim Binsted at the University of Hawaii for input on the developing interface, and huge thanks to the SmartFM team for their input on all aspects of application and various adjustments to the API to make everything connect up properly.

When I woke up this morning there was another comment from SuaveAfro, about wanting the app to allow the user to download other people's lists. I've commented back that other user's lists can be downloaded through the "Search Lists" function in the menu tab, although it is not an easy function to find, since you have to click "More" in the menu to get there. That is partly intentional, as the focus of the app is on items rather than lists, but I have to concede I haven't put up a help manual or anything that explains all that. I was so focused on the ADC submission that there is not much in the way of online support materials, and only a cursory help system on the app itself. I'll do my best to make better documentation available, but in the meantime I'll put as much as I can on this blog to help users of the application.

Video describing SmartFM Android Application

2009-09-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

So the other week I submitted an android application to the second Android Developers Challenge (ADC). There's over a million dollars in prize money up for grabs from Google in the second such competition. Last time android was only available on emulators, but now the devices are out, so competition will be fierce.

I've put together a short video about my app, the SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary, which shows you how I integrated the Google Speech Recognition component and got multimedia content creation working. I'm real excited about this application because now any user can create study content (focused on languages at the moment) on the go, uploading sounds and images. So say you learn a new word in the language you are studying you can check what it means using the dictionary, and if it doesn't exist, add the entry there and then. If it is there, you get helpful info on the word and its usage, and you can add new example sentences and usages you've discovered, with images and audio to illustrate.

The results from the ADC won't be in till late November, and owners of android devices should be able to vote on the best apps later this month (please vote for me :-), but I'll release this to the market before then, once I've worked out a few bugs.

Please check out the video and let me know what you think:

SmartFmMobileStudyDictionary.mov

Android: displaying one dialog after another

2009-08-07T19:54:00.000-07:00

So having got my progress bar dialog to appear I now find myself prevented from displaying a second dialog to announce the results of the long running action.

Here is the code:


   final ProgressDialog myOtherProgressDialog = new ProgressDialog(
     this);
   myOtherProgressDialog.setTitle("Please Wait ...");
   myOtherProgressDialog.setMessage("Adding item to study list ...");
   myOtherProgressDialog.setIndeterminate(true);
   myOtherProgressDialog.setCancelable(true);

   // TODO spinner not showing for some reason ...
   final AlertDialog dialog = new AlertDialog.Builder(this).create();

   final Thread add = new Thread() {
    public void run() {
     AddItemResult add_item_result = addItemToList(
       Main.default_study_list_id,
       (String) item.item_node.atts.get("id"));
     
     dialog.setTitle(add_item_result.getTitle());
     dialog.setMessage(add_item_result.getMessage());
     dialog.setButton("OK",
       new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
        public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog,
          int which) {
        
         return;
        }
       });
     
     myOtherProgressDialog.dismiss();
     //Looper.prepare();
     dialog.show();
    }
   };
   myOtherProgressDialog.setButton("Cancel",
     new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
      public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
       add.interrupt();
      }
     });
   OnCancelListener ocl = new OnCancelListener() {
    public void onCancel(DialogInterface arg0) {
     add.interrupt();
    }
   };
   myOtherProgressDialog.setOnCancelListener(ocl);
   closeMenu();
   myOtherProgressDialog.show();
   add.start();

The problem is that if I just try to show the second dialog I get this error:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Can't create handler inside thread that has not called Looper.prepare()

and if I try and edit the existing progress dialog to show the results of the long running action I am told:

android.view.ViewRoot$CalledFromWrongThreadException: Only the original thread that created a view hierarchy can touch its views.

Which is a bit frustrating. Is my only option to display results in a completely new activity?

Android dialog not appearing after menu action

2009-08-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

So I have been having reasonable success getting progress dialogs to show up in android. It all seems to rely on showing the progress dialog and then starting whatever is the long running process in another thread, e.g.

 private void loadItem(Activity activity, final String item_id) {
ProgressDialog myProgressDialog = new ProgressDialog(activity);
myProgressDialog.setTitle("Please Wait ...");
myProgressDialog.setMessage("Loading item ...");
myProgressDialog.setIndeterminate(true);
myProgressDialog.setCancelable(true);

final ItemDownload item_download = new ItemDownload(activity,
myProgressDialog) {
public Vector downloadCall(SmartFmLookup lookup) {
return lookup.item(item_id);
}
};
myProgressDialog.setButton("Cancel",
new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
item_download.interrupt();
}
});
OnCancelListener ocl = new OnCancelListener() {
public void onCancel(DialogInterface arg0) {
item_download.interrupt();
}
};
myProgressDialog.setOnCancelListener(ocl);
myProgressDialog.show();

item_download.start();
}

I've even managed to support user cancellation. All good; however I have a more complex situation where the progress dialog is supposed to be displayed after hitting a menu button, and then replaced with another dialog that shows the results of the process; which is followed by a second progress dialog. In this case the first progress dialog never appears but the result dialog and second progress dialog do. I've tried removing all the other dialogs, but the initial progress dialog still never shows up - it gets stuck on the clicked menu button (see image).

Here's the code with subsequent dialogs stripped out:


public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem menu_item) {
switch (menu_item.getItemId()) {
case ADD_TO_LIST_ID: {
// send command to add to list - need spinner?

final ProgressDialog myOtherProgressDialog = new ProgressDialog(
this);
myOtherProgressDialog.setTitle("Please Wait ...");
myOtherProgressDialog.setMessage("Adding item to study list ...");
myOtherProgressDialog.setIndeterminate(true);
myOtherProgressDialog.setCancelable(true);

// TODO spinner not showing for some reason ...

final Thread add = new Thread() {
public void run() {
AddItemResult add_item_result = addItemToList(
Main.default_study_list_id,
(String) item.item_node.atts.get("id"));

}
};
myOtherProgressDialog.setButton("Cancel",
new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
add.interrupt();
}
});
OnCancelListener ocl = new OnCancelListener() {
public void onCancel(DialogInterface arg0) {
add.interrupt();
}
};
myOtherProgressDialog.setOnCancelListener(ocl);
myOtherProgressDialog.show();
add.run();


break;
}
}
return super.onOptionsItemSelected(menu_item);
}

I think the solution must require programmatic closing of the menu popup. I did find this post on how to open it. I was hoping to use that to open the menu bar at the beginning of my app, but calling that from the OnCreate method causes this error:

android.view.WindowManager$BadTokenException: Unable to add window -- token null is not valid; is your activity running?

However it seems I can use something similar to close the menu panel:


    public void closeMenu(){
        this.getWindow().closePanel(Window.FEATURE_OPTIONS_PANEL);
    }

However, even after shutting the open menu panel, I still don't get to see the progress dialog.

Ah, found the problem, I was calling add.run() instead of add.start, so the new Thread was never spawned. Duh!!!

Android audio formats - converting to mp3

2009-07-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

So Android support recording of audio in the 3GPP/AMR format, however it seems that there is no built in support for conversion to mp3 which is what I need to be able to upload audio to a web service I am working with.

Apparently we can extract the AMR core from a 3GPP file but it seems I need some audio conversion library ...

One way round this might be to upload the file to another service that could do the conversion. There are various online conversion services, but I can't seem to find one that will do 3gpp to mp3.

I had also thought that there might be something in the android marketplace (and then I could outsource the conversion but still run it on the device), and there is one app, but it has a lot of reviews suggesting it does not work and may even be a virus.

There appear to be some people who have succeeded in porting ffmpeg to android:

http://discuz-android.blogspot.com/2008/12/struct-ipv6mreq-has-no-member-named.html
http://gitorious.org/~olvaffe/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-android

However, so far I have failed to even get ffmpeg to work from the command line with files extracting from the android simulator:

http://www.hiteshagrawal.com/ffmpeg/converting-audiovideos-using-ffmpeg

ffmpeg is open source, but I am not sure how to deploy code other than java to android.

So I guess I am going to give up on uploading audio from android and see if I can get images uploaded, and come back to this after I have some more input ..

Sen et al (2007) Learning to Identify Beneficial Partners

2009-07-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

Cited by 4 [ATGSATOP]

So this is another paper in my attempt to finish the background reading for an invited paper in the AP2PC'07 workshop proceedings. I believe I found this one following a citation trail from Ben-Ami and Shehory (2007) and I think I grabbed it because it had "learning" in the title. Peer to Peer is mentioned in passing, but this paper is really about a multi-agent system where individual agents have learning capabilities. I know the first author from a panel session in AP2PC'05, so that is another connection, but I can't really remember if I had some more complex motivation for printing out this particular paper last October.

In principle I am reading this to help illuminate some of the ways that agent research can be of benefit to P2P researchers, but there is a part of me that is just interested in mathematical and algorithmic characterizations of "learning". The paper itself introduces parallels between human and artificial agents trying to make critical choices about interaction partners; and this makes me think of the human interaction analogies in Ian Clarkes Masters thesis on Freenet, my own intuitions about pruning search in my NeuroGrid system, as well as the agent modelling in the paper I co-authored with Ben Tse and Raman Paranjape. We are all humans and we interact with other humans most days, and so I guess it is no surprise that this sort of analogy crops up again and again; however I think there is a pitfall here. Sometimes the analogies breakdown and our intuitions lead us astray - I think this is the case with mobile agents where our human experience of the greater efficiency of human face to face interaction suggests that sending a mobile agent across a network should be more efficient than static agents communicating with each other when in fact it is difficult to predict the relative efficiency of the two methods for mobile agents (Joseph & Kawamura, 2001).

The goal of the authors research is to try and discover which learning schemes will sustain mutually beneficial partnerships between agents. Apparently algorithms which achieve equilibria in repeated play have so far been restricted to two-player situations. This paper examines a population of agents that learn through the reinforcement technique of Q-learning (Watkins & Dayan, 1992). The authors restrict their system to one where agents search through repetitive personal interaction; not through referral.

In the authors system each agent is of a particular type, and has preferences to interact with agents of other types. Thus the potential reward that agents achieve through interacting with each other is a matrix of agents against types; and the matrix is designed such that some optimal solution of agent partnerships exists where no agent can get a greater reward by switching to interact with other agents. Since the matrix of rewards is unknown to the agents, the Q-learning technique is used to update agents estimates of the rewards of interacting with each other. Q-learning updates estimates through a combination of earlier experiences of reward with the current experience. The extent to which experience influences current estimates is not varied, and the alpha parameter that determines this is not mentioned again in the paper, making a replication difficult. However, in order to vary the agents level of explorative behaviour, i.e. the extent to which agents try out new interactions, the authors adjust the probability with which the agents select a random agent to interact with, rather than the one recommended by the Q-learning estimate. By adjusting this probability over time exploratory behaviour is gradually reduced in what seems like a sort of simulated annealing.

No particular justification is given for the particular parameter settings or the approach used, leading me to wonder what the basis for this approach is. Are these techniques similar to others in the literature, or are they based on any empirical observations of real-world phenomena? Nonetheless, initial simulation results in a static environment show that a slow decay of exploratory behaviour is associated with the system taking longer to achieve equilibrium, but also with a higher final average payoff for the agents. This certainly makes intuitive sense.

In subsequent simulations dynamic environments are explored where agents die off and are replaced if they fail to achieve a sufficiently high payoff within a certain timeframe. As the environment becomes tougher and agents are killed off more quickly it takes longer and longer for the system to reach a stable equilibrium, although this can be mitigated by reducing the level of exploratory behaviour (see figure d is rate at which exploratory behaviour decays). Again this makes intuitive sense.

In further simulations we see that protecting young agents can also help the system achieve equilibrium sooner, which also makes intuitive sense, and makes me think of the use of karma in online communities; or at least the way that new users will be given an initial chunk of reward or karma points. Not sure how strong the parallel is here, but I guess you could model an online community in terms of multi-agents looking for beneficial interactions. New users are entering the community at a certain rate, and not hanging around indefinitely. They will need to have positive interactions within a certain time period before they will effectively remove themselves from the community; which makes me think of that paper that shows the effect of existing social network patterns on incoming users (wasn't it something to do with closed triangular relations) - should re-read that for my thesis project, if I can find it (probably in disCourse somewhere).

In a final section the authors experiment with introducing noise and we see that noise can have a similar effect to prolonging exploratory behaviour, i.e. taking longer to get to equilibrium, but perhaps finding a higher optimum. My main concern with all this is the relationship to the real world where systems may spend much of their time away form equilibrium. I see connections to other work that I have done on the evolution of intelligence (where we compared our models with populations of animals in the real world) and online communities, but a lot of the modeling decisions seem to be soewhat arbitrary. It would be nice to know what was motivating them.

My references:

Joseph S. & Kawamura T. (2001) Why Autonomy Makes the Agent. In Agent Engineering, Eds. Liu, J, Zhong, N, Tang, Y.Y. and Wang P. World, Scientific Publishing.

Sandip Sen, Anil Gursel, & Stephane Airiau (2007). Learning to identify beneficial partners Working Notes of the Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop at AAMAS

Ben-Ami & Shehory (2005) A Comparative Evaluation of Agent Location Mechanisms in Large Scale MAS

2009-07-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Cited by 3 [ATGSATOP]

So this was one of the papers I printed out last year since it cited Koubarakis (2003), and am reading as part of trying to put together an invited paper for the AP2PC 2007 workshop proceedings. Putting together the proceedings and the invited paper has been a somewhat ill fated process interrupted by the death of my father, the collapse of the industry grant that was funding my position at University of Hawaii, and the birth of my twin sons! I am back on track now, although new crises loom on the horizon I am actually making some progress reading all the papers I printed out last October (Sycara, 1998; Sycara, 1991; Rosenschein, 1993; Koubarakis, 2003). If I can just hang in there I can wrap this thing up by the end of the summer - fingers crossed.

So after reading this paper I think I probably should have been reading Shehory (2000) which describes the distributed agent location mechanism that this paper is evaluating in comparison with centralized location mechanisms. However this is the one I had printed out, so partly not to waste the paper, and also because it is easier to read paper papers when pushing the twin stroller around I am sticking with this. It also reflects my earlier literature searching tendencies to print out things that look interesting without necessarily doing sufficient investigation to find the critical highly-cited papers in a particular domain; but enough of that.

This paper was presented at AAMAS 2005, which I attended. It describes a number of problems associated with centralized location services

the middle agent that supplies the directory services becomes one of the system failure points and/or communication bottlenecks

although no academic or industry systems are cited. I get the feeling that the problems described are based on observations of toy systems and simulations rather than on experience with really large scale systems. I may be wrong, but the paper is not really providing me re-assurance to the contrary. The paper mentions the P2P approach, but only the flooding model is considered rather than anything more sophisticated like a distributed hashtable (DHT) although this is understandable given the year of publication. Compared to simulations of P2P systems, the testing of simply random and grid networks seems a little overly simplistic. Furthermore the efforts at generalizability are restricted to a fixed number of repeat runs rather than an assessment of the number of runs needed to achieve a particular confidence level. Of course the same criticism could be leveled at most P2P simulation studies.

The main conclusions of the paper are as follows:

the response time of a distributed location mechanism is significantly better than the response time of a centralized one, in particular for large scale MAS (see fig 1 above). This result does not hold, however, in capability-deprived MAS, where a centralized mechanism will perform better.
it is evident that a centralized location mechanism is very sensitive to workloads. At a medium to high load, in particular in large MAS, the centralized mechanism will perform poorly, whereas the distributed one will hardly be affected.
the advantages of the distributed solution do come at the cost of a communication overhead

Although it feels like these follow logically from the definition of distributed and centralized location systems. It is not clear that we necessarily need simulations to confirm these assertions. So overall I don't come away thinking that P2P researchers would find much of interest in this paper, except in so far as to see the parallel concepts in the two fields, but I have to concede that this may be the right paper for some agents researchers to read in order to see the applicability of the P2P approach. So let us say that I was slightly disappointed by the level of this paper, but it would be unfair to judge the potential contribution of agents to P2P based on this one paper, and I think my overall opinion is turning. It might be helped by reading Shehory (2000), but right now I am going to forge on with the other papers I have printed out.

David Ben-Ami, & Onn Shehory (2005). A comparative evaluation of agent location mechanisms in large scale MAS Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, 339-346 DOI: 10.1145/1082473.1082525

References

Barabasi, A. L., Albert, R., "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks" (Cited by 6145). Science, page 286(509), 1999.
David Ben-Ami, Onn Shehory, "Evaluation of Distributed and Centralized Agent Location Mechanisms", Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents VI, p.264-278, September 18-20, 2002
Clarke I., Sandberg O., Wiley B., Hong T. W., "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System" (Cited by 1760). Proceedings of the ICSI Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability. Berkeley, CA, 2000.
Decker K., Sycara K., Williamson M. "Middle-Agents for the Internet" (Cited by 398) .Proceedings of IJCAI-97, pages 578--583, Nagoya Japan 1997.
Dimakopoulos V. V., Pitoura E., "A Peer-to-Peer Approach to Resource Discovery in Multi-agent Systems" (Cited by 13). Proceedings of. CIA 2003: pages 62--77.
Michael R. Genesereth, Steven P. Ketchpel, Software agents, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.48-ff., July 1994 
Gibbins, N. and Hall, W. "Scalability Issues for Query Routing Service Discovery" (Cited by 19). Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Infrastructure for Agents, MAS and Scalable MAS (2001), pages 209--217.
Adriana Iamnitchi, Ian Foster, Daniel C. Nurmi, "A Peer-to-Peer Approach to Resource Location in Grid Environments", Proceedings of the 11 th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing HPDC-11 20002 (HPDC'02), p.419, July 24-26, 2002
Somesh Jha, Prasad Chalasani, Onn Shehory, Katia Sycara, "A formal treatment of distributed matchmaking" (poster), Proceedings of the second international conference on Autonomous agents, p.457-458, May 10-13, 1998, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Koubarakis M., "Multi-agent Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing: Methods, Systems, and Challenges" (Cited by 12). Proceedings of. CIA 2003 pages 46--61.
Kuokka D., Harada L., "Matchmaking for information agents" (Cited by 100). Proceedings of IJCAI-95, pages 672--679, 1995.
Elth Ogston, Stamatis Vassiliadis, "Matchmaking among minimal agents without a facilitator", Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents, p.608-615, May 2001, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
Onn Shehory, A Scalable Agent Location Mechanism, 6th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents VI, Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL),, p.162-172, July 15-17, 1999
Smithson A., Moreau L., "Engineering an Agent-Based Peer-To-Peer Resource Discovery System" (Cited by 3). In Gianluca Moro and Manolis Koubarakis, editors, First International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, pages 69--80, Bologna, Italy, July 2002.
Srinivasan N. et al., "Enabling Peer-to-Peer Resource Discovery in Agent Environment" (Cited by 1). Proceedings of Challenges in Open Agent Systems (AAMAS 2002), July 2002.
Stoica I., Morris R., Karger D., Kasshoek M. F., Balakrishnan H., "Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for Internet Applications" (Cited by 6651). Technical Report TR-819, MIT, March 2001.
Vitaglione G., Quarta F. and Cortese E., "Scalability and Performance of JADE Message Transport System" (Cited by 38). Proceedings of the AAMAS Workshop on AgentCities, Bologna, 2002.
Watts, D. J., Strogatz, S. H, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small World' Networks" (Cited by 7766). Nature, 393: pages 440--442, 1998.
A Taxonomy of Middle-Agents for the Internet, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems (ICMAS-2000), p.465, July 10-12, 2000
Yolum P., Singh M. P., "An Agent-Based Approach for Trustworthy Service Location" (Cited by 13). Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, Bologna, Italy 2002.
Bin Yu, Munindar P. Singh, "A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities", Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents IV, The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace, p.154-165, July 07-09, 2000

Kim (2008) The Role of Task-Induced Involvement and Learner Proficiency in L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

2009-06-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

Cited by 1 [ATGSATOP]

Another paper that I am reading as part of a meta-analysis of second language vocabulary learning. I had started to read this and then paused for three weeks while I read three background theoretical papers (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001; Hulstijn, 2001; Hulstijin, 2003) that made this one much easier to understand.

This paper is an experimental study in two parts designed to test L&H's involvement load hypothesis. One concern is control of time on task, since this varied in L&H's experimental attempt to assess involvement load hypothesis. Knight (1994) apparently brings this issue up in general for things like dictionary look up tasks. All through I was concerned with precisely how vocabulary knowledge was being measured. Like Folse (2006) Kim used the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS; Paribahkt & Wesche, 1993) but I still wonder what L&H used - later on it is described as providing L1 translation or English explanations. Laufer's (2003) experiment gave support for different performance based on different levels of involvement load, however another experiment in the set gave varying performance for three tasks that were supposed to have the same involvement load (distribution was different?). Am keen to know Laufer's explanation of that - that paper also on our reading list?

Laufer (2001) apparently indicates that involvement load construct should generalise from textual to face to face audio situations, which I had assumed, but good to be able to reference that assertion given the wide range of studies we are applying the concept to. I was unsure of the meaning of interactionally modified input versus interactionaly modified output, and in particular the concept of premodified input, although this is in the context of L&H(2001) that I guess I should be reading.

I was concerned about the random assignment implications of the split between the two experiments. One of the experimental groups from the first experiment is compared with a group constructed for the second experiment, which I think was run subsequently, and although similar had a slightly different mix of ages and nationalities.

Another concern is that it seems we could explain results independently of involvement load. In the reading condition the learners attention is only drawn to the target words through emphasis and glossing. In the gap-fill condition the learners attention is drawn to 15 words, and in the composition and sentence writing conditions the learners attention is drawn to the 10 words they will be tested on. Purely in terms of attention one might expect to see the results that were achieved. In the experiment that tested the three different involvement load levels, the immediate post test only distinguished the composition group as significantly higher, while the delayed post test distinguished all three - there was no interaction or main effect for proficiency level. The second experiment made no distinction between the composition and sentence-writing tasks. I had been wondering earlier if the results could all be explained in terms of receptive/productive or active/passive differences, although the significant difference between reading and gap-fill at post-test could not, but now I realise that there were 15 words being brought to attention in the gap-fill task, it seems that the results can all be explained in terms of attentional resources. Another question is whether the comprehension questions needed understanding of the target words in order to be answered (looking at appendix b I would say not really).

I am concerned about the bias of using the VKS tests, and the author expresses some concerns as well. I find the alleged pedagogical implications sit uneasily with me, since I am not sure that showing a benefit on a VKS test necessarily indicates that the learner has gained something of importance. The key problem here is that the VKS sentence generation task could represent various sorts of ability on the part of the learner, e.g. that they memorized a sentence containing the word versus actually generating a novel sentence. In particular it seems that if a learner was specifically practicing sentence generation or doing essay composition for a particular set of vocabulary that this would increase performance on the test through a practice effect. It seems to be obvious that practicing a productive skill would lead to higher performance on productive tests, whereas practicing a receptive skill would lead to benefits on receptive tests. The question I would like to know the answer to is what kind of transfer do we get cross-task, and thus motivational concerns aside, what is the most efficient approach to take to maximise ability on both receptive and productive tasks.

Reading proofs of our soon to be publshed paper on vocabulary study (Joseph et al. 2009) I am struck that as we discuss how to make tests more and more challenging, we are not addressing the goal of the language learner. We are arguing that gradually more challenging tasks maintains motivation and boosts long term retention, but the real question should be what is the long term task that the learner wants to succeed at. Clearly looking up a word in a dictionary can help a learner understand a sentence they are reading. The question is then whether other activity related to that word should be undertaken. The usual argument in L2 is that if nothing else is done then exposure to low frequency words will be insufficient for the learner to avoid having to look the word up again in future. I guess the real question is whether some sort of "artificial" re-exposure to the word will be a more efficient way of increasing the likelihood of future sentence comprehension, versus using that same time to just do more reading ... and what kind of experiment could actually test which approach was more efficient? I guess one could have learners perform a reading comprehension task, and then have one group perform another reading comprehension task, while a second group did vocabulary review, and then both groups would be tested on another reading comprehension task that was of comparable level and contained similar words. So for this kind of experiment we would need three different texts of comparable length, involving the same "target" vocabulary?

Depending on the results of such an experiment an argument could be made to say that although explicit vocabulary study was not recommended, that selection of subsequent texts for additional comprehension practice could be selected based on which words were looked up by a learner, in order to increase the chances of a rewarding experience - which is linked to overall motivation issue, i.e. should the learner be reading anything other than texts they specifically select themselves?

[A great deal of research has shown that when learners study definitions alone their ability to comprehend text containing the target words does not improve (Graves, 1986; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986)] from Joseph et al. (2009), so I wonder if doing essay composition, or gap filling leads to improvements in text comprehension.

[N.B. The Kim paper also references some more studies showing the importance of negotiation that I was previously associating with Newton (1995), i.e. de la Fuente (2002) and Joe (1995, 1998) although latter focused on generative rather than negotiated tasks?]

Kim, Y. (2008). The Role of Task-Induced Involvement and Learner Proficiency in L2 Vocabulary Acquisition Language Learning, 58 (2), 285-325 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00442.x

My References

Joseph S.R.H., Watanabe Y., Shiung Y.-J., Choi B. & Robbins C. (2009) Key Aspects of Computer Assisted Vocabulary Learning (CAVL): Combined Effects of Media, Sequencing and Task Type. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning. 4(2) 1-36.

Kim's References

Arlov, P. (2000). Wordsmith: A guide to college writing (Cited by 3). Upper Saddler River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Barcroft, J. (2002). Semantic and structural elaboration in L2 lexical acquisition (Cited by 34). Language Learning, 52(2), 323–363.
Baddeley, A. D. (1978). The trouble with levels: A reexamination of Craik and Lockhart (Cited by 190)’s framework for memory research. Psychological Review, 85, 139–152.
Brown, T. S., & Perry, F. L., Jr. (1991). A comparison of three learning strategies for ESL vocabulary acquisition, TESOL Quarterly, 25, 655–671.
Cho, K-S., & Krashen, S. (1994). Acquisition of vocabulary from the Sweet Valley Kids Series: Adult ESL acquisition. Journal of Reading, 37, 662–667.
Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research (Cited by 3428). Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671–684.
Craik, F. I. M., & Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory (Cited by 1346). Journal of Experimental Psychology; General, 104, 268–294.
de la Fuente, M. J. (2002). Negotiation and oral acquisition of L2 vocabulary: The roles of input and output in the receptive and productive acquisition of words. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 81–112.
Ellis, N. C. (2001). Memory for language (Cited by 97). In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 33–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellis, R., & He, X. (1999). The role of modified input and output in the incidental acquisition of word meaning (Cited by 0). Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 285–301.
Ellis, R., Tanaka, Y., & Yamazaki, A. (1994). Classroom interaction, comprehension, and L2 vocabulary acquisition (Cited by 19). Language Learning, 44, 449–491.
Howell, D. C. (2002). Statistical methods for psychology (Cited by 3067) (5th ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Duxbury.
Hulstijn, J. H., Hollander, M., & Greidanus, T. (1996). Incidental vocabulary learning by advanced foreign language students: The influence of marginal glosses,
dictionary use, and reoccurrence of unknown words (Cited by 185). The Modern Language Journal, 80, 327–339.
Hulstijn, J. H., & Laufer, B. (2001). Some empirical evidence for the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary acquisition (Cited by 91). Language Learning, 51, 539–558.
Joe, A. (1995). Text-based tasks and incidental vocabulary learning (Cited by 44). Second Language Research, 11, 149–158.
Joe, A. (1998). What effects do text-based tasks promoting generation have on incidental vocabulary acquisition (Cited by 62)? Applied Linguistics, 19, 357–377.
Knight, S. M. (1994). Dictionary use while reading: The effects on comprehension and vocabulary acquisition for students of different verbal abilities (Cited by 150). Modern Language Journal, 78, 285–299.
Laufer, B. (2000). Electronic dictionaries and incidental vocabulary acquisition: Does technology make a difference (Cited by 20)? In U. Heid, S. Evert, E. Lehmann, & C. Rohrer (Eds.), EURALEX (pp. 849–854). Stuttgart: Stuttgart University Press.
Laufer, B. (2001). Reading, word-focused activities and incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language (Cited by 15). Prospect, 16(3), 44–54.
Laufer, B. (2003). Vocabulary acquisition in a second language: Do learners really acquire most vocabulary by reading (Cited by 44)? Some empirical evidence. Canadian Modern Language Review, 59, 567–587.
Laufer, B., & Hulstijn, J. H. (2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: The construct of task-induced involvement (Cited by 150). Applied Linguistics, 22, 1–26.
Luppescu, S., & Day, R. R. (1993). Reading, dictionaries and vocabulary learning (Cited by 99). Language Learning, 43, 263–287.
Nassaji, H. (2002). Schema theory and knowledge-based processes in second language reading comprehension: A need for alternative perspectives (Cited by 46). Language Learning, 52(2), 439–482.
Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language (Cited by 807). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newton, J. (1995). Task-based interaction and incidental vocabulary learning: A case study (Cited by 39). Second Language Research, 11, 159–177.
Paribakht, T. S., & Wesche, M. (1993). The relationship between reading comprehension and second language development in a comprehension-based ESL program (Cited by 84). TESL Canada Journal, 11, 9–29. Language Learning 58:2, June 2008, pp. 285–325
Paribakht, T. S., & Wesche, M. (1997). Vocabulary enhancement activities and reading for meaning in second language vocabulary acquisition (Cited by 136). In J. Coady & T. Huckin (Eds.), Second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy (pp.174–200). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pulido, D. (2003). Modeling the role of second language proficiency and topic familiarity in second language incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading (Cited by 38). Language Learning, 53(2), 233–284.
Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rott, S. (2004). A comparison of output interventions and un-enhanced reading conditions on vocabulary acquisition and text comprehension (Cited by 1). The Canadian Modern Language Review, 61(2), 169–202.
Rott, S., Williams, J., & Cameron, R. (2002). The effect of multiple-choice L1 glosses and input-output cycles on lexical acquisition and retention (Cited by 20). Language Teaching Research, 6, 183–222.
Stahl, S. A., & Clark, C. H. (1987). The effects of participatory expectations in classroom discussion on the learning of science vocabulary (Cited by 20). American Educational Research Journal, 24(1), 541–555.
Waring, R., & Takaki, M. (2003). At what rate do learners learn and retain new vocabulary from reading a graded reader (Cited by 46)? Reading in a Foreign Language, 15(2), 130–163.
Wesche, M., & Paribakht, T. S. (1996). Assessing second language vocabulary knowledge: Depth vs (Cited by 7). breadth. Canadian Modern Language Review, 53, 13–39.

Fighting with Android Layouts - lack of row spanning

2009-06-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

So I've been trying to layout a couple of icons, two pieces of text and an image in an Android GUI, and have so far been thwarted from achieving the effect that I desire.

I've tried various arrangements and I still can't get what I want. My initial layout was just to use a simple table layout like the one on the left, which with android:shrinkColumns="1" means that the sentences get wrapped which looks good.

Results from emulator in image on left(translation sound icon is hidden when not available). My only complaint is that the image doesn't span two rows leaving a lot of blank space between sentences. Unfortunately it seems that Android tables don't support row spanning according to this Google groups post.

Next I tried a table within table layout as shown on the left, but try as i might with different combinations of stretch and shrink columns, either the image would get knocked onto the next row (as shown), or when it wasn't the bottom of the text would be cut off.

After that I tried experimenting with RelativeLayouts, where you can specify that one item should be positioned relative to another using syntax like android:layout_toRightOf = "@id/sentence_sound".

My first attempt - shown further down on the left, used a single RelativeLayout inside a table (tables seeming to be the only way to get the text to wrap), and that was probably the best result, given that the translation sound was absent.

You can see from the black image the way the translation sound doesn't line up with the translation from the eclipse GUI. Given the translation sound is usually absent in the content I am dealing with I will go with that for the moment.

The reason for giving up there is that what I thought was my clever final approach - to nest relative layouts, so we had one for the sentence and sound, and a second for the translation and sound, and place one above the other - leads to the complete disappearance of the translation, even though the hierarchy viewer claims that it's there.

I guess what I am attempting to do is a bit of a corner case, but it has been frustrating not to get the layout just as I wanted - almost as frustrating as trying to get all these images lined up in this blog post :-)

Even with these images I would be surprised if anyone can really understand what I'm doing. For replication, I really need an easy way to associate the XML layout files with each imsge. I'll happily provide those if anyone thinks they know a solution.

Koubarakis (2003) Multi-Agent Systems and Peer to Peer Computing: Methods, Systems and Challenges

2009-06-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

So I must have read this paper about 3 or 4 times now. It was originally recommended to me by Gianluca Moro as being a good paper to read about what MultiAgent Systems (MAS) research might have to offer peer to peer (P2P) research. In Koubarakis' opinion the Agents field was slower to pick up tools and techniques from the P2P community than some other fields and that this was disappointing given that:

deployed P2P systems can be considered an interesting case of MAS as pointed out originally [by Finin & Labrou (2000)].

Koubarakis further suggests specifically that:

MAS can readily offer concepts and techniques that can be useful to P2P computing at the application modeling and design level (e.g., ontologies for describing network resources in a semantically meaningful way, protocols for meaning negotiation, P2P system modeling and design methodologies etc.).

Interestingly I was at an Agents conference in 2000 where Tim Finin spoke at the scalability workshop as to how Napster might be "improved" using ontologies, and I remember comments afterwards to the effect that Napster was doing just fine without ontologies. What I keep coming back to here is the question of whether ontologies and sophisticated protocols for meaning negotiation would provide any short-term benefit for P2P system users and developers. I have several layers of comments about this in the paper from my various passes over this point, but the summary is that a sophisticated layer of middle agents on which to base applications could allow developers to avoid re-implementing lower layers again and again, but that any individual developer is not going to have much patience with that kind of system if they don't see some immediate benefit. In addition in the first instance there are likely to be drawbacks in as much as P2P applications need to operate blindingly fast to produce the best results for the end user, and as such P2P protocols are simple and robust. Support for complex negotiations seems like it would slow things down.

Nevertheless, Koubarakis presents a review of what P2P research might offer MAS research and vice versa. The former makes sense to me; P2P systems can offer look up services that agent systems use, and basically be an infrastructure component for MAS. It is in the latter case that I still struggle with understanding the benefits, i.e. what agent research can offer to P2P developers. I guess it is important to distinguish between P2P researchers and P2P developers, but I will attempt that elsewhere. Koubarakis' first example is of the application of agent based software engineering methodologies to P2P systems. I think this is one that I glossed over in earlier readings, and now that I look up the referenced paper by Bertollini et al. (2002) I see that the Tropos software engineering methodology (from a very quick skim) allows a diagrammatic summary of the Napster and Gnutella architectural designs, which they then abstract away from to produce a generic peer to peer virtual community pattern which can then be used to support the implementation of particular P2P solutions using the JXTA framework (JXTA forums are still active, but not clear what the status of that project is, particularly since Oracle bought Sun). Interestingly the example implementation used comes from health care, which is an application domain I compared Agents and P2P in myself (Tse et al., 2006). I am not deeply familiar with the effectiveness of agent-oriented software design, but this does seem like an area where agent theory might have something to offer. At least, some sort of formal approach could be helpful in the design of distributed systems.

Next up is the idea from Tim Finin; build ontologies on top of P2P systems. The Edutella project is given as an example, although that project appears to have petered out; at least the Edutella website has not been updated since 2004, although there are more recent academic publications on Edutella. Of course even if the Edutella project has not been a great success that doesn't mean there can't be some value to be derived from building ontologies on top of P2P systems, but I struggle to see what they are. of course this relates to the whole question of the "Semantic Web", which I find a recent Tim O'Reilly post on. O'Reilly is talking about rich data snippets that allow Google results to display more strucutre. There is a whole bundle of ideas here, but I should try and finish my summary of Koubarakis' paper before straying into that territory.

Koubarakis specifically mentions the Semantic Web while refering to work by Karl Aberer on local onotologies and local translations among ontologies of neighboring peers. Aberer's paper "The Chatty Web: Emergent Semantics Through Gossiping" is cited by 156 [ATGSATOP], and there certainly seems to be a rich research vein there. I see some interesting articles looking at emergent semantics deriving from folksonomies - another area I have published in (Joseph et al., 2009). A skim of Aberer's article indicates that the problem they are hoping to address is inter-ontology mapping so that, for example, one could send out a query to get project titles from multiple different data sources, where the meta-data format was potentially different in each case, e.g. multiple XML documents where in one case we have <project><title>My Project</title></project> and in another we have <project-title>Project X</project-title>. Without reading that paper in more detail it is not clear to me to what extent schema/ontology authors have to provide mappings, and to what extent users are giving feedback on failed matches; but the authors reference other work on automated ontology matching which I guess is what this is all about. Say I want to formulate my query for a flight and send it out to all the online travel sites, I don't have to force them to all use the same schema - there is some process that just handles the translation between the different terms used by each site so that everyone can agree on how to query on things like "departure time". Still seems like the simple short term solution is to have translations provided by 3rd parties, if at all. Not clear to me why the effort of automating ontology matching brings great bounty.

Next up is BestPeer, which apparently improves on a P2P system by adding mobile agents. I have a long standing point (Joseph & Kawamura, 2001) about the unpredictable benefits of mobile agents, and I have the BestPeer paper on my reading list, so will discuss that in a future blog post. The final work mentioned in the section on what agents could offer P2P systems is theoretical analysis of search in distributed agent systems by Shehory (1999), which I also have on my reading list, so more on that soon. Overall I think I am being more and more persuaded that there is agent research that can inform P2P researchers, but the more complex question is whether agent research is useful for P2P developers. My main gripe is that simply citing the list of properties that agents should have (e.g. autonomy, reactivity) etc. is not enough to explain their value. One has to present mechanisms that support autonomy, reactivity and so forth, and then show how their use brings some specific benefit to the system they are being incorporated to. I guess the alternative tack here is to say that the agent field has lots of analysis into the behaviour of systems comprised of multiple autonomous entities, and attempts at producing design guidelines to handle development of such systems.

The next section in the paper is on bottom-up approaches to MAS such as projects like DIET and BISON which are inspired by natural ecosystems. This is certainly an interesting area of research and the suggestion seems to be that these lightweight multi-agents platforms could serve as a testbed for P2P systems, although it feels a little back to front given that the granularity of P2P systems is usually smaller than even the simplest multi-agent systems. I think the challenge here is that laboratory based platforms like these are generally likely to be cut off from real P2P users, unless it achieves critical mass within the research community itself. Clearly such things can be used as test-beds to provide theoretical results about distributed systems; but any P2P system that is hoping to be used by a non-trivial number of people is probably going to have to be built "close to the metal". Again I am skirting up against this difference between P2P users, developers and researchers.

The final portion of this paper focuses on Koubarakis' own research of P2P publish and subscribe systems. Koubarakis' approach is based on the idea that:

The next generation of P2P data sharing systems should be developed in a principled and formal way and classical results from logic and theoretical computer science should be applied

although that makes me think of a chapter in the book "The Next Fifty Years" where Paul Ewald talks about how in medicine fundamental achievements have occurred more through the testing of deductive leaps than by building-block induction, giving examples such as Edward Jenner's discovery of vaccination in the absence of knowledge of viruses as evidence that simply trying to understand the workings of disease at the cellular and biochemical levels may be insufficient to make great leaps.

Actually I'm not sure of the validity of my analogy here, since I had been thinking of Ewald's points as being related to the importance of accidental discovery versus theoretically informed developments, when actually they are slightly different, since the process of generating a hypothesis to test necessarily involves some theoretical input. Although I think my concern stems from the plethora of available theories and the difficulty in assessing the extent to which different theories are experimentally grounded. Developing P2P systems in a principled and formal way will certainly be attractive to those who are well versed in the principles and formal theories of computer science. Having spent some time becoming more versed in them myself I am not convinced that they are purely virtuous. I feel there is an extent to which theory can end up serving itself rather than serving the development of useful techniques and systems.

In conclusion Koubarakis cites results from his research where they calculate worst case upper bounds for the complexity of satisfying and filtering queries within their publish and subscribe networks. I think a lot of my personal confusion in this area comes down to differentiating between systems that are simulations designed to provide support for theoretical results versus systems that are frameworks that one might hope to build applications for use in the real world.

One of the key things I realise re-reading all these papers is how I am not really interested in industrial software engineering. I am not really interested in developing techniques that might be used in factories or supply chain management. I am interested in writing code that everyday end users (including myself) interact with. It was the potential of the digital butler that got me interested in agents. P2P systems and search engines were interesting because of the experience they delivered to the end user. I think that's what I repeatedly struggle with regarding agents research - trying to find something of direct use to the end user.

Cited by 12 [ATGSATOP]

Manolis Koubarakis (2003). Multi-agent systems and peer-to-peer computing: Methods, systems, and challenges Lecture notes in computer science, 2782, 46-61

References (my scholar system couldn't handle this papers reference format - didn't want to burn time on fixing that at the moment)

K. Aberer, P. Cudre-Mauroux, and M. Hauswirth. The Chatty Web: Emergent Semantics Through Gossiping. In Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2003), May 2003.

D. Bertolini, P. Busetta, A. Molani, M. Nori, and A. Perini. Designing peerto- peer applications: an agent-oriented approach. In Proceeding of International Workshop on Agent Technology and Software Engineering (AgeS)-Net Object Days 2002 (NODe02), volume 2592 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 1–15. Springer, October 7–10 2002.

T.W. Finin and Y. Labrou. Napster as a Multi-Agent System. Presentation at the 18th FIPA meeting, University of Maryland Baltimore County, July 2000.

Joseph S.R.H. Yukawa J., Suthers D. & Harada V. (2009) Adapting to the Evolving Vocabularies of Learning Communities. International Journal of Knowledge and Learning.

Joseph S. & Kawamura T. (2001) Why Autonomy Makes the Agent. In Agent Engineering, Eds. Liu, J, Zhong, N, Tang, Y.Y. and Wang P. World, Scientific Publishing.

O. Shehory. A Scalable Agent Location Mechanism. In Proceedings of ATAL 1999, pages 162–172, 1999.

Tse B., Raman P. & Joseph S. (2006) Information Flow Analysis in Autonomous Agent and Peer-to-Peer Systems for Self-Organizing Electronic Health Records In Agents and Peer to Peer Computing, Eds Joseph S.R.H., Despotovic Z., Moro G. & Bergamaschi S. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4461.

Csikszentmihalyi & Hermanson (1999) Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why Does One Want to Learn?

2009-06-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

This is another paper that was recommended to me by Peter Leong who is teaching a course in Second Life this summer for the College of Education at the University of Hawaii. We are trying to better understand how we might build engaging learning spaces in Second Life.

Reading this paper I started wondering what proportion of the population went to museums. Superficially I imagine computer games and films/tv to be far more frequently consumed by the general population, although since having children I realise what a valuable resource museums are. Is going to the cinema more popular than going to the museum? I guess the big difference is whether you are asking your audience to sit in a chair or walk around, and whether they are hoping for thrills rather than to be made to think. One imagines that theme parks are more popular than museums, but again it would interesting to know the real statistics.

Csikzentmihalyi's concept of flow was mentioned in the McClelland (2000) paper I blogged about previously. Although it seems like Pine and Gilmore's experience realms diagram is a subdivision of flow, at least since reading Csikzentmihalyi's paper he mentions flow in the context of watching a basketball game, so the implication is that one can get sucked in to a state of flow for both passive and interactive experiences, and either absorptive or immersive experiences? However I am less clear about this latter dimension, I guess immersion is where you are totally immersed actively in a role, or in a passive appreciation of something. Funny as I would call that being absorbed, but absorption for P&G seems to be more about maintaining a distance from the thing you are observing, e.g. for an educational experience where you try and work out how something works.

Csikszentmihalyi & Hermanson (1999) distinguish extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. They argue that museums must rely on intrinsic methods of motivation. A good part of the paper is taken up describing the flow concept, and I the range of activities the authors suggest can induce flow are wider than I expected. Flow apparently relies on activities that have clear goals and appropriate rules:

Conflicting goals or unclear expectations divert our attention from the task at hand

However this is at odds with some of my experience programming, where I am changing goals as I explore different possibiilties. It seems to me there can also be a state of flow as I explore and reject possible goals, although I take the main point that this does require some shift in level of attention. Given clear specifications and little ambiguity one can become completely immersed in programming to specification, but sometimes the most interesting solutions come from questioning the goals and expectations to find alternative solutions to the real underlying problem.

The authors also mention that as skills increase, the challenges of the activity must increase to maintain flow, which reminds me of the suggestion in other motivations literature (Dornyei?) that tasks should be just hard enough and not too hard to maximize motivation, although I have yet to find any empirical studies which back this up. The authors also cite a number of references to support the assertion that affective processes can be as important as cognitive processes in learning, and this ties in to ideas about memory being strongest when things are linked to emotionally charged events. Further discussion of flow includes the assertion that:

when involved in the activity, the individual fully expresses the self

although sometimes when I am in a programming or writing flow I think I lose my "self". Overall the discussion of flow is interesting, but it only seems to tie weakly to the design challenge of museum exhibits. At least it is not clear whether the state of flow which I associate with much more focused activities is necessarily the state we should be trying to induce in museum visitors; although arguably it would be no bad thing to have visitors losing themselves in the exhibits. The authors provide the diagram shown above to indicate one approach to structuring exhibits or experiences at museums. There is the "hook" that piques initial interest, opportunities for involvement and then a set up for intrinsic rewards that hopes to stimulate flow. There are many good suggestions such as trying to connect exhibits to the individual visitor and presenting things as perspectives rather than fact:

Information that is presented as true without alternative perspectives discourages the motivation to explore and learn more

Although this is slightly ironic as the statement itself is one of fact rather than perspective. There are further discussions of the conditions for flow, such as the suggestion that displays should provide information by which visitors can compare their responses to other standard(s?), and that supportative environments provide people with choices, and acknowledge their perspectives or feelings; however I find these difficult to conceptualize without more concrete examples. However the authors do acknowledge that as yet there is:

no table where we can look up the elements that will attract the curiosity of difference types of visitors.

Just started having this idea about doing roleplays and paying SL residents to come in and be actors for some relatively low rate of Linden dollars. Arguably they would be more fun to interact with than scripted bots, would allow for the possibility of "unscripted" emotional interaction. Although of course the payment aspect might negatively effect the social interaction. What about tasks or role plays where you don't get paid unless a team works together. An extrinsic reward may undermine intrinsic motivation according to this paper, but museum's pay actors to form living exhibits in their museums ... I wonder if one could create something engaging ... could the activity be interesting enough that people would get involved anyway? I wonder what kind of games have been built in second life already? I don't hear much about that, but then I haven't looked. It seems like you could have a murder mystery, or ecological mystery - could have a subterranean level with dwarves or gnomes (or menehune) suffering from a disease and rather than just find a cure, you have to convince the dwarves to change their behaviour which requires talking to multiple NPCs and working out a convincing argument - all much easier to make believable if you can make the dwarves real people playing roles ... they can judge themselves whether they have been convinced by what the team of detectives come up with, and be in a position to hand out prizes (in a suitable story context) when they feel they have been convinced. Of course we also have to deal with new people popping in at different times, but could deal with that by restricting the number of entrances; could have a leader board of time to solve the problem - I guess the whole thing could reset after a certain time - but what we really want is to allow multiple actors to come in and have their teamwork be required to solve the problem - I guess there could be multiple versions of the game - one if there is only one avatar and other harder versions if there are more avatars around ...

Some related SL activity includes Second Life Singers, and also a Macbeth interactive experience, Virtual Hallucinations, and the OSU Medicine Testis Tour.

Also an interesting blog on Education in Second Life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, & Kim Hermanson (1999). Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why Does One Want to Learn? The educational role of the museum By Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 146-160

Cited by 70 [ATGSATOP]

Blogger posts really grab high google ranking

2009-06-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that my recent blog post on "Android multipart upload" is now top of the Google ranking for a Google search using those terms. And not even those terms in quotes, just those three terms. I guess that is because blogspot.com probably gets a high rating from Google, and I guess my post has those three terms in proximity, whereas other mailing lists have the same terms distributed throughout their content. Anyhow, it was kind of surprising to see my blog post so high up in the rankings. Google analytics tells me that that blog post is getting a lot of hits, and I even had a comment from someone asking for help with that issue. It seems odd that I would jump the multiple google groups posts with my blog post, but I guess that it is at least partly desirable since I was trying to write a summary of what I had discovered from multiple google group discussions.

I guess this is a phenomena that people noticed a while back. Google either submits blogger posts directly into its search index, or it integrates them at some other level. I imagine that companies may have noticed this, and a top "maximise your search ranking" tip would be to start a blog and then post regularly on topics that match the keyword searches you are hoping your customers will find.

Of course the main question for me is about whether there isn't a better approach to making summaries of discussions on mailing lists accessible. For example it would be good if my blog post summarizing multiple google groups discussions was automatically posted to the appropriate Google Groups discussions and flagged in previous discussions on the same topic. I guess a form of trackback on discussions would be useful, i.e. all discussions would show links to summaries that included them. Most of all I wish that the main API documentation would link to summaries of this sort; but perhaps that is overkill, is the general Google Search enough ...? I guess I think there could be some additional tools provided to make the job of the folks doing the summarizing easier, and also make those summaries easier to find for those getting lost in the tangle ...

Hulstijn (2001) Intentional and Incidental Second Language Vocabulary Learning: A Reappraisal of Elaboration, Rehearsal and Automaticity

2009-06-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

So this is the paper that I should have been reading last week. Hulstijn's (2003), which I read last week, reviewed more broadly the use of the incidental/intentional distinction across the fields of psychology and second language learning, considering grammar as well as vocabulary. This earlier 2001 book chapter is focused specifically on vocabulary acquisition and amongst other things has a detailed summary of the empirical results related to rehearsal. Early on Hulstijn reviews the traditional and connectionist perspectives on what it means to "know a word" and I found the following particularly interesting:

The acquisition of an entry’s features in L1 is generally believed to take place in an incremental way (Nagy & Herman, 1987), consisting of the filling of various `slots' of entries in the mental lexicon (De Bot, Paribakht & Wesche, 1997) but to date no specific claims have been made concerning the order in which L2 lexical features must or may be acquired

The emphasis on the statement about order of feature acquisition is mine. I'm thinking this refers to the order in which spelling, meaning, pronunciation and other aspects of entries in the presumed "mental lexicon" are acquired. I wonder what kind of experiments would explore this? I guess presenting the text or audio of a word without L2 definition of L1 translation might offer some degree of control, but seems to me that the lexical entry itself would not emerge until a number of presentations of each aspect, and it would take time for each to become fixed.

My speculation aside, Hulstijin emphasizes two factors of the many that affect the difficulty of learning new words: codability (related to learner's prior phonotactic knowledge), and arbitrariness of the form-meaning link (related to decomposability of the word, e.g. stoplight). After the familiar reprisal of the large numbers of words required by learners to achieve the 95% threshold generally agreed as a prerequisite for text comprehension there is a fascinating dissection of the automatic skills required for fluent speech, listening and reading, which I summarize below:

Normal, fluent speech proceeds at a speed of two to three words per second
Humans have a capacity for consciously focusing their attention on only a very limited amount of information
It follows that the speech production process must largely take place automatically, i.e. conscious focus on message while articulation handled unconsciously
Similarly for listening, word recognition processes have to take place automatically in order for listener attention to be focused exclusively on message
Normal fluent reading proceeds is around three to six words per second and by the same argument word recognition must be automatic

As I have mentioned previously I think evaluation of teaching methods and software really should be in terms of the language goals of the learner, and I think the above neatly summarizes the set into which most language learners goals will fall. Here is another tidbit that caught my attention:

Phonological representations emerge during the process of lexical access, and are either utilized (the so-called indirect route to lexical access) or not (Taft, 1993: 91).

Which appears to refer to the possibility of reading without hearing the words in your head, and I suddenly find myself wondering whether there is always an audio track in my head when I am reading. As soon as I think about it there is, but perhaps when I am not forcing the reading process into conscious awareness, it is not. So that Taft reference would be an interesting one to pursue. Makes me think of angles for investigation of consciousness.

In a subsequent section I was surprised to read the assertion that:

Only less skilled readers use contextual information in word recognition (Stanovich, 1980) ... , in normal listening and reading, lexical access is not subject to top-down influence from syntactic and semantic processing; the processing of a word is largely driven by the input code itself rather than by contextual information (Cutler, 1995: 114; Seidenberg, 1995: 165).

Whereas I would have thought, particularly from a connectionist perspective, that contextual information in the form of collocation awareness would be pre-activating sets of words that one would expect to find next; thus the slight surprise every time one hears the All American Rejects lyrics "I wake up every evening ...". However Hulstijn goes on to describe the threshold hypothesis:

according to which knowledge of reading goals, text characteristics and reading strategies (such as inferring the meaning of unknown words from context), cannot compensate for a lack of language knowledge if the latter remains below a certain threshold level.

and I wonder if this is the same as the 95% vocabulary requirement for text comprehension? All of this is reinforcing the argument that learning to apply reading strategies should not take precedence over learning a core vocabulary.

Specifically on incidental versus intentional learning, Hulstijn says that while theoretically the distinction between them is difficult to maintain, methodologically the distinction is important. There is a review of the distinction in both the psychological and SLA literature similar to the 2003 book chapter, and the important point for our meta-analysis is this:

in the applied domains of L1 and L2 pedagogy, incidental vocabulary learning refers to the learning of vocabulary as the by-product of any activity not explicitly geared to vocabulary learning, with intentional vocabulary learning referring to any activity aiming at committing lexical information to memory.

However as Hulstijn points out it is possible to construct incidental learning tasks where subjects process new vocabulary only superficially and intentional tasks where they will process it deeply. Hulstijn also cites multiple studies that indicate that vocabulary acquisition is enhanced when learner's attention is oriented towards unfamiliar words, but I still have misgivings about time on task. Hulstijn reasons that:

From an educational point of view, simply encouraging learners to spend much time on reading and listening, although leading to some incidental vocabulary learning, will not be enough in itself

Although I don't know that I am convinced that this is what the evidence presented indicates. In a subsequent section on pedagogic consequences, rehearsal is one of a number of areas explored in some detail. I was particularly fascinated by the following:

In a name-learning experiment using college students, Landauer & Bjork (1978) found that uniform spacing was better (for presentation) and a pattern of increasing intervals (for testing). The educational implication of this finding would be that incidental vocabulary learning benefits from regular and frequent exposure whereas intentional vocabulary learning benefits from self tests with increasing intervals.

Which makes me think that I should re-read that paper. I had certainly assumed that an expanding rehearsal series (ERS) would be the optimal way to present vocabulary whether for intentional study, or incidental learning through text presentation. Hulstijn also has many interesting suggestions for exercises to achieve automaticity, but overall I don't quite get the conclusion that L2 study based purely on extensive reading is necessarily insufficient. I mean it's odd because I'm all for explicit study of vocabulary, and I am certainly open to there being a potential benefit, but the various arguments made in this chapter don't convince me that we have evidence to demonstrate that one couldn't be as effective studying an L2 purely through incidental learning. I mean the main argument for using intentional learning is that vocabulary acquisition improves if learner's attention is oriented towards unfamiliar words, but this comes back to how vocabulary acquisition is being measured. If orienting attention towards unfamiliar words improves scores on simple vocabulary recall tests, it doesn't mean that the learners' key goals are being met.

It is possible the studies Hulstijn refers to are already taking this into consideration, but it seems to me that the question to be answered is not whether vocabulary acquisition improves through intentional study, but whether progress towards fluent speech, listening, reading and writing are advanced. That is more difficult to test, but not impossible. Seems to me like the experiment to assess this sort of thing would be a reading comprehension exercise with and without glosses (or with and without dictionary lookup or whatever) for the two conditions, where the post-test is another reading comprehension exercise that involves similar vocabulary. That would seem to get at the real question as to whether the focus on vocabulary is benefiting the learner's long term goals. Perhaps that kind of study has already been done. We are going to be reading some of the paper's referenced by Hulstijn as part of our meta-analysis, so I will come back to this point once I have read some more.

Hulstijn also emphasizes the importance of achieving automaticity to allow fluent vocabulary use. There is the suggestion that Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis has lead L2 specialists and materials writers to encourage L2 learners to move quickly through course materials and not to reprocess old materials extensively. Hulstijn indicates this may have an adverse effect on achieving automaticity, and suggests a number of tasks designed to promote automaticity that are likely to be more interesting for learners than simple re-reading of old texts.

Cited by 128 [ATGSATOP]

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Rosenschein (1993) Consenting Agents: Negotiation Mechanisms for MultiAgent Systems

2009-06-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

This is another paper I'm reading for my invited paper on agents and peer to peer computing. I'm not quite sure how I ended up with this paper by Rosenschein, which itself appears to be a summary of an invited talk at a conference. Sycara referred to a number of Rosenschein papers in her AI Magazine article. Maybe this invited talk was just what I could find online at the time. Anyway, given that I have it printed out, it seemed like a good place to start.

The paper gives motivations for considering systems of interacting autonomous agents. Telecommunications and electric grids seem like good examples, a conclusion I have been drawing from reading Sycara's papers, although I know little about the specific requirements from these industries. It's when agent authors get on to systems designed to support user interfaces for the average user that things seem least realistic. Rosenschein gives this example:

For example, with Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), the individual's palmtop computer will be expected to coordinate schedules with others PDAs (e.g., my software agent determines whether my car has been fixed on time at the garage; if not, it contacts the taxi company, reschedules my order for a cab, and updates my day's schedule)

Which seems very unrealistic. Of course one has to remember that this paper was written in 1993, before the web and mobile technologies were commonly accessible. However there are several things that appear to serve as barriers to this kind of personal scheduling system. One of them is that it requires the garage to have a computerized system and that information from it is exposed in some form. I guess modern garages do now keep computer records of how work is progressing, as do modern taxi companies, although convincing them of the need to expose internal data seems hard. I guess that's where having things in agent wrappers might reassure companies, but it's still a big leap.

However the biggest hurdle is that the current solution to this kind of problem, i.e. you sort it out yourself, is pretty damn robust. I guess if you had a taxi company and a garage who didn't just have websites, but exposed RESTful APIs to their internal systems, then a mobile phone could co-ordinate these things, but getting a program to make the right choices; and step back, setting it up so that I can easily communicate my desires to that program seem like a huge challenge. Alot of it comes down to human trust in "agents", but there is also the question of the business model. Are there going to be people who are willing to pay for such a service, or for platforms that come bundled with these sorts of services? I guess one could try seeing if Hertz and Quikfit (UK garage chain - I don't know any US one) would expose APIs the way Google and Twitter do, and then write something for Android or iPhone; however the notion of an open platform for multiple agents still seems fanciful, it mainly for complexity reasons. It's almost always going to be simpler to build one mashup that consumes a small number of services and delivers a single interface to the user.

Of course, clearly Rosenchein and other agent researchers will have updated their ideas in the last 15 years, but I guess I'm trying to write about the history of the agent community, and this paper does get explicit about what many agent researchers were focusing on:

What concerns us here are not the details of how to stuff information in to a packet on the network; it 's not even the higher-level issue of how agents will communicate with one another (in a common language, or perhaps using translation filters). Rather, once we assume that agents can communicate and understand one another, how will they come to agreements?

My personal experience working with the Plangent system at Toshiba was that in general, how to get communication going in distributed systems was the main issue. One could construct planning and negotiating agents of one kind or another, and I guess this was the interesting area from an AI perspective, but the real hurdle to building effective distributed systems was the communication itself; and from where I sit now it sure seems like RESTful APIs are the solution. Of course now that we have those more and more commonly available the interesting question is whether everything discovered about how agents interact and cooperate can be used to build successful agent systems on top of RESTful mashups. Rosenschein envisions the following:

With PDAs, for example, new agents (and even new types of agents) will constantly be entering the environment. My PDA, to be effective in negotiation and coordination, must be able to deal with these open, dynamic, configurations of agents.

I guess the key obstacles here are security related. On my android phone I can download new software, and that software can communicate with existing software on my phone, but the interactions do not really involve negotiation. The program can either access the data from local and remote services or it cannot. The real hurdle seems to be what benefit does the user or developer see from the added complexity of supporting negotiations between agents. I guess it all comes back to the concept of the digital butler - we'd all love to have a butler who was tirelessly working to make our life easier. Rosenschein puts it like this:

we want our agents to faithfully act as our surrogates in encounters with other agents

So it certainly does come back to trust, but trust is not enough. There has to be a value proposition there to. I currently point my iCalendar at a number of Google calendars that other people can update. The value proposition there is that I can easily see events other people are providing, and I know I can shut off those calendars at will (no need for trust really). The value proposition is clear. I guess I could install a calendar agent that would try to negotiate times for meetings with the agents of other users, but again it seems like a lot of effort to set up something that may work unreliably, when the simple exposure of socially translucent information across the calendars can achieve the same effect, e.g. my colleagues and I can all see the same calendar and if I move a meeting they can all see that. Yes, a really really smart agent working for each of us could maybe save us a few minutes spent in email co-ordinating and avoid the occasional absent member or missed meeting, so the value proposition seems low.

So anyway, it's pretty clear that I'm not seeing the benefit of agents in the personal information management realm, but am open to their utility in industrial software. Further on the paper we see the area that Rosenschein is really interested in which is domain theory, and he describes three domains:

Task Oriented Domains (TOD) - sets of independent tasks
State Oriented Domains (SOD) - moving the world from an initial state to a goal state
Worth Oriented Domains (WOD) - similar to SOD, but with value is assigned to each state

and three classes of domain:

Subadditive - where combining tasks may reduce but never increase the total cost
Concave - where adding a set of tasks to some existing set Y will not add more than adding same to subset of Y
Modular - where the cost of the combination of two sets of tasks is exactly the sum of their individual costs, minus the cost of their intersection

and he describes example problems including postmen delivering letters, database queries, and fax problems. Several of these reminded me of the traveling salesman problem, and I think the main point here is that different domains will lead to different possible outcomes for the various negotiation strategies that agents might employ. Rosenschein argues that game theory is a great match for agents, since the assumption of rational actors that doesn't apply so well to human actors has a better fit for agents. Reading this was helpful in terms of seeing what agent research might offer p2p researchers, in that classification of domain types will be useful for understanding the properties of interacting peers in p2p systems; I guess the best example being something like BitTorrent's use of the TitForTat strategy. Of course I'm probably late to the party now :-) but then I'm slow like that. Yes, clearly there is a good fit for multi-agent game theory analysis of the interaction strategies employed in peer to peer systems like BitTorrent.

Cited by 36 [ATGSATOP]

Hulstijn (2003) Incidental and Intentional Learning

2009-06-08T14:47:00.000-07:00

So this is one of the papers I thought I needed to read as follow up to Laufer & Hulstijn (2001) as described in an earlier blog post. My colleague had been recommending that I read a paper by Hulstijn that apparently addressed a construct of 'rehearsal' that could be applied to intentional learning. Unfortunately I grabbed the wrong book chapter. I should have been reading Hulstijn's (2001) paper entitled: "Intentional and Incidental Second Language Vocabulary Learning: A Reappraisal of Elaboration, Rehearsal and Automaticity", a book chapter in Cognition and Second Language Instruction; but I accidentally grabbed Hulstijn's (2003) "Incidental and Intentional Learning", a book chapter in the Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Anyway, I'll read the other paper next week, but since I read all of Hulstijn's 2003 paper before realizing my mistake, here are my notes on that. Actually I did notice my mistake earlier, but I was in a park with the paper printed out, and I couldn't easily grab all of the 2001 paper on my iPhone, so I finished reading the paper copy I had printed out.

In this paper Hulstijn undertakes a detailed examination of the differences between incidental and intentional learning from popular, psychological and second language acquisition perspectives. The popular perspective is that of study versus immersion, where incidental learning corresponds to the idea of immersing oneself in a language by extensive communication with native speakers and reading/writing of native texts; and intentional learning corresponds to attending language classes. These popular perspectives only partially reflect the way in which the terms are used academically. After reviewing the development of 20th century psychology, Hulstijn says that in terms of cognitive psychology that:

intentional and incidental learning refer, strictly speaking, only to the presence or absence of an announcement to participants in an experiment as to whether they will be tested afterwards

I had been surprised when Folse (2006) had classified his study as incidental, when it had seemed to me that asking subjects to perform cloze tests involving a limited set of words, or construct sentences with those words, was tantamount to asking those subjects to learn those words. To be fair to Folse, his study did involve a number of distractor tasks, but I was still surprised by the suggestion that simply not mentioning in advance that there would be a vocabulary test would make the study one of incidental learning. I guess the common incidental learning study task is reading comprehension, where the task focus is much more clearly on something other than vocabulary acquisition. I guess Folse's intention was to avoid having subjects focus on acquiring vocabulary so that they would not attempt to memorise the words through other means, such as writing down lists of words to look at independently, or repeatedly going over the words in their heads. Of course Folse doesn't say this explicitly, but it makes me think of Eyssenck's (1982) assumption that active intention to learn does not tend to affect learning outcomes (backed up by experimental results of Hyde & Jenkins, 1973). Although this leaves me confused as to the point of the incidental/intentional learning distinction.

Fortunately Hulstijn goes on to cite a number of more detailed definitions from Schmidt (1994a) as characterising the Second Language Acquisition perspective on incidental learning. The three definitions in order of increasing specificity are:

learning without the intent to learn
learning of one thing while the learner's primary objective is to do something else
learning of formal features while an individual is focused on semantic features

Going on to consider intentional learning from an SLA perspective Hulstijn refers to the cognitive interpretation of the use of rehearsal and memorizing techniques employed by learners when they have explicit intention of learning and retaining lexical information (Schmitt, 1997). He does not re-iterate the suggestion from Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) that the benefit of incidental over intentional learning experiments is that the experimenter can be more certain of the strategies being employed by the learner. The distinctions between the incidental/intentional and explicit/implicit dichotomies are re-iterated and Hulstijn summarizes the difference between explicit and intentional learning as follows:

Whereas explicit learning involves awareness at the point of learning (e.g., by trying to understand what the function of a certain language form is), intentional learning involves a deliberate attempt to commit new information to memory (e.g., by applying rehearsal and/or mnemonic techniques)

Hulstijn suggests that there is a confusion over the what and how of incidental and intentional learning; that it is almost impossible to conceive of the acquisition of grammatical features through intentional learning. This seems a little odd for me, but then grammar is not my specialty. Still I can remember being explicitly instructed on points of Japanese grammar and then trying to employ them. In some ways it seems to me that one can intentionally focus on learning grammar and lexis, but that employing both effectively requires achieving a level of automaticity where the process through which they are employed is not subject to introspection.

The involvement load constuct of Laufer & Hulstijn (2001) is only mentioned briefly in the context of incidental learning of novel words, and there is no mention of its possible relation to intentional learning. My feeling is that my colleague Yi-Jiun Shiung's intuition that the constructs of involvement load can be applied to intentional learning are correct; although I guess I start to see that the incidental/intentional dichotomy is being used to distinguish task type. If you are constructing a sentence or solving a cloze test then you are, a priori, not repeating a particular word over and over in your head, or constructing a mnemonic to help you remember an L1-L2 mapping. Thus for the purposes of our meta-analysis it seems that classification in terms of task type is perhaps more important than the incidental/intentional dimension.

The constructs that Hulstijn refers to in his section on intentional learning studes are monolingual vs bilingual, context vs. no context, rehearsal, feedback, and mnemonics. Interestingly he also says that:

It appears that a number of researchers have investigated various presentation and rehearsal regimes (with and without feedback) in computer-aided instruction, but such studies are almost never published in international journals.

I think we have managed to find a few, although many number of them are post-2003. Of greater significance are Hulstijn's summaries of the findings of various studies including the indication that learning rates under genuine incidental learning conditions are low compared to intentional learning conditions. Although of course it is almost impossible to control for 'time on task'. Other studies suggest bilingual presentation outperforms monolingual presentation (although I assume this depends on learner level and the test type), that context is a difficult construct to pin down, and mnemonics should only be resorted to when other approaches have failed.

There's a study by Griffin & Harley (1996) that arguably should be in our meta-analysis, as well as a few others we should check on, particularly in the latter section on intentional learning. Of course this raises the question about whether we try to broaden the scope of our meta-analysis, or whether we compromise it by including other studies that we discover as a result of reading the core set of initial papers that we found.

My References

Folse, K. S. (2006). The Effect of Type of Written Exercise on L2 Vocabulary Retention. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 273-293.

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Sycara (1991) Problem Restructuring in Negotiation

2009-06-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

I read about this paper in Sycara's (1998) Multiagent systems paper, which I blogged about recently. In that blog post I was saying that I found it really difficult to imagine artificial agents handling negotiation in anything other than an inflexible and trivial fashion. Now I have read Sycara's (1991) paper "Problem Restructuring in Negotiation" which describes her PERSUADER system, I have a much better idea of how an expert system can be structured to handle negotiation. The PERSUADER system is a very thorough expert system that encapsulates knowledge from real world experts, and uses Case Based Reasoning, Goal Graph Search, Situations Assessment and Persuasive Argumentation to mediate labour disputes. The mediator agent maintains dynamic belief and goal networks for the negotiating parties and performs search over these networks in order to determine likely settlements.

The PERSUADER system is complex, and I won't attempt a detailed description of it here, but suffice to say that it feels like the process of negotiation performed by humans has been dissected and analyzed and broken into its component parts. As soon as I had caught the gist of one component, e.g. matching case histories of settlements with the current negotiation, when we were on to other approaches that involved generating settlements from scratch by reasoning about the goals and beliefs of the negotiating parties. I would have thought that even small parts of the system would be very complex, but the paper goes on and on to describe more and more involved meta-strategies that are designed to resolve different types of conflicts. It also seems that the system can learn based on the failure of proposed settlements as they are added to it's memory of cases, and the goal and belief networks of the negotiating parties are updated, although I didn't read specific details about this latter aspect.

I guess my main questions were has this system ever been evaluated in a real world context, and did anyone ever use it? It seems that the PERSUADER was developed as part of Sycara's PhD thesis, so I may need to read that and other subsequent publications to get to answer my questions here. I was able to grab a couple of other of Sycara's publications on PERSUADER from Google Scholar, but I couldn't find any mention of evaluation. In her classic paper on multiagent systems Sycara (1998) mentions that one of the key obstacles to the adoption of agent technology was individuals becoming comfortable with the idea of delegating a task to an agent. I find it difficult to imagine either party in a real labour dispute being willing to accept an AI expert system as a mediator; although not impossible - I would be very interested to know if such a thing had ever happened. There are hints in this paper that PERSUADER was applied to real world scenarios, but it is not clear if this was as part of a real negotiation, or after the fact.

Sycara mentions in passing knowledge-based work that provides support for human negotiators (Kersten et al., 1990; Jarke and Goeltner, 1987), and it seems that this is the kind of approach that is much more likely to see real usage. I sense a parallel with machine translation and machine support for human translators.

Even with the overall complexity of the PERSUADER system there are some issues that appear glossed over such as the functions that generate the bargaining power of a local union, which takes arguments of the economic context and the international union and returns numerical values. However I was impressed that nine months were spent filling the case base from labour relations literature, published arbitration awards, two human experts and the systems own learning mechanism. There is a saying that as soon as a computer does something we say that intelligence is not required for the task, thus making artificial intelligence an unreachable goal. Reading about the PERSUADER I felt that this was a carefully crafted expert system that encapsulated many of the techniques that would be employed by a human negotiator, but was also one that might miss many of the subtleties of human negotiation where agents are not always rational. It seems like the system would work well to the extent that it's model of the problem space was well designed, but in some ways that is the real trick isn't it. I get the feeling that really intelligent human negotiators are modifying the classification categories over time. Sort of what I am trying to do with our meta-analysis of second language vocabulary acquisition. There are existing categorizations implicit and explicit in the various papers, and they are not always perfectly aligned. We are trying to dig down to the information bearing categorizations through a process of adjusting the granularity of representation. Perhaps it's just my imagination, but it feels like that's the kind of thing that would be required for the system to impress me with its intelligence. Although at the end of the day any of these kinds of expert systems that are comprehensible to humans are going to feel a little like the emperor with no clothes; that there are sets of mindless computations going on and no real understanding, but that's a separate debate.

Bottom line here for my purposes is that I can certainly see what Sycara is talking about when referring to the literature on what Agents have to offer, and it certainly informs my "agents and p2p" invited paper, where I had been struggling to understand what agents had to offer. Sycara points out that the restructuring process and algorithms of PERSUADER are domain independent, and these are certainly a technique like a P2P distributed hash table, or search pruning that the field of agents has in its armory. On the flip side this seems like not such a good example because the question immediately arises how do we know the techniques employed by PERSUADER are any good? I guess that I should assume that different approaches to expert systems have been evaluated at some point in the literature and that the fields of AI and agent practitioners are aware of these results. However this kind of heavy reasoning just doesn't seem of much practical use in the P2P field; which now appears to me to have much more in common with reactive agents (as Sycara (1998) describes), which have the advantage of speed making them useful in rapidly changing environments. Interestingly Sycara (1998) says that:

In reactive systems the relationships between individual behavior, environment and overall behavior is not understandable, which necessarily makes if hard to engineer agents to fulfill specific tasks.

Although I feel that many P2P systems have done a pretty good job of engineering desirable system level behavior; and it is still not clear to me that reasoning agents with complex representations bring huge benefits. I guess they may in auction systems running trading software, but I am not aware of many plug and play expert systems that can be used for helping with general programming. At least PERSUADER feels like a giant heuristic - maybe it has some reusable parts, and if I read more recent papers on expert systems I would see more clearly the AI equivalents of distributed hashtables or swarmcasting.

It also occurs to me that one of the significant challenges is getting all the data into the expert system. It seems like a lot of effort it spent turning data from experts and historical data into a form that the machine can process. Being able to extract that info from conversations and reading documents (which are huge AI problems themselves) would have a big impact on the practicality of this kind of approach.

This paper inspired me to search for ruby code that supported AI techniques like Case Based Reasoning. I found this interesting blog post.

Cited by 92 [ATGSATOP]