Learning

Editor's Note: We thought about Sally Yates again today when journalist and commentator Mike Barnicle (on Morning Joe) referred to the former Acting Attorney General as a "truly noble, heroic figure" and so decided to rerun the Harvard Law School article on her speech to the graduating class. "Being bold, taking a risk and owning it, isn't easy to do, and the instinct for self-preservation may continually draw you to the safe, risk-free course," she said. "But I urge you to resist that instinct. Not only is a life of hedging your bets unsatisfying, but it means you're unlikely to make much of a difference." more »

"Humans learn object manipulation skills without any teacher through millions of interactions with a variety of objects during their lifetime. We have shown that it possible to build a robotic system that also leverages large amounts of autonomously collected data to learn widely applicable manipulation skills, specifically 'object pushing skills,' said Frederik Ebert, a graduate student in Sergey Levine's lab who worked on the project. more »

From Prof. Billingham's essay: "I'm told that when men meet women, they sometimes rate each other on a scale of 1 to 10. Of course, mathematicians are far too intelligent and sophisticated do this. We rate people on a scale of 0 to 1. In our original mathematical model, all we could do was compare one possible frog with another. The numbers didn't mean anything in themselves; they just told the princess whether one frog was "better" than another. Let's change the fairytale slightly so that the 100 frogs are now labelled with numbers drawn randomly from those that lie between 0 and 1, with the handsome prince having the highest number. What's the princess's best strategy now?" more »

"Our primary interest was really in the patterns of people’s answers to these questions," Kara Weisman said. "So, when a certain person thought a robot could think or remember things, what else did they think it was capable of doing? By looking at the patterns in people’s responses to these questions, we could infer the underlying, conceptual structure." Those patterns resulted in three main clusters of mental capacities: body (physiological sensations, like hunger and pain), heart (social-emotional abilities, like guilt and pride) and mind (perceptual and cognitive abilities, like memory and vision).   more »