🚀 go-pugleaf

University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Computer Science
ECOT 717 Engineering Center
Campus Box 430
Boulder, Colorado 803090430
(303) 4927514, FAX: (303) 4922844

CS COLLOQUIUM
Reinforcement Learning Formulations of the AI Problems:  Have they been 
good for AI
or
(An Analysis of the Exploitation-Exploration Tradeoff and an Application to 
Human-Computer Interaction
Satinder Singh Baveja
Syntek Capital
Thursday, March 14, 2002
3:30  4:30 PM
Engineering Center Classroom 265

Refreshments will be served afterwards in ECOT 831

The field of reinforcement learning (RL) has introduced into AI many 
abstract mathematical formulations of the AI problem, mostly by borrowing 
them from the fields of operations research and adaptive control. Has this 
been good for AI? I will argue that RL formulations have allowed us to ask 
and answer precise questions about many important AI issues as well as to 
bring a (mostly) principled design methodology to many application areas. I 
will illustrate these twin advantages through examples from my own work. In 
the first part of the talk I will provide an answer to a formulation of the 
"exploitation-exploration" tradeoff: should an agent exploit what it 
already knows or should it explore in the hope of learning something that 
leads to even greater long-term return? In the second part of the talk, I 
will describe why and how RL offers a powerful methodology for designing 
many human-computer interaction systems. I will illustrate this methodology 
through our design, construction and empirical evaluation of NJFun (a 
system that provides telephonic access to a database of fun activities in 
NJ), and show that RL measurably improves NJFun's performance.

Host:  Clayton Lewis
------------------------------
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/events/colloquia/colloquia.html

Sign Language Interpreters Available Upon Request.  Please contact Jane 
Obrecht, Department of
Computer Science, Engineering  ECOT 722, 303-492-6101, at least five days 
prior to the colloquium.

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