Lit. Review
With the intentions of ending the week well, I decided to go through Mozer’s paper. Our seniors and professor considered this to be a model paper given the extensive use of reinforcement learning by the researchers.
Tag: Machine_Learning
Yesterday we’d asked Professor Littman for a text on machine learning. The result of our query was a hefty tome – Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach by Peter Norvig (one of my role-models) and Stuart Russell. The concepts were straightforward enough to understand but the text was littered with forehead-wrinkle-inducing jargon (eg: classification, regression, realizable hypothesis spaces). I managed to get through a section or two, stopping at ‘learning decision trees’; it was slow going especially since I was making a personal (metaphor filled) summary on my research wiki.
Today I waded through a paper outlining the shortcomings of the Nest smart thermostat and its limited success at learning users’ preferences. I also read a long rant from a tech blogger who had tried and failed at basic home automation. The combined (albeit limited) picture I got from the two articles conjured a somewhat bleak status quo for machine learning and user-programming in smart homes. Which of course, is just what an eager young researcher wants to hear (I’ll also try reading some more upbeat literature tomorrow).
It looks good, doesn’t it?