Related papers: GUBS, a Behavior-based Language for Open System De…
Designing conversational user interface experience is complicated because conversation comes with many expectations. When these expectations are met, we feel the interface is natural, but once violated, we feel something is amiss. The last…
Syntax-Guided Synthesis (SyGuS) is the computational problem of finding an implementation f that meets both a semantic constraint given by a logical formula $\varphi$ in a background theory T, and a syntactic constraint given by a grammar…
Knowledge-based biomedical data science (KBDS) involves the design and implementation of computer systems that act as if they knew about biomedicine. Such systems depend on formally represented knowledge in computer systems, often in the…
Language-guided active sensing is a robotics subtask where a robot with an onboard sensor interacts efficiently with the environment via object manipulation to maximize perceptual information, following given language instructions. These…
This thesis concerns the development of a framework that facilitates the design and analysis of formal systems. Specifically, this framework provides a specification language which supports the concise and direct description of formal…
We present Buzz, a novel programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms. Buzz advocates a compositional approach, offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both from the perspective of the single robot and of the overall swarm.…
Gene expression is a central process to any form of life. It involves multiple temporal and functional scales that extend from specific protein-DNA interactions to the coordinated regulation of multiple genes in response to intracellular…
Reliable real-time trajectory generation is essential for future autonomous spacecraft. While recent progress in nonconvex guidance and control is paving the way for onboard autonomous trajectory optimization, these methods still rely on…
Automatic grammar coaching serves an important purpose of advising on standard grammar varieties while not imposing social pressures or reinforcing established social roles. Such systems already exist but most of them are for English and…
Writing specifications for computer programs is not easy since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge this conceptual gap we propose controlled natural…
Bacteria have been a source of inspiration for the design of evolutionary algorithms. At the beginning of the 20th century synthetic biology was born, a discipline whose goal is the design of biological systems that do not exist in nature,…
There is a growing interest in building autonomous systems that interact with complex environments. The difficulty associated with obtaining an accurate model for such environments poses a challenge to the task of assessing and guaranteeing…
We present Grid Beam Search (GBS), an algorithm which extends beam search to allow the inclusion of pre-specified lexical constraints. The algorithm can be used with any model that generates a sequence $ \mathbf{\hat{y}} = \{y_{0}\ldots…
Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…
Behavioral skills or policies for autonomous agents are conventionally learned from reward functions, via reinforcement learning, or from demonstrations, via imitation learning. However, both modes of task specification have their…
The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithms that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and part-of-speech tags, improving the quality of later generations of grammatical components. Syntactic rules are…
Actions may not proceed as planned; they may be interrupted, resumed or overridden. This is a challenge to handle in a natural language understanding system. We describe extensions to an existing implementation for the control of autonomous…
An essential element of any verification technique is that of identifying and communicating to the user, system behaviour which leads to a deviation from the expected behaviour. Such behaviours are typically made available as long traces of…
Human communication is inherently multimodal and social: words, prosody, and body language jointly carry intent. Yet most prior systems model human behavior as a translation task co-speech gesture or text-to-motion that maps a fixed…
Designing safe and sustainable chemicals is critical to combat chemical pollution in our environment. Machine learning (ML) methods have been developed to aid with de novo molecule design. However, data on the environmental impacts of…