Related papers: The Inspiring Universe
Machine learning with application to questions in the physical sciences has become a widely used tool, successfully applied to classification, regression and optimization tasks in many areas. Research focus mostly lies in improving the…
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…
Developmental machine learning studies how artificial agents can model the way children learn open-ended repertoires of skills. Such agents need to create and represent goals, select which ones to pursue and learn to achieve them. Recent…
A scientifically literate society is important for many different reasons, some of which include democratic and scientific topics. This study was performed in order to identify topics in astronomy and science in general that may not be well…
Virtual reality technology is biased. It excludes approximately 95% the world's population by being primarily designed for male, western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic populations. This bias may be due to the lack of diversity…
World Models help Artificial Intelligence (AI) predict outcomes, reason about its environment, and guide decision-making. While widely used in reinforcement learning, they lack the structured, adaptive representations that even young…
In many real-world scenarios where extrinsic rewards to the agent are extremely sparse, curiosity has emerged as a useful concept providing intrinsic rewards that enable the agent to explore its environment and acquire information to…
The physics of matter in the condensed state is concerned with problems in which the number of constituent particles is vastly greater than can be easily comprehended. The inherent physical limitations of the human mind are fundamental and…
The scientific method is often presented, e.g. to children, as a linear process, starting by a question and ending by the elaboration of a theory, with a few experiments in-between. The reality of the building of science is much more…
The capacity to filter out irrelevant information from our environment is critical to efficient processing. Yet, during development, when building a knowledge base of the world is occurring, the ability to selectively allocate attentional…
It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to look around:…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
Curiosity-based reward schemes can present powerful exploration mechanisms which facilitate the discovery of solutions for complex, sparse or long-horizon tasks. However, as the agent learns to reach previously unexplored spaces and the…
Nowadays whenever a user buys any gadget, apart from the price his focus would also be on how easy is the functionality of the gadget. This means users are more concerned towards the usability of the gadget. Therefore, this study set to…
We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), including the astronomy projects Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org) and Planet…
In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…
Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning.…
How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism... and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to…
Activities related to access to astronomical facilities and data could offer an effective, entry-level path for outreach and astronomy education. The Government of Italy proposed the Open Universe initiative that was adopted by the United…
How do human beings make sense of their relation to the world and realize their ability to effect change? Applying modern concepts and methods of coordination dynamics we demonstrate that patterns of movement and coordination in 3-4…