Related papers: Tactical Patterns for Grassroots Urban Repair
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to analyze large amounts of data in various practices, such as object recognition. We are specifically interested in using AI-powered systems to engage local communities in developing plans…
Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches have been typically conceived for independent or loosely-coupled problems to enhance the benefits of distributed planning between autonomous agents as solving this type of problems require less…
Algorithmic Recourse aims to provide actionable explanations, or recourse plans, to overturn potentially unfavourable decisions taken by automated machine learning models. In this paper, we propose an interaction paradigm based on a guided…
Mapping is a time-consuming process for deploying robotic systems to new environments. The handling of maps is also risk-adverse when not managed effectively. We propose here, a standardised approach to handling such maps in a manner which…
People with limited mobility in the U.S. (defined as having difficulty or inability to walk a quarter of a mile without help and without the use of special equipment) face a growing informational gap: while pedestrian routing algorithms are…
Autonomous systems, including robots and drones, face significant challenges when navigating through dynamic environments, particularly within urban settings where obstacles, fluctuating traffic, and pedestrian activity are constantly…
Public models offer predictions to a variety of downstream tasks and have played a crucial role in various AI applications, showcasing their proficiency in accurate predictions. However, the exclusive emphasis on prediction accuracy may not…
General-purpose service robots are expected to undertake a broad range of tasks at the request of users. Knowledge representation and planning systems are essential to flexible autonomous robots, but the field lacks a unified perspective on…
We consider the problem of building an assistive robotic system that can help humans in daily household cleanup tasks. Creating such an autonomous system in real-world environments is inherently quite challenging, as a general solution may…
Model-based planners and controllers are commonly used to solve complex manipulation problems as they can efficiently optimize diverse objectives and generalize to long horizon tasks. However, they often fail during deployment due to noisy…
Model-based planning and execution systems offer a principled approach to building flexible autonomous robots that can perform diverse tasks by automatically combining a host of basic skills. This idea is almost as old as modern robotics.…
The problem of identifying models of post-disaster reconstruction is an issue that has been dealt with in depth in a number of works, mostly dedicated to individual cases or to the comparison of models. There are also a number of works that…
We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for…
Action planning using learned and differentiable forward models of the world is a general approach which has a number of desirable properties, including improved sample complexity over model-free RL methods, reuse of learned models across…
Aligning large language models with human preferences is critical for creating reliable and controllable AI systems. A human preference can be visualized as a high-dimensional vector where different directions represent trade-offs between…
City governments in the United States are increasingly pressured to adopt emerging technologies. Yet, these systems often risk biased and disparate outcomes. Scholars studying public sector technology design have converged on the need to…
Generalized planning is concerned with the characterization and computation of plans that solve many instances at once. In the standard formulation, a generalized plan is a mapping from feature or observation histories into actions,…
Urban growth sometimes leads to rigid infrastructure that struggles to adapt to changing demand. This paper introduces a novel approach, aiming to enable cities to evolve and respond more effectively to such dynamic demand. It identifies…
Robots are frequently tasked to gather relevant sensor data in unknown terrains. A key challenge for classical path planning algorithms used for autonomous information gathering is adaptively replanning paths online as the terrain is…
Urban assessments often compress diverse needs into single scores, which can obscure minority perspectives. We present a community-centered study in Montreal (n=35; wheelchair users, seniors, LGBTQIA2+ residents, and immigrants).…