Link to video: http://bit.ly/wAUZD2

Transcript: http://bit.ly/xiVK3B

The Other Haiku (Nerdish)

For the Fulbright Science and Technology Award seminar that happened over the last weekend I made a poetic entry for the contest “Science for all”.

Here is the Powerpoint with the Haiku – What is Reinforcement Learning: A poetic Approach

Below is the explanation of the presentation. The presentation does not  in any way cover all that is reinforcement learning. Just a taste.

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement Learning is a subset of Machine Learning or Artificial intelligence in which, machines learn by performing actions in an environment and then receive an associated reward. Learning, in most cases, aims to develop a strategy (action choices) that will lead to high rewards/returns. Reinforcement learning is being used in multiple applications including, but not limited to:

· Looking for treatment options for HIV by scheduling drug doses in the correct quantities and sequence.

· Assisting in debt collection in New York City by optimizing when to collect certain taxes given that people are in arrears.

· Used in the learning mechanism the folding robot uses. Yes robots finally fold your laundry (a very hard task that humans do easily).

· Reinforcement learning is used also to solve games. Some of the best reinforcement learning game agents play better than humans.

· Using game theory reinforcement learning is also used in predicting/creating economic models.

Reinforcement learning is also interesting, in that it aims to solve the fundamental problem that is Artificial Intelligence. Having an agent learn how to act rationally in an environment. My specific research is concerned with trying to use multiple Reinforcement Learning agents to improve performance in tasks. This is termed Ensemble Reinforcement Learning, a more heads are better than one approach. For the contest I tried my hand at Haiku, with accompanying pictures,to communicate my science. Machine learning has also been used to generate Haiku.

Download: What is Reinforcement Learning: A poetic Approach

Something extra

Like that last chip in the bag. I got a chance to meet Steve Wozniak the day after we finished the Fulbright conference. I had named him as one of my top scientists (or engineer as he refers to himself) I admire. So here are the pics. He came to Rutgers to talk about “Disruptive Innovation”

Vukosi and Steve Wozniak @Rutgers (14 November 2011)

He also signed my iPhone and HP TouchPad

Woz signed all of these and he has a stainless steel business card

One of the points I took from him about bridging the gap between consumption and innovation are:

He says we should aim to make the product not just the concept so as to actually have to learn what goes into it. #SteveWozniak @rutgers

November 14, 2011 7:31 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@vukosi

Vukosi Marivate

The Video of the visit. I am shown asking a question for like half a second

I got an opportunity to attend my first New York Tech Meetup (NYTM). I work on a side project (One of my 1001 side projects – http://www.vima.co.za/pages/projects.html) called UPOD (User Programming of Devices), scratch implementation of the idea: http://scratchabledevices.com/.  My team and I were there to present our latest advances on the project. So the website does not do it justice. We will have an update on all that we have done soon. Our presentation did not go as we planned as we had wi-fi problems at the venue. People did leave understanding our idea which is a consolation and we had respectable tweets . Now to the tech meetup.

What is NYTM? From the website:

NYTM centers around its monthly events, where members gather to watch emerging companies demo new ideas, hear leading-edge thinking on technology topics, and build their networks to develop their businesses.

From that description alone, one gets the feeling that this is something special, it was. The theme for Nov 2 was education. So a lot of teams from universities were presenting. Rutgers had a good showing with a number of projects. I even think we had the most representation. Anyway on to the projects of the night. I will not cover all of them. You can get the list here: http://nytm.org/2011/11/01/november-2-nytm-presenters/

BodyJam

Shopping online for clothes? Dont know how that piece of clothing will look on you? Well BodyJam has a solution. Using the Kinect Sensor, the projects fits your body with the clothes you want to try out in real-time. So you can see what you would look like in that shirt. Words cannot do this justice, you have to see it.

BodyJam

Commons

Commons is an iPhone app that encourages civic engagement. So you spot a pothole on the street in your city, you can then take a picture of the pothole and upload it to report it. But the app is also a game. You get points for what you report. Other users can also vote for your report and you get more points. News Blurb: http://bit.ly/vbbGkY

Video:

Rediscovering New York City with the Commons App by 5minTech

Grafighters

We all remember those great fighting games we played. Now imagine being able to draw your own characters and uploading them into the game. #nufsaid head over: http://grafighters.com/

Grafighters

This was just a taste of the presentations. There were much more. You can check out the presenters here - http://nytm.org/2011/11/01/november-2-nytm-presenters/

Of note were BlueFin Labs, finally proper analytics for TV and the HackNY Projects - http://hackerleague.com/hackathons/hackny-fall-2011

I enjoyed the presentations even though our demo didnt go as well. We will be fixing that and also presenting at the Rutgers Entrepreneurship day in less than two weeks. I want to say thanks to the whole team for all of the work they had put into this. Its not our main research work, but it has certainly been fun seeing our project move from idea to prototypes. We are getting better at this.

The team and a Rutgers Alum (@cavaughn) <- Guy on left

I also kept track of the tweets about the event. You can checkout the simple analytics here:

vukosi’s Archive on nytm Containing 500 Tweets; http://archivist.visitmix.com/vukosi/14