We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers' hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular objects and the actions that they had previously use...

We present a computational model capable of solving arbitrary Tower of Hanoi problems. All elements except visual input and motor output are implemented using 150,000 LIF spiking neurons. Properties of these neurons (firing rate, post-synaptic time constant, etc.) are set based on the neurons in corresponding areas of the brain, and connectivity is similarly constrained. Cortical components are...

Patients with prefrontal cortex lesions are impaired on a variety of planning and problem-solving tasks. We examined the problem-solving performance of 27 patients with focal frontal lobe damage on the Water Jug task. The Water Jug task has never been used to assess problem-solving ability in neurologically impaired patients nor in functional neuroimaging studies, despite sharing structural sim...

A pattern database (PDB) is a heuristic function implemented as a lookup table that stores the lengths of optimal solutions for subproblem instances. Standard PDBs have a distinct entry in the table for each subproblem instance. In this paper we investigate compressing PDBs by merging several entries into one, thereby allowing the use of PDBs that exceed available memory in their uncompressed f...

This paper is devoted to the design of an efficient and convergent semiproximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for finding a solution of low to medium accuracy to convex quadratic conic programming and related problems. For this class of problems, the convergent two block semi-proximal ADMM can be employed to solve their primal form in a straightforward way. However, it is k...

This note serves two purposes. Firstly, we construct a counterexample to show that the statement on the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems in a highly influential paper by Boyd et al. (Found TrendsMach Learn 3(1):1–122, 2011) can be false if no prior condition on the existence of solutions to all th...

This paper describes a syntactic approach to imitation learning that captures important task structures in the form of probabilistic activity grammars from a reasonably small number of samples under noisy conditions. We show that these learned grammars can be recursively applied to help recognize unforeseen, more complicated tasks that share underlying structures. The grammars enforce an observ...

A pattern database is a heuristic function stored as a lookup table which stores the lengths of optimal solutions for instances of subproblems. All previous pattern databases had a distinct entry in the table for each subproblem instance. In this paper we investigate compressing pattern databases by merging several adjacent entries into one, thereby allowing the use of pattern databases that ex...

While extensive use of software in technical systems necessitates a multi-domain systems perspective education has increasingly focused on specific fields of engineering science. Project-based learning (PBL) attempts to overcome this disconnect with authentic problem solving at the core of the approach. A medium-sized Cyber-physical system (CPS) is presented that includes sufficient detail to h...