Category: Diary

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Hey you, accept me please!

Hey you!
Out there in your lab,
Getting lonely, getting old,
Can you feel me?

Hey you!
Standing in the aisle [of your department!],
With an itchy feet and fading smile
As you have not any good student for a while,
Can you feel me?

Hey you!
Don’t help them to bury the strong AI,
Don’t give in without a fight!

Hey you!
Out there on your own,
Sitting naked by the phone,
Would you touch me? [It is not necessary to do so physically; it is sufficient to admit me!]

Hey you!
With your sonar against the wall,
Waiting for someone to call out [and implement your SLAM algorithm!]
Would you touch me?

Hey you!
Would you help me to admit to a good Ph.D. program
Open your group, I’m coming home!

[This is a disappointing part; you must not read it!!!]
[But it was only fantasy
The sonars was too noisy as you can see.
No matter how he try, he could not break free
And the bugs ate into his brain.]

Hey you!
Out there on the road [it refers to your outdoor robot],
Always doing what you’re not told [yes! It needs me to become working],
Can you help me?

Hey you!
Out there beyond the wall,
Breaking bottles in the hall [actually, your mobile robot do so because its obstacle avoidance behavior does not work anymore],
Can you help me?

Hey you!
Don’t tell me there is no hope at all.
Together we research, divided we fall!

P.S: The original lyric is from Pink Floyd and I’ve changed it a little!

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Applying Started!

I started filling the forms. I filled most parts of forms of MIT, USC, and U. of Alberta. Hmmm … Is there anybody who
can help me writing a good statement of purpose?! Anyway, hope it works!! 😀

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Life goes on

We (me and Dr.Nili) are still working on editing the paper. It is about 2.5 months from when I started writing it. It seems that it doesn’t want to be finished anyway.

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Figure Generation Progress Report

Right now, I get my computer to generate necessary data for my figures which I will put them in my paper. Hmmm … These are necessary data:

1-Abstract Problem – Structure Learning – ZO and FO (done!)
2-Abstract Problem – Behavior/Structure Learning – ZO (done!)
3-Object Lifting – Structure Learning – ZO/FO (under preparation)
4-Object Lifting – Behavior/Structure Learning – ZO (not yet!)

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TOEFL days

Thesilog has lost one of its posts during host transfer. Anyway, that was not very important. Emmm … I am rather busy with studying for the TOEFL exam that will be held tomorrow. I am a little stressful! Let’s see what will happen.

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Credit Assignment Report

Today, I was working on my Subsumption architecture credit assignment report. It is rather completed now which is a very good news for me. This report is contaminated (!) with a lot of formulas, and it seems to be one of the most difficult reports one may encounter in his lifetime (I am kidding!). emmm … what should I do now? I don’t know, I cannot think anymore …

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Neural Network presentation making

Dr.Yazdanpanah wants to present his Neural Network course using PowerPoint slides instead of writing on that old lovely whiteboards. He asked me to make necessary powerpoint files for the whole neural network course. I was engaged in doing so for the several past days (it was multi-layer feedforward NN part). It is not an easy task, but it is fun. I don’t know whether you know or not, but I love NN and believe in that connectionist approach to intelligence. Therefore, preparing course materials is nice job. I can re-read a lot of related things, which I don’t face in my daily project works, and also may learn some new stuff. Anyway, I am not sure if he accept my work, but let’s try it!

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Fuzzy SSA, Old Notes, and Predictive NN

Today, I was there at control laboratory doing some kind of research! I supposed to write my technical report about value decomposition, credit assignment, and … in SSA, but I didn’t write a single word (except this post that you are reading and a few more in a comment section of some weblogs). In spite of that, today was not useless as I had a chance to discuss with Mohammad about a fuzzy generalization of SSA and also re-read some previously devised theories, methods and hypotheses of my project. In addition, I used MatLab’s Neural Network Toolbox for the first time and implemented a predictive network. I made a predictive model of LTI system and that was successful. Thereafter, I tried to predict my Anti Memoirs’ daily hit and that was not ok! It wasn’t as easy as I supposed. I will work on it later.

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Approximate Reward report writing

Today, I came to Control Lab. in order to write a technical report about approximate reward in RL. I write something, but my efficiency is not very good, e.g. you may get involved in a long conversation and you cannot escape! 😀 Anyway …
During my writings, I found out that there might be some fallacy in agnostic learning: policy would change after changed agnostic reinforcement signal. I am not sure whether my result is correct or not.
If I can prove that policy does not change value function, everything would be ok! It is not generally correct, but may be correct in some situations, i.e. being sure that every state-action will be visited infinitely, then V->V* and so policy is irrelevant. emmm … must be thought!

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Post those-busy-days era: Chaos control and Co-evolution

At last, I finished that bulk of reporting stuff that I was engaged in during last week. I must have written a technical report about Chaos Control and a paper on Evolutionary Robotics. These heavy works –with becoming near deadlines and too little time to do- was too stressful for me. Fortunately, I did them!

The first one that is written in Persian (Farsi) is a literature survey on different methods of chaos control. I have been fascinated about chaos for a long time (perhaps from the time I was 12. Yes?! What is the problem?!), but I could not find any possibility to do some real scientific research or at least readings. Despite a short not-too-academic research that I did in the first year of BSEE, I have found a chance to do a real one when I entered graduate school and begin my MS study (The first one was about using a chaos signal in order to solve some optimization problem. After that, I did two chaos control ones too).
Thus, this rather good literature survery was a very pleasant experience for me. In spite of those readings, I am not a chaos specialist anyway! 😀

The second one, which is entitled Behavior Evolution/Hierarchy Learning in a Behavior-based System using Reinforcement Learning and Co-evolutionary Mechanism, was a result of some experiences on evolutionary robotics. You may know that I believe in the evolutionary mechanism (be natural or artificial), though many think that it is just an idiot (with IQ = 0.0001) given enough time to try every cases. Nevertheless, I got some good results mixing co-evolution and learning which was fascinating. I mainly did this research in order to satisfy the requirement of getting a mark for Dr.Lucas’ Biocomputing course, but that was only an ignition. Anyway, Dr.Nili and Dr.Araabi told me not to submit this paper to any place before submitting some other papers before.