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Showing posts from May, 2011

Constrained MDPs and the reward hypothesis

It's been a looong ago that I posted on this blog. But this should not mean the blog is dead. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Anyhow, I am back and today I want to write about constrained Markovian Decision Process (CMDPs). The post is prompted by a recent visit of Eugene Feinberg , a pioneer of CMDPs, of our department, and also by a growing interest in CMPDs in the RL community (see this , this , or this paper). For impatient readers, a CMDP is like an MDP except that there are multiple reward functions, one of which is used to set the optimization objective, while the others are used to restrict what policies can do. Now, it seems to me that more often than not the problems we want to solve are easiest to specify using multiple objectives (in fact, this is a borderline tautology!). An example, which given our current sad situation is hard to escape, is deciding what interventions a government should apply to limit the spread of a virus while maintaining economic

Brains, Minds and Machines

Former UofA student, Alborz , shared a link to a video recording of a recent MIT150 symposium on Brains, Minds and Machines on facebook. I watched the video yesterday (guess what, I need to mark 40 something finals, hehe:)). I wrote a comment back to Alborz on facebook and then I thought, why not make this a blog post? So, here it goes, edited, expanded. Warning: Spoilers ahead and the summary will be biased. Anyhow.. The title of the panel was: " The Golden Age — A Look at the Original Roots of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience 
" and the panelist were Emilio Bizzi, Sydney Brenner, Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky, Barbara H. Partee and Patrick H. Winston. The panel was moderated by Steven Pinker who started with a 20-30 minute introduction. Once done with this each of the panelist delivered a little speech and at the end there were like two questions asked by Pinker. My heroes in the panel were Minsky and Winston . They rocked! Minsky almost fell as