Difference between revisions of "Projects"

Revision as of 11:39, 21 April 2008

This page is a repository of links to the pages describing the projects we are working on at AIRLab, or have been in the past.

Ongoing projects

by research area (areas are defined in the Main Page); for each project a name and a link to its AIRWiki page is given

Agents, Multiagent Systems, Agencies

• Multiagent cooperating system

• Planning in Ambient Intelligence scenarios

BioSignal Analysis

Affective Computing

• Relatioship between Cognition and Emotion in Rehabilitation Robotics
• Driving companions
• Emotion from Interaction
• Affective Devices

Brain Computer Interface

• Command wheelchair using BCI2000
• BCI based on Motor Imagery

Automatic Detection Of Sleep Stages

• Sleep Staging with HMM

Analysis of the Olfactory Signal

• Lung Cancer Detection by an Electronic Nose

Computer Vision and Image Analysis

• Automated extraction of laser streaks and range profiles

• Data collection for laser-rangefinder and camera calibration

• Particle filter for object tracking

E-Science

Machine Learning

• Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Multiagent Coordination in Real-Time Computer Games

Ontologies and Semantic Web

• JOFS, Java Owl File Storage
• FolksOnt
• Extending a wiki with semantic templates
• Geographic ontology for a semantic wiki

Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

Robotics

• LURCH - The autonomous wheelchair

• RAWSEEDS

• Balancing robots: Tilty, TiltOne

• ROBOWII

• PoliManus

• HE-KNOWS - An electronic nose

Soft Computing

Finished projects

See the list of our finished projects on the Finished Projects page.

Note for students

If you are a student and there isn't a page describing your project, this is because YOU have the task of creating it and populating it with (meaningful) content. If you are a student and there IS a page describing your project, you have the task to complete that page with (useful and comprehensive) information about your own contribution to the project. Be aware that the quality of your work (or lack of it) on the AIRWiki will be evaluated by the Teachers and will influence your grades.

Instructions to add a new project or to add content to an existing project page are available at Projects - HOWTO.

HOWTO add a new project to the AIRWiki

NOTE: we know it's a lot of text down here. We tried to be hyper-clear to help inexperienced users of AIRWiki: let's say we made the following instructions fool-proof, and possibly too pedantic for most of us. This means that if you consider yourself such an expert that you can avoid to read these instructions, and you do some mistake, by definition you have proved yourself to be a fool.

Contributing to a wiki is easy, and leaves you with a deep sense of satisfaction: by contributing, you are documenting your work in a durable form and helping all the other users of the wiki as well. By the way, a well thought out help for MediaWiki (the software that AIRWiki, or for that matter also Wikipedia and many other websites, is built upon) is available here. So even if this is your first experience with a wiki, you should not have any problems.

To contribute you need to become one of AIRWiki's Registered users. Please note that all the content you insert into the AIRWiki must be written in English.

Here is a complete description of the procedure to create a new page associated to your project: follow it carefully, because other contributors do not appreciate when their content is damaged by careless people. Be very careful with that 'Save page' button...

Step 1: Preparing the new project page

1. open a text editor (e.g. Notepad);
2. create a new, empty text file: let's call it YourPage.txt;
3. open the Project page template and click the edit tab on the top of it to expose the wiki source text;
4. copy all the content of the source text window into YourPage.txt;
5. modify YourPage.txt file by substituting all the example text with information about your project.

Step 2: Adding the new project to the Projects page of the AIRWiki

1. open the Projects page;
2. go to the 'Ongoing projects' section and find the subsection having the name of the research area of your project: e.g. "E-Science" (if you have doubts, ask the teachers);
3. choose a name of your liking for the new AIRWiki page dedicated to your project. If the project already has an "official" name, use it; otherwise, use a word or a short phrase with only the first letter in capitals (of course you have to choose a name that is coherent with the objectives of the project);
4. click the edit link on the right of the subsection to expose the wiki source text;
5. add a new text line with the name of your project and a link to its wiki page: the latter is simply the project name you chose surrounded by double square parentheses (this will create the page when you will click the "Save page" button - DON'T click it now);
6. use a blank line to separate the new line from pre-existing text;
7. be extremely careful not to alter pre-existing text: if you think you could have done that, press the 'back' button of your browser now to exit from the editing page without saving, then repeat the editing steps;
8. click the "Show preview" button at the bottom of the page, and look carefully at the whole subsection (not only to the part you added): if it doesn't seem to be perfectly right, press the 'back' button of your browser to exit from the editing page without saving, then repeat the editing;
9. when you are certain that all is ok, click the "Save page" button at the bottom of the page.

You should be now (proudly) looking at the description of your project, perfectly set among the others. Now, clicking on the link to your project's page in the Projects page of the AIRWiki, you will see one of these:

• the 'edit' tab of an empty page: good, you chose an unused name for your page. Proceed to fill the page as described below.
• a non-blank page: argh, you chose an already-used name for your page. Re-edit the Projects page and modify the wiki link (i.e. the name between double square parentheses) you put in it, changing the name of your new page (i.e. again, the name between double square parentheses). As before, click the 'Save page' button only if and when you are certain that all is ok in the whole page.

Go on with this checking and modifying until you find a (sensible!) name that no other project has yet used.

Step 3: Filling the new page

1. if you are looking at the 'edit' tab of your project's new page, simply open file "YourPage.txt" (you know, the one containing the content for your page, which you prepared before) and copy its entire contents into the page. If not, first use a browser to open your page and click on the 'edit' tab on the top of the page.
2. click the "Show preview" button at the bottom of the page, and look carefully at the result: if it doesn't seem to be right, press the 'back' button of your browser now to exit from the editing page without saving, then repeat the page editing by clicking on the 'edit' tab on the top of the page;
3. when you are certain that all is ok, click the "Save page" button at the bottom of the page.

You should now be able to (veeery proudly) see your project's page in its full glory. If you aren't satisfied with the result, just go back to page editing by clicking on the 'edit' tab on the top of the page.

As your work on your project will go on, don't forget to keep your project's page up-to-date by editing it every time you have new material. To know how, see #HOW TO add information to a project page.

HOW TO add information to a project page

As said in AIRWiki#How do I access the contents of this wiki?, AIRWiki is divided into two parts (called "layers"): a public layer, readable by anyone through the internet and a private layer, only accessible by Registered users.

Registered users can modify both layers of AIRWiki.

For project pages, the public layer can be changed by clicking the 'edit' tab of the page. Thus, to add or modify something you only have to click that tab and do it. By clicking the 'Save' button on the bottom of the page, your work will be immediately made public on the internet. If you want to check the result before saving (a very good habit), click the 'Show preview' button and take a look. If you are not sure that what you see is exactly what it should (including the parts of the page that you didn't modify - or thought so :-) ), just press the 'back' button of your browser now to exit from the editing page without saving, then repeat the page editing.

The private layer of project pages can be edited in just the same way: the only difference is that you have to click the 'discussion' tab instead of the 'Edit' one.

See #Public or private? to understand what you should put into the public layer and what you should, instead, put into the private layer.

Tip: if you are editing the private layer of a project page, on the top of the web page you are looking at there is the title "Editing Talk:NameOfTheProject". If the title is "Editing NameOfTheProject" (i.e. if Talk: is missing), you are editing the public layer.

Actually, there is only one important difference between modifying the public layer and the private layer: if you publish something wrong in the public layer, you make your mistake public to all the world. And you have full responsibility for what you publish. Of course, we all make mistakes, and you should not be too worried by the possibility that you write something that doesn't make sense scientifically or technically: but there are types of mistakes which mean trouble, especially when you infringe someone else's copyright. See Registered users#Caveats for registered users.

Public or private?

As soon as you have some new information about your project (decisions, roadmaps, results, images, data, descriptions of things gone well or of errors made, links, warnings, and everything else), it's very important that you put it into the project's page. In this way you will create a trace of how the project is proceeding, what difficulties you had to overcome, and how this was accomplished.

The best thing to do is to treat your project's page as an online repository of everything related to the project. You are encouraged to do just that. By doing so you:

• help anyone that is working or will work on your project or a similar one by recording useful information;
• can access your documentation through the internet, from any PC.

To know how to put information in, see #HOW TO add information to a project page. The obvious problem is: what information must be put into the "public" layer of the project's page and what should instead put into the "private" layer? You should follow these (loose) guidelines:

• Any text of the public layer of AIRWiki must be written in English;
• Anything on the public layer of AIRWiki should be sufficiently "finished". If something needs revising or checking, leave it in the private layer until it's ready.
• You should, eventually, migrate all the content of the private layer to the public layer. (Well, excluding the details regarding your work that cannot be of interest to anyone out of the AIRLab, such as how much you paid for this and that :-) ) So:
  • try to keep the contents of the private layer of your project's page well organized: in this way the migration will be easy;
  • it's a good idea if you directly write everything in English!
• Try to include into the project's page everything you would have liked to find there (if you work on a project started by others) and everything you think that people working on it in the future will like to find.
• It is especially useful if you include a project diary into the private part of your project's page: a short description of everything you do, why you did it, and what resulted from it. This will be invaluable for those that will have to take your work further!

A final note: for your teachers, the AIRWiki will be the main source of information about how your project is going, so they will look at its page (public and private parts) often and with attention :-)