Semantic search

The aim of the project is to design, implement, test, and evaluate a new version of the device. While the charge phase, implemented by an ad-hoc IC controlled by the PIC, is quite efficient, some work has to be done in order to design a new solenoid and improve the way the PIC implements a sort of modulation of strength of the shoot, in order to implement small passages between robots. The final purpose is to improve the efficiency of the system, with the aim of minimize the energy consumed and maximize the energy transmitted to the ball, in order to obtain more powerful shots.

The first part of the project is focused on some theoretical aspects in order to understand the current design and evaluate how to improve it, while the second phase will be focused on the implementation and test of a new prototype of the kicking device. Experience with PIC-based systems is a plus, but not required, while some experience with electronics circuits is highly recommended. Students are supposed to work in the lab following a set of safety guidelines and rules with circuits at 400V, with 10A pick current during charge phase, and even more during shots. Student from electronics engineering are really welcomed to choose this project.

1. http://www.er.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/robocup-mid/index.cgi%7Ccenter%7C300px]]

When developing embedded applications it is frequently needed to look at *hardware register content* in order to *debug the code*. All commercial development suites offer register views that show their contents as well as the meaning of each bit. Open source development solutions currently lack this feature, meaning that you have to look to the correct memory location and map the content to the corresponding register bits manually. This seems to be one of the most limiting issues when developing embedded application using open source solutions.

This project aims to fill this gap, developing an Eclipse plug-in that shows the register contents in a tree viewer, like most commercial suites do.|center|300px]]

The idea is to use one or more calibrated camera to estimate the position and the trajectories of the moving objects in the scene. The skills required for this project are:

• C/C++ and OpenCV library
• Linux o.s.
• Geometry/Image processing
• Probabilistic robotics/IMAD|center|300px]]

• B. Dal Seno, M. Matteucci, and L. Mainardi. "A genetic algorithm for automatic feature extraction in P300 detection" (http://home.dei.polimi.it/dalseno/papers/2008/ijcnn08.pdf)
• B. Dal Seno, M. Matteucci, L. Mainardi, F. Piccione, and S. Silvoni. "Single-trial P300 detection in healthy and ALS subjects by means of a genetic algorithm" (http://home.dei.polimi.it/dalseno/papers/2008/grazGa08.pdf)%7Ccenter%7C300px]]

Material:

• papers about Manifold based optimization and space representations
• C++ framework for EKF-SLAM

Expected outcome:

• An extended Kalman filter which uses this new representation

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• Good mathematical background
• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

Aim of this project is to expand a traditional search engine with semantic information, so that also documents containing words related to the ones in the query can be retrieved. Existing thesauri and ontologies can be used, as well as more dynamic and collaborative sources of knowledge such as user tags and wikipedia pages and categories.

Starting points for this work can be the projects "SeQuEx - Semantic Query Expansion" and "Enriching search results with semantic metadata".|center|300px]]

Goal of this project is to develop a Facebook application to analyze a user's network of friends and automatically detect groups to suggest lists.|center|300px]]

Our projects and theses on this topic involve two different games: Unreal Tournament 2004 and TORCS. Please contact us for additional information.

References

• Drivatar in Forza Motorsport (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drivatar/default.aspx)
• TORCS (http://torcs.sourceforge.net/ TORCS)
• Botprize (http://botprize.org/)
• Daniele Loiacono's AI&R Lab Projects (http://home.dei.polimi.it/loiacono/uploads/Teaching/HomePage/AIRLab_AA20092010.pdf)%7Ccenter%7C300px]]

Information Geometry has been recently applied in different fields, both to provide a geometrical interpretation of existing algorithms, and more recently, in some contexts, to propose new techniques to generalize or improve existing approaches. Once the student is familiar with the theory of Information Geometry, the aim of the project is to apply these notions to existing machine learning algorithms.

Possible ideas are the study of a particular model from the point of view of Information Geometry, for example as Hidden Markov Models, Dynamic Bayesian Networks, or Gaussian Processes, to understand if Information Geometry can give useful insights with such models. Other possible direction of research include the use of notions and ideas from Information Geometry, such as the mixed parametrization based on natural and expectation parameters (3) and/or families of divergence functions (2), in order to study model selection from a geometric perspective. For example by exploiting projections and other geometric quantities with "statistical meaning" in a statistical manifold in order to chose/build the model to use for inference purposes.

Since the project has a theoretical flavor, mathematical inclined students are encouraged to apply. The project requires some extra effort in order to build and consolidate some background in math, partially in differential geometry, and especially in probability and statistics.

Bibliography

1. Shun-ichi Amari, Hiroshi Nagaoka, Methods of Information Geometry, 2000
2. Shun-ichi Amari, Information geometry of its applications: Convex function and dually flat manifold, Emerging Trends in Visual Computing (Frank Nielsen, ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5416, Springer, 2009, pp. 75–102
3. Shun-ichi Amari, Information geometry on hierarchy of probability distributions, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 47 (2001), no. 5, 1701–1711.|center|300px]]

One of the common hypothesis in regression analysis is that the noise introduced in order to model the linear relationship between regressors and dependent variable has a Gaussian distribution. A generalization of this hypothesis leads to a more general framework, where the geometry of the regression task is no more Euclidean. In this context different estimation criteria, such as maximum likelihood estimation and other canonical divergence functions do not coincide anymore. The target of the project is to compare the different solutions associated to different criteria, for example in terms of robustness, and propose generalization of LASSO and LARS in non Euclidean contexts.

The project will focus on the understanding of the problem and on the implementation of different algorithms, so (C/C++ or Matlab or R) coding will be required. Since the project has also a theoretical flavor, mathematical inclined students are encouraged to apply. The project may require some extra effort in order to build and consolidate some background in math, especially in probability and statistics.

Picture taken from (2)

Bibliography

1. Tibshirani, R. (1996), Regression shrinkage and selection via the lasso. J. Royal. Statist. Soc B., Vol. 58, No. 1, pages 267-288
2. Bradley Efron, Trevor Hastie, Iain Johnstone and Robert Tibshirani, Least Angle Regression, 2003|center|300px]]

In a context of smart modules that have to cooperate by exchanging data to reach their common goal, the communication protocol and middleware are core components. This project is about the middleware component, a publish/subscribe system that takes care of managing topics, publisher and subscribers, and of marshaling data before sending it. This project aims at porting the LCM marshaling and middleware library, developed at MIT and used in the Grand Challenge competition, to embedded systems, in order to exploit the existing LCM tools and to be compliant with an existing and efficient technology.

The project consists in:

• stripping non necessary features of LCM to match the constraints of an embedded system and of the communication protocol
• adding necessary features, like the concept of deadline (and priority as a consequence), that are mandatory for a real time distributed system
• building a gateway, on an embedded platform, that acts as gateway between the standard-LCM world and the embededd-LCM network

The projects has to be developed in ANSI C, and experience with embedded platforms is a plus.|center|300px]]

In the project "Wikipedia Category Map" a tool has been developed to extract the graph of Wikipedia categories, to store it in RDF format and to interactively visualize and explore it. Aim of this project is to analyze the resulting graph for the extraction of semantic relationships; for example it is possible to define metrics of distance between topics in the graph, which can be useful for various purposes in information retrieval.|center|300px]]

Material

• lots of theoretical background and material
• an existing (and working) C++ implementation of the framework

Expected outcome:

• a C++ library for the implementation of generic EKF-SLAM algorithms

Required skills:

• Experienced C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

• R. Blatt et al. Brain Control of a Smart Wheelchair (http://tinyurl.com/ygldwun)%7Ccenter%7C300px]]

Material:

• existing prototypical implementation of the system

Expected outcome:

• an odometric sensor for planar odometry with uncalibrated camera

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• Good mathematical background
• Backgroundd in computer vision
• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

The aim of the project is first to improve the current design of the PIC-based board, and realize a new working prototype, and then to implement and evaluate different algorithms able to estimate more precisely the x,y and theta odometric data from the mice readings. Experience with PIC-based systems and some experience with electronics circuits is a plus. Students are supposed to redesign the electronic board, improve the firmware of the PIC, and work on the algorithm that estimates the robot position on the PC. It would be also interesting to evaluate the possibility to embed the optimization and estimation algorithms in the firmware of the PIC in order to produce a stand-alone device.

Ask the tutors of the project for extra material, such as data-sheets and other documentation.|center|300px]]

Material:

• Kinect sensor and libraries
• A framework for multisensor SLAM
• PCL2.0 library for dealing with point clouds

Expected outcome:

• Algorithm able to build 3D point cloud representation of the observed scene
• Point clouds processing could be used to improve the accuracy of the filter as well

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• Basic background in computer vision
• Basic background in Kalman filtering
• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

• implementing embedded algorithms for the estimation of the IMU attitude to be compared with the actual one (e.g., Kalman filter, DCM, Madgwick, etc.)
• developing a, easy to use, procedure for the calibration of IMU parameters
• making a comparison with commercial units using a robot arm as testbed
• validate the accuracy of the IMU on a flying platform
• integrate the measurements from a GPS to reduce drift and provide accurate positiong (this will make it definitely a MS thesis)

Material

• electronic board and eclipse based C development toolkit for ARM processors
• papers describing the algorithms we are interested in implementing

Expected outcome:

• few different AHRS algorithms with comparative results
• user-friendly procedure to calibrate the IMU
• a sistem which integrated IMU and GPS to provide accurate positioning

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• C programming on ARM microcontroller
• background on kalman filtering and attitude estimation|center|300px]]

• J.R. Wolpaw et al. Brain-computer interfaces for communication and control (http://tinyurl.com/yhq27pq)
• R.J. Croff, R.J. Barry. Removal of ocular artifact from the EEG: a review (http://tinyurl.com/ykk6ks9)%7Ccenter%7C300px]]

Material

• A framework for multisensor SLAM using the world centric approach
• Papers and report about robocentric slam

Expected outcome:

• a fully functional robocentric version of the MoonSLAM framework

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• Basic background in computer vision
• Background in Kalman filtering
• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

Material:

• a MS thesis which describes the scan matching algorithms
• a BS thesis which implements a prototype of the system

Expected outcome:

• a complete system that build maps integrating laser scan and visual informtion

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• Background on Kalman filtering
• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

When developing embedded applications it is common the need to test some algorithm in some fast way, without to re-program the whole firmware every time. PAWN (http://www.compuphase.com/pawn/) is a *simple and lightweight scripting language with a C-like syntax*. Execution speed, stability, simplicity and a small footprint were essential design criteria for both the language and the abstract machine, making PAWN suitable for embedded applications.

This project aims to port the abstract machine to ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, add a set of functions to interface with the underlying hardware peripherals and then to embed it as ChibiOS/RT (http://www.chibios.org) thread.|center|300px]]

Material:

• datasets with real data
• a few odometric system implementations
• C++ libraries for non linear optimization

Expected outcome:

• software for the self calibration of a set of odometry systems mounted on the same robot

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]

The proposed project is aimed at extending USARSim along two directions:

• Development of a tool for automatically generating realistic 3D worlds for robot testing. This task involves work on 3D game modelling and development using the UDK engine.
• Create test arenas and perform experiment in USARSim. Simulation tools as USARSim are powerful tools for robotics, but in order to consider the results obtained in a virtual environment also valid in the real case, simulated environments must be validated through experiments performed both in virtually and with real robots.

Results will be included in the USARSim project and used by the RoboCup community.|center|300px]]

• Implementation of mechanical and electronical parts of the robots for the management of the ball and kicking
• Design of robot behaviors (fuzzy systems)
• Coordination of robots
• New sensors

These projects allow to experiment with real mobile robots. Participation to the championships is a unique experience (2000 people, with 800 robots playing all sort of games...)

The project can be turned into a thesis by facing different problems in depth.|center|300px]]

Aim of this project is to design and develop a software tool to extract this kind of information from a single social network platform (decided by the student). It may be required also some kind of analysis or visual representation of the collected data.|center|300px]]

TiltOne is a robot with only two wheels that can stand in vertical position following an unstable equilibrium point. The control is applied by commanding an amount of torque to the wheels, allowing the robot to mantain it's gravity center vertical aligned to the wheel axis.

The aim of the project proposal is to implement and compare different control solutions, based on classical approach (as PID and LQR control) and Machine Learning approach (as Reinforcement Learning control policies), that allow the robot to move following a given trajectory at a given speed.|center|300px]]

variables associated to both internal nodes and leaves of the tree.

The project will focus on the understanding of the problem and on the implementation of different algorithms, so (C/C++ or Matlab or R) coding will be required. Since the approach will be based on statistical models, the student is supposed to be comfortable with notions that come from probability and statistics courses.

The project is thought to be extended to master thesis, according to interesting and novel directions of research that will emerge in the first part of the work. Possible ideas may concern the proposal and implementation of new algorithms, based on recent approaches to phylogenetic inference available in the literature, as in (3) and (4). In this case the thesis requires some extra effort in order to build and consolidate some background in math in oder to understand some recent literature, especially in (mathematical) statistics and, for example, in the emerging field of algebraic statistics (5).

Other possible novel applications of phylogenetic trees have been proposed in contexts different from biology, as in (6). Malware (malicious software) is software designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner's informed consent. Often malwares are related to previous programs thought evolutionary relationships, i.e., new malwares appear as small mutations of previous softwares. We are interested in the use of techniques from phylogenetic trees to create a taxonomy of real world malwares.

Picture taken from http://www.tolweb.org/tree/ and http://www.blogscienze.com

Bibliography

1. Felsenstein 2003: Inferring Phylogenies
2. Semple and Steel 2003: Phylogenetics: The mathematics of phylogenetics
3. Louis J. Billera, Susan P. Holmes and and Karen Vogtmann Geometry of the space of phylogenetic trees. Advances in Applied Math 27, 733-767 (2001)
4. Evans, S.N. and Speed, T.P. (1993). Invariants of some probability models used in phylogenetic inference. Annals of Statistics 21, 355-377.
5. Lior Pachter, Bernd Sturmfels 2005, Algebraic Statistics for Computational Biology.
6. A. Walenstein, E-Md. Karim, A. Lakhotia, and L. Parida. Malware Phylogeny Generation Using Permutations of Code, Journal in Computer Virology, v1.1, 2005.|center|300px]]

Per maggiori informazioni, inviare una mail a lanzi@elet.polimi.it

Comportamenti di Gruppo in Videogiochi di Corse Automobilistiche

Questa tesi prevede lo studio delle dinamiche dei comportamenti dei piloti in competizioni automobilistiche su circuito e lo sviluppo di una intelligenza artificiale in grado di imitare i comportamenti di un vero mevero pilota. In particolare, il lavoro di tesi si concentrerà su comportamenti di gruppo come i sorpassi, le manovre per evitare collisioni con altri veicoli, il recupero da situazioni di emergenza, ecc. Terminatala fase di analisi e l’implementazione di un prototipo, verrà valutata la possibilità di inserire tale implementazione all’interno di un videogioco di ultima generazione.

Comportamenti di Gruppo in Videogiochi di Corse Motociclistiche

Questa tesi prevede lo studio delle dinamiche dei comportamenti dei piloti in competizioni motociclistiche su circuito e lo sviluppo di una intelligenza artificiale in grado di imitare i comportamenti di un vero vero pilota. In particolare, il lavoro di tesi si concentrerà su comportamenti di gruppo come i sorpassi, le manovre per evitare collisioni con altre moto, il recupero da situazioni di emergenza, ecc. Terminata la fase di analisi e l’implementazione di un prototipo, verrà valutata la possibilità di inserire tale implementazione all’interno di un videogioco di ultima generazione.

Intelligenza Artificiale in Videogiochi di Corse Motociclistiche

La tesi prevede l’analisi e l’implementazione dell’intelligenza artificiale per un videogioco di corse motociclistiche. Il sistema dovrà essere in grado di eseguire in modo corretto ed efficace un insieme di manovre complesse quali: l’accelerazione da fermo, la frenata in situazioni limite, l’approccio ad una curva che preveda la fase di stacco, di impostazione, di percorrenza e di uscita, l’approccio a serie di curve, ecc. Si valuterà la possibilità di inserire tale implementazione all’interno di un videogioco di ultima generazione.|center|300px]]

Material:

• papers from major journals and conferences
• reports from research projects

Expected outcome:

• a report with a detailed review of the state of the art organized according to the main relevant aspects (to be identified during the work)
• an implementation of some state of the art algorithms for tracking or navigation

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• proficiency in english
• basic understanding of computer vision
• basic understanding of filtering techniques|center|300px]]

One possible example is the annotation of mp3 files available on the Web. They can be classified in genres or associated to datatype properties, such as rating, title, length and release date... also exploiting data already available in http://musicbrainz.org/%7Ccenter%7C300px]]

• Pierluigi Taddei, Ferran Espuny, Vincenzo Caglioti: Planar Motion Estimation and Linear Ground Plane Rectification using an Uncalibrated Generic Camera. International Journal of Computer Vision 96(2): 162-174 (2012)

Material:

• reference paper to start from and reference datasets
• C++ library for extraction and manipulation of features (OpenCV)

Expected outcome:

• working system able to perform visual odometry using an omnidirectional camera

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• computer vision and 3D reconstruction|center|300px]]

Material

• a huge corpus of literature on the topic
• datasets to test the approach upon
• C++ library for image processing and computer vision (OpenCV)

Expected outcome:

• software for the stabilization of videos from a moving camera showing moving objects in cluttered environments
• a tool for the objective evaluation of image stabilization algorithms

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• computer vision and 3D reconstruction
• C++ programming under Linux|center|300px]]