Student projects
Below you find a selection of proposals for Bachelor's and Master's theses as well as
Diplomarbeiten and SEPs. Normally, many more topics are possible, so if you are interested
in this field of work, please contact me and we'll surely find a solution.
Evaluation and creation of "scripts" for everyday activities (DA, MT)
- Introduction
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Research in psychology suggests that the human's ability to understand activities and infer
details missing in a description is based on scripts learned from experience. These scripts
consist of roles of actors and objects and a sequence of actions performed during the activity.
We aim at using scripts to improve our system for importing robot plans from natural-language
descriptions found on websites like ehow.com. The first stage of this project is already finished,
i.e. almost-working plans can be imported from websites. But as the instructions were written for
humans, much information is missing: Locations are not specified in sufficient detail, directives
e.g. for switching off devices after use are often missing etc.
- Task description
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This thesis deals with the thorough analysis of problems related to the understanding of abstract
task descriptions, possible solutions and the creation of scripts for several household
activities. One challenge will be to find a good compromise between sufficiently detailed yet
general scripts that contain on the one hand enough information for understanding incomplete
descriptions but are on the other hand still valid for a rather large number of different plans.
- Prerequisites
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- Some basic knowledge about first-order logic is helpful