Department of Computer Science Technische Universitaet Muenchen
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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
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
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
  • Some basic knowledge about first-order logic is helpful

Computer Science IX | Technische Universität München