This is not for asking any doubts or queries. I know this is a technical forum and hence would be the best platform for me to get advice on.
I am a Master's student in computer engineering and hold interest in Robotics. I am confused as to where should I start if from. I have 2 courses one is on controlling of robots and other is based on introduction to AI. I don't want to take both the courses together. I am confused as to do I need to go for controlling of robots first or AI first?
Also, if you know any good forums/blogs on AI then please share... Would be a lot helpful.
Thanks.
AI and robot control are different subjects, and do not necesssarily cross over that much. AI covers writing software that is intelligent, and applies to things as disperate as character recognition in scanned text, stock market analysis and face detection. There are uses of AI techniques with mobile and manipulator robotics, but there are lots of good robot projects out there that are implemented with zero AI.
Your control course for robotics will likely cover the basics of kinematics and dynamics of robots, path planning, and cover a fair bit of practical robotics knowledge. All of this course is important knowlege for building and controlling robots, and if robotics is your goal destination then i would take this course. You can do good work in the robotics field with zero knowlege of AI, but you cant with zero knowlege of robot control.
Well, I would take the AI class first, because I would want to know more about the logic before going to the control part.
As far as forums go, you could check out the AI Forum, and the AI Depot (the AI Depot is not exactly a forum, but it has some good resources and articles).
You can also check out these Area51 StackExchange site proposals:
Cognitive Science
Robotics Research
Machine Learning
Related
I'm not that mature in coding. I'm curious about can I use NLP Toolkit for game development.
I have a game in my mind. It is like there are three different difficulties. The player selects one of them. And the word pops out according to the difficulty level that the player selected. After that 10 additional blob comes out and you will enter words according to the word that came out in the middle. For example, the school came out from the selection.
So I will enter words like book, teacher, computer, homework, parental pressure, future anxiety, fear of the morning, cafeteria, childhood, school bus and I will get +10 points.
Can I use NLP Toolkit for this and what will be the correct way to develop this? I want to develop this game for phones and computers at the same time so there will be some porting work to be done but none of a big deal. Maybe we can just code it for mobile and run it, through emulators.
So my main questions are these; What is the correct way to develop this game (which language or which tools should I use) can I use NLP Toolkit and if use it will it make my work easier. I have taken a look at spaCy too. But I'm developing my game in Turkish but there isn't support for it.
I was thinking to develop this game on python and graphical interface via css but I dunno how accurate that is. As I said I'm a newcomer to this community. And English isn't my first language so sorry for mistakes and unclear sentences. Thanks for your help and kindness. Thanks in regards.
I want to learn AI and build AI projects. there are sources but not as if I want to learn other programming languages like learning python Django and building web apps. I can find clear and many resources and many people to ask. Any suggestions would help me.
websites
courses
social media groups
tutoring
thanks
I read a lot of AI but still, I could not create a project.
I can recommend Kaggle.com. There are a lot of courses and tutorials where you can learn Python, machine learning basics, but also deeper machine learning topics like pandas library.
When you are more practiced you can do competitions. Kaggle is a good platform to learn machine learning and you have a lot of code to practice on.
Everyone is always caught by headlines about AI changing this or that industry. Everyone is very anxious to start an AI project of their own. But whatever the purpose, it's important to choose an AI project that suits you. So I recommend that you can browse this https://ai.google/ AI website from Google. You will have a comprehensive understanding of different aspects of the current AI field. This might ease your confusion in choosing an AI project that is either interesting or meaningful to you.
Hope my answer is helpful to you!
Im looking into to starting to do some AI programming especially aiming at robots. Creating robots that think and act for themselves. Just wanting some advice on what coding platforms/languages are out there that are best suited to this area?
Im a microsoft developer through and through, so would I be able to accomplish this with the MS Robotics studio at all. Or is that all based on remote control robot development?
Am a little confused because there is so much contradicting information out there. Please help.
Thanks in advance
What kind of robotics are you trying to do? (i.e. is it a robot where a laptop or another powerful device might be an acceptable controller? Or are you looking at a small true embedded robot?)
If it's the first, MS Robotics might be right for you. It uses .Net IIRC so there's a nice low entry barrier. If you wanna do something smaller, maybe look at Arduino, which has so much support around its platform that you'll probably find what you need. Arduino uses something very very much like C++.
Regardless of what you choose, find a kit robot. I can't stress this enough. You want to spend time doing AI, not getting hardware to all work correctly.
If you wanna try something weird and interesting, the Parallax Propeller Microcontroller is a relatively cheap arudino-weight processor with 8 cores. Might be nice for AI, where thinking generally is best done in parallel.
Try using webots for designing the control. I found it very intuitive and friendly... lets you focus on your core programming logic. Hardware should start from Boebot (the very basics) and graduate to Arduino platforms as you gain knowledge.
Try getting a Pioneer, once you move to real robotics (excellent sensor suite but prohibitively priced). Or try flying bots like A.R.Drone etc. It would be nice to program and will give you insight into UAVs as well.
My company is doing a fair bit of WPF and Silverlight development recently and we are discovering that while we are darn good at slinging code, our UI design skills lack some "pizazz".
Where does one find a "devigner", as Microsoft calls them? Are there user groups (especially in the Dallas area) with these types of artists/usability experts?
I've had experience with web developers with these skill sets, but not so many with WPF/Silverlight experience and looking on the Internet for these people hasn't turned up much.
Edit: Made this a wiki so I can get a little more feedback without people thinking I'm fishing for points. So far the comments have been helpful.
In my experience, it's pretty tough to find these guys. Posting on job boards that are known to attract exceptional talent (such as 37signals and StackOverflow) is probably your best bet. You will probably end up finding someone who is a developer first and has a hobby-level passion for graphics design. These guys might not do the best work, but they will at least have both of the (mostly mutually exclusive) skills you are looking for.
A second option could be to hire a run-of-the-mill graphics designer and assign one of your developers to work with him and make all of the graphics stuff work in your application. This, of course, requires two people working on a project when you originally planned on having one but I think it's still a viable option.
EDIT: graphic design job postings/information
http://www.youthedesigner.com/graphic-design-jobs/
http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/jobs.html
http://www.coroflot.com/public/jobs_browse.asp
Even though it is getting easier to find these guys, it is still fairly hard as the skill sets are kind of mutually exclusive (as already noted) ... and because there is a training gap (most designers know only the Adobe suite of products (this is the part that is getting better).
I personally think you will find that you have to cultivate this blend of skills and that it may not be found in just one person.
One thing I would encourage you to watch is part 2 of the Hiking Mt. Avalon workshop. This part covers collaboration between the developer and the designer ... and also describes the developer/designer/integrator workflow ... which is a workflow that allows you to cultivate these types of people ... and to just deal with this difficult situation.
I personally think that it is easier to bring a developer closer to the designer world (in order to perform as your integrator/devigner ... because one of the main roles of this person is to understand the platform (i.e. WPF/Silverlight) and how to leverage it to make the designs into real live software ... without harming the design/artistic integrity.
In fact, I am an example of a developer with designer tendencies and often perform the role of integrator. I find myself spending a lot of time with our graphics artists/designers, trying to instill knowledge of the platform into them slowly but surely.
For example, showing them the slider isn't just a static graphic but a living, dynamic thing that can be restyled, retemplated, and have behavior. This is an example of trying to cultivate a designer so that he or she can perform more and more as an integrator/devigner ... and lessening the work the actual integrator has to do ... to the point where the role of the integrator may not even be needed anymore ... or looking at it another way ... having just cultivated a new integrator/devigner.
For the record, I can't stand the term 'devigner' either. I think integrator is a much better description of what the person finds themselves doing (i.e. crossing the chasm between development and design).
See these posts (1, 2, 3) for more info.
Hope that helps! You're not alone in your desire to find these types of people!
Why don't you ask on the MSDN WPF forum?
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/threads/
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I wanted to ask Stack Overflow users for a nice idea for a project that could entertain a fellow student programmer during a semester. Computer vision might look interesting, although I couldn't say if a project on that field is something that could be achievable in 4 months. What do you think?
There is a story that, during the early days of AI research when significant progress was being made on "hard" logic problems via mechanical theorem provers, a professor assigned one of his graduate students the "easy" problem of solving how vision provided meaningful input to the brain. Obviously, things turned out to be far more difficult than the professor anticipated. So, no, not vision in the general sense.
If you are just starting in AI, there are a couple of directions. The classic AI problems - logic puzzles - are solved with a mechanical theorem prover (usually written in Lisp - see here for the classic text on solving logical puzzles). If you don't want to create your own, you can pick up a copy of Prolog (it is essentially the same thing).
You can also go with pattern recognition problems although you'll want to keep the initial problems pretty simple to avoid getting swamped in detail. My dissertation involved the use of stochastic proccesses for letter recognition in free-floating space so I'm kind of partial to this approach (don't start with stochastic processes though, unless you really like math). Right next door is the subfield of neural networks. This is popular because you almost can't learn NN without building some interesting projects. Across this entire domain (pattern processing), the cool thing is that you can solve real problems rather than toy puzzles.
A lot of people like Natural Language Processing as it is easy to get started but almost infinite in complexity. One very definable problem is to build an NLP program for processing language in a specific domain (discussing a chess game, for example). This makes it easy to see progress while still being complex enough to fill a semester.
Hope that gives you some ideas!
The staple software that most people implement as one of their first applications of ANNs is character recognition (not necessarily hand written characters).
You could do something simpler than general "vision", like point a webcam at a digital thermometer and read the temperature from that.
Can't tell without knowing more about you, your friend, and the project. My guess is "no".
I'd point you towards two sources. The first is Peter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence"; the second is "Programming Collective Intelligence". Maybe they'll inspire you.
Write a spam filter. Pick an interesting corpus to train on and filter (Twitter messages, Facebook wall posts, blog comments...?). There are lots of ways to go about building the classifier, identifying training data, etc.
One thing I always wanted to do was improve the AI of older video games. Take DOOM for example. Very simplistic AI, compared to even what you see today. You could try improving or even completely rewriting AI for enemy characters in a video game.
Or you could write your own little game that specifically focuses on the computer making surprisingly informed decisions.
I've always thought it would be interesting to write something that will look at a post (say, a question here) and predict how many votes it will get. I originally thought of the idea in the context of looking at a blog or an article and predicting vote ups/downs on reddit (or more simply a bucket like low, medium, high).
A program that plays poker, hearts or similar.
Make it interesting, for example a game AI, I know a chess sim might take awhile, but maybe you could boil it down a bit (just 3 pieces, 2 rooks and a king each side) for example...
Turing tests are interesting. Here is a link on how LOLBot passed the turing test