This resource motivates and develops a new research programme in epistemology that is centred around the concept of epistemic autonomy.--

Traditionally, organizations and researchers have focused on learning that occurs through formal training and development programs. However, the realities of today’s workplace suggest that it is difficult, if not impossible, for organizations to rely mainly on formal programs for developing human capital. This volume offers a broad-based treatment of autonomous learning to advance our understanding of learner-driven approaches and how organizations can support them. Contributors in industrial/organizational psychology, management, education, and entrepreneurship bring theoretical perspectives to help us understand autonomous learning and its consequences for individuals and organizations. Chapters consider informal learning, self-directed learning, learning from job challenges, mentoring, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), organizational communities of practice, self-regulation, the role of feedback and errors, and how to capture value from autonomous learning. This book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, management, training and development, and educational psychology.

Autonomous Learning Systems is the result of over a decade of focused research and studies in this emerging area which spans a number of well-known and well-established disciplines that include machine learning, system identification, data mining, fuzzy logic, neural networks, neuro-fuzzy systems, control theory and pattern recognition. The evolution of these systems has been both industry-driven with an increasing demand from sectors such as defence and security, aerospace and advanced process industries, bio-medicine and intelligent transportation, as well as research-driven – there is a strong trend of innovation of all of the above well-established research disciplines that is linked to their on-line and real-time application; their adaptability and flexibility. Providing an introduction to the key technologies, detailed technical explanations of the methodology, and an illustration of the practical relevance of the approach with a wide range of applications, this book addresses the challenges of autonomous learning systems with a systematic approach that lays the foundations for a fast growing area of research that will underpin a range of technological applications vital to both industry and society. Key features: Presents the subject systematically from explaining the fundamentals to illustrating the proposed approach with numerous applications. Covers a wide range of applications in fields including unmanned vehicles/robotics, oil refineries, chemical industry, evolving user behaviour and activity recognition. Reviews traditional fields including clustering, classification, control, fault detection and anomaly detection, filtering and estimation through the prism of evolving and autonomously learning mechanisms. Accompanied by a website hosting additional material, including the software toolbox and lecture notes. Autonomous Learning Systems provides a ‘one-stop shop’ on the subject for academics, students, researchers and practicing engineers. It is also a valuable reference for Government agencies and software developers.

Building a robot that learns to perform a task has been acknowledged as one of the major challenges facing artificial intelligence. Self-improving robots would relieve humans from much of the drudgery of programming and would potentially allow operation in environments that were changeable or only partially known. Progress towards this goal would also make fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence by furthering our understanding of how to successfully integrate disparate abilities such as perception, planning, learning and action. Although its roots can be traced back to the late fifties, the area of robot learning has lately seen a resurgence of interest. The flurry of interest in robot learning has partly been fueled by exciting new work in the areas of reinforcement earning, behavior-based architectures, genetic algorithms, neural networks and the study of artificial life. Robot Learning gives an overview of some of the current research projects in robot learning being carried out at leading universities and research laboratories in the United States. The main research directions in robot learning covered in this book include: reinforcement learning, behavior-based architectures, neural networks, map learning, action models, navigation and guided exploration.

Humans and machines are very di?erent in their approaches to game pl- ing. Humans use intuition, perception mechanisms, selective search, creat- ity, abstraction, heuristic abilities and other cognitive skills to compensate their (comparably) slow information processing speed, relatively low m- ory capacity, and limited search abilities. Machines, on the other hand, are extremely fast and infallible in calculations, capable of e?ective brute-for- type search, use “unlimited” memory resources, but at the same time are poor at using reasoning-based approaches and abstraction-based methods. The above major discrepancies in the human and machine problem solving methods underlined the development of traditional machine game playing as being focused mainly on engineering advances rather than cognitive or psychological developments. In other words, as described by Winkler and F ̈ urnkranz [347, 348] with respect to chess, human and machine axes of game playing development are perpendicular, but the most interesting, most promising, and probably also most di?cult research area lies on the junction between human-compatible knowledge and machine compatible processing.I undoubtedly share this point of view and strongly believe that the future of machine game playing lies in implementation of human-type abilities (- straction,intuition,creativity,selectiveattention,andother)whilestilltaking advantage of intrinsic machine skills. Thebookisfocusedonthedevelopmentsandprospectivechallengingpr- lems in the area of mind gameplaying (i.e. playinggames that require mental skills) using Computational Intelligence (CI) methods, mainly neural n- works, genetic/evolutionary programming and reinforcement learning.

The behaviorist credo that animals are devices for translating sensory input into appropriate responses dies hard. The thesis of this pathbreaking book is that the brain is innately constructed to initiate behaviors likely to promote the survival of the species, and to sensitize sensory systems to stimuli required for those behaviors. Animals attend innately to vital stimuli (reinforcers) and the more advanced animals learn to attend to related stimuli as well. Thus, the centrifugal attentional components of sensory systems are as important for learned behavior as the more conventional paths. It is hypothesized that the basal ganglia are an important source of response plans and attentional signals. This reversal of traditional learning theory, along with the rapid expansion of knowledge about the brain, especially that acquired by improved techniques for recording neural activity in behaving animals and people, makes it possible to re-examine some long standing psychological problems. One such problem is how the intention to perform an act selects sensory input from relevant objects and ensures that it alone is delivered to the motor system to control the intended response. This is an aspect of what is sometimes known as the binding problem: how the different features of an observed object are integrated into a unified percept. Another problem that has never been satisfactorily addressed is how the brain stores information concerning temporal order, a requirement for the production of most learned responses, including pronouncing and writing words. A fundamental process, the association between brain activities representing external events, is surprisingly poorly understood at the neural level. Most concepts have multiple associations but the concept is not unduly corrupted by them, and usually only a single appropriate association is aroused at a time. Furthermore, any arbitrary pair of concepts can be instantly associated, apparently requiring an impossibly high degree of neural interconnection. The author suggests a substitute for the reverberating closed neuronal loop as an explanation for the engram (active memory trace or working memory), which may go some way to resolving these difficulties. Shedding new light on enduring questions, The Autonomous Brain will be welcomed by a broad audience of behavioral and brain scientists.

Fully revised and updated, this second edition updates Novak's theory for meaningful learning and autonomous knowledge-building along with tools to make it operational - that is, concept maps, created with the use of CMapTools and the V diagram. It is essential reading for educators at all levels and corporate managers who seek to enhance worker productivity.

The contributions in Toward Learning Robots address the question of how a robot can be designed to acquire autonomously whatever it needs to realize adequate behavior in a complex environment. In-depth discussions of issues, techniques, and experiments in machine learning focus on improving ease of programming and enhancing robustness in unpredictable and changing environments, given limitations of time and resources available to researchers. The authors show practical progress toward a useful set of abstractions and techniques to describe and automate various aspects of learning in autonomous systems. The close interaction of such a system with the world reveals opportunities for new architectures and learning scenarios and for grounding symbolic representations, though such thorny problems as noise, choice of language, abstraction level of representation, and operationality have to be faced head-on. Contents Introduction: Toward Learning Robots * Learning Reliable Manipulation Strategies without Initial Physical Models * Learning by an Autonomous Agent in the Pushing Domain * A Cost-Sensitive Machine Learning Method for the Approach and Recognize Task * A Robot Exploration and Mapping Strategy Based on a Semantic Hierarchy of Spatial Representations * Understanding Object Motion: Recognition, Learning and Spatiotemporal Reasoning * Learning How to Plan * Robo-Soar: An Integration of External Interaction, Planning, and Learning Using Soar * Foundations of Learning in Autonomous Agents * Prior Knowledge and Autonomous Learning

Paves the way towards a fully-fledged science of human information-seeking by discussing how and why people seek knowledge.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents - DAI Meets Databases, CIA-97, held in Kiel, Germany, in February 1997. The book opens with 6 invited full papers by internationally leading researchers surveying the state of the art in the area. The 16 revised full research papers presented were carefully selected during a highly competitive round of reviewing. The papers are organized in topical sections on databases and agent technology, agents for database search and knowledge discovery, communication and cooperation among information agents, and agent-based access to heterogeneous information sources.