UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents


"Empowerment and State-dependent Noise - An Intrinsic Motivation
               for Avoiding Unpredictable Agents"

                     Dr. Cornelius Glackin
  (Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of Hertfordshire)
    [joint work with Christoph Salge and Dr. Daniel Polani]



                     13 February 2013  (Wednesday)
                           1 pm -2 pm


                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                  * * Lecture Theatre LC108  * *

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

Empowerment is a recently introduced intrinsic motivation algorithm
based on the embodiment of an agent and the dynamics of the world the
agent is situated in. Computed as the channel capacity from an agent's
actuators to an agent's sensors, it offers a quantitative measure of how
much an agent is in control of the world it can perceive. In this talk,
we expand the approximation of empowerment as a Gaussian linear channel to
compute empowerment based on the covariance matrix between actuators and
sensors, incorporating state-dependent noise. This allows for the first
time the study of continuous systems with several agents. We demonstrate
that if the behaviour of another agent cannot be predicted accurately,
then interacting with that agent will decrease the empowerment of the
original agent. This leads to behaviour realizing collision avoidance
with other agents, purely from maximizing an agent's empowerment.

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk