Only In California

I am going to get into other tales from my trip to Pasadena later, but I wanted to give a quick update on one of my adventures in Southern California. As part of the conference, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) hosts a video competition with the goal of encouraging students to enter into a career in AI research. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I was part of a video about a system that interprets motions made with a Wiimote. This film had been made so as to be entered into the competition and ended up being nominated for the Best Short Film Award. As the creator of the film could not be there, I was designated as his proxy since I was attending the conference.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I have officially appeared in an award winning short film. It is an accomplishment that I am now going to add to resumes and business cards. As the proxy, I was also entrusted with the task of saying a 30 second speech. Since I did not expect we would win, it ended up coming something like this:

"Michael (the video director) couldn't be here today, and so he sent me in his place. He didn't tell me what he wanted to say, so I am just going to assume that he would have thanked Ricardo who built the WiiGesture system with him, and me, for appearing in the film. Thanks."

Anyone who knows me is probably also aware that there were a lot of "ummm"s and "ahhh"s thrown in as well.

Live From Pasadena, it's Rick Velanzano

I am currently in Pasadena at the General Game Playing Competition. The competition is held as part of a workshop at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). And my name has been misspelled on my name tag.

General Game Playing is part of a push towards constructing general machine reasoning systems. The idea is to construct a program that can reason about the task at hand and devise a strategy to do it well. The field of games used as a test bed because a large number of tasks can be expressed in this way, and competition offers a simple well to compare alternative approaches.

Artificial intelligence researchers have had tremendous success in developing programs that perform specific games at a world-class level. The classic example was Deep Blue which bet the world-champion Chess champion Gary Kasparov. At the University of Alberta, we have one of the strongest games research group in the world and some of our more public successes include the construction of a program, Chinook, which is not only world-class at Checkers but provably can never be beaten. Our Computer Poker Research Group also constructed a program, Polaris, that has shown capable of defeating world-class poker players over a large number of heads-up limit hold'em matches. Oh yeah, and I was not involved in either of those projects.

However, these programs are limited in that they are specific to the exact game they were designed to play. These programs can playing arbitrarily poorly if even even slight modifications are made to the game, like changing the way a knight moves, changing the size of the board, or changing the number of players. On the other hand, humans are much better at handling such game changes.

In comparison, general game playing programs are expected to play a large variety of games, and actually only get the games rules immediately before the game is to begin. The game then consists of two phases: the initial "thinking" phase, during which the program has an opportunity to analyze the game descriptions; the game-play phase, during which players are required to make a move ever so often (the time changes depending on the game).

Anyways, I will be updating this page over the next week with updates on how the conference is going and how we did in the competition.

UPDATE: The competition started with two divisions of 4 players. We came second in our division and are off to the finals with 3 other teams. We also just got killed when we tried to play Sudoku.

UPDATE 2: Well, the competition is over and we ended up coming in third. We were a little disappointed because we missed out on second by the smallest of margins (it came down to how the numbers were rounded), and the fact that we had some trouble with a program on some of the games. Regardless, we are pleased with the result and despite a few hiccups, were much happier about the way the competition was run this year.

My Acting Pedigree

For a course project, a friend of mine built a Wii Gesture Classification system. The idea is that during game play, a user will perform actions with the Wiimote which have to be identified by the game and translated into actions by a game character. These actions have to be classified properly. For example, consider a baseball game in which a full swing needs to be distinguished from a bunt.

The difficulty with building such a system is that fact that there will be a significant amount of variation in the way different people will try to perform the same action. For example, people swing a baseball bat in many differenet ways, and even do so from different sides. Moreover, as different games will require different action sets to classify, it would be nice to have a system that could be re-used in multiple games without much effort.

My friend's system is trained through the use of examples. To do so, a number of people perform the desired actions. The system then attempts to generalize from these training examples to a more general idea of the actions. The resulting model is then used to classify actions by a game player.

This is all a long-winded way of getting to the point that it is a cool system, he made a demo movie of his software for the 2009 AAAI Video Competition, and I am in it. In the video, my friend shows the system classifying actions in real-time. Since I can't resist the allure of movie-making, I volunteered to be one of the test subjects.

Anyways, here is the video:


You can also find contact info if you are interested in the system at the following link: http://wiigesture.com/

An Update

Since I am currently writing my thesis during the day, I find I am less inclined to come home and write on this here blog. Hopefully I will be able to satisfy my legions of fans until July when I will be more interested in writing. Until the next time I feel obligated to write anything, I leave you with the following updates/observations.

I will begin by saying that I have decided to grow a thesis beard. Specifically, I will not shave until my thesis writing is complete. There are a number of reasons for this decision. First, thesis writing is like the playoffs of a graduate degree. Secondly, looking in the mirror will be a constant reminder of how lazy I am. If I had finished my thesis sooner, I wouldn't look this bad. This should provide extra motivation for finishing as soon as possible.

Finally, the thesis beard will allow me to officially be better than Sidney Crosby at something. He has millions of dollars, is a world-class athlete, and is well-spoken. I am none of these things. But at least for the next few years, I can still grow a better beard than him. Sure, I assume I am better at mathematics and computer science than he is, but I don't know for sure. He may just be hiding those skills. However, concerning beards, I have him beat. At least for now.

A second update: I have run out of toothpicks. When I arrived in Edmonton 20 months ago, I purchased 500. Today, I ran out. Considering that I did not spend that entire time in Edmonton, I am guessing I am going at about a toothpick per day pace. Make of that what you will.

Another Short Post

During a conversation with a friend, I realized that the fact that I enjoyed being a catcher for so many years may mean that I fundamentally like having things thrown at me. Not that this is an invitation.

I Have Never Thought Of It That Way

My sister Julie thinks that my area of research, single-agent search, sounds like a dating service for spys.

Ricardo, Richard, Rick, Ricky, and Dick

Maybe it is because St. Richard's Day was only a few weeks ago, but I am still somewhat surprised to have stumbled on a few different interesting ideas about my name since then.

For those who aren't in the know, when I was younger I generally went by the name Ricky. At some point, I decided to move on to Rick, just as I assume Timmy's generally move on to Tim at some point. This was a semi-conscious decision which was done by slowly phasing out the old name - mostly by introducing myself to new people as Rick instead of Ricky.

Anyways, while Ricky Gervais proves that the name is not just for children any more, Michael Ian Black, in a recent blog post, describes why it is the perfect name for a drug dealer:

My hypothetical drug dealer’s name is Ricky because it sounds like the kind of name that is both friendly but also scummy, which is how I want my drug dealer to be.

Considering that Ricky from Trailer Park Boys is a friendly yet scummy drug dealer, it is starting to seem that this belief is fairly universal.

Now, while Richard is my legal name, only a handful of people call me that, including my Nonna, who pronounces it "Ric-kard" (as in rhyming with mallard). I don't really have a problem with Richard, as it is a fine name. It just sounds so regal, which is why I don't really go by it except in formal situations. In any case, I share said name with one Rick Ankiel of the St. Louis Cardinals who, accordng to stltoday.com, apparently has similarly been pondering the various incarnations of his name:

Ankiel has been preoccupied recently about when it is age appropriate for him to shorten his given name, Richard, to "Dick" instead of "Rick." Some friends and clubhouse denizens have already taken to calling him "Dick" this spring. He calls it an instant "ice-breaker."

Interesting. So at some point, I felt "Rick" was more age-appropriate than "Ricky," and now Mr. Ankiel believes that I should move onto "Dick" in the near future. Well, I suppose it is better than being a friendly, but kinda scummy kid.

Update: I'd like to dedicate this post to Ricky Romero who was nails tonight in the Jay game, even if they lost. I'd like to dedicate the use of the word nails to the Drunk Jays Fans and some anonymous fan named Joshua Waitzkin.