Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...
The advent of comprehensive synaptic wiring diagrams of large neural circuits has created the field of connectomics and given rise to a number of open research questions. One such question is whether it is possible to reconstruct the information stored in ...
An integer linear program is a problem of the form max{c^T x : Ax=b, x >= 0, x integer}, where A is in Z^(n x m), b in Z^m, and c in Z^n.
Solving an integer linear program is NP-hard in general, but there are several assumptions for which it becomes fixed ...
Non-convex constrained optimization problems have become a powerful framework for modeling a wide range of machine learning problems, with applications in k-means clustering, large- scale semidefinite programs (SDPs), and various other tasks. As the perfor ...
We apply inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with a novel cost feature to the problem of robot navigation in human crowds. Consistent with prior empirical work on pedestrian behavior, the feature anticipates collisions between agents. We efficiently learn ...
Autonomous robots have the potential to fundamentally transform conventional farming methods, e.g. by enabling economically viable farming of sloped arable land. However, navigation on slopes in harsh conditions is challenging for robots as they must be pr ...
Finding cycles in directed graphs enables important applications in various domains such as finance, biology, chemistry, and network science. However, as the size of graph datasets continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to discover cycles wit ...
There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...
In this thesis we present and analyze approximation algorithms for three different clustering problems. The formulations of these problems are motivated by fairness and explainability considerations, two issues that have recently received attention in the ...
