In order for cooperative robots ("co-robots") to respond to human behaviors accurately and efficiently in human-robot collaboration, interpretation of human actions, awareness of new situations, and appropriate decision making are all crucial abilities for co-robots. For this purpose, the human behaviors should be interpreted by co-robots in the same manner as human peers. To address this issue, a novel interpretability indicator is introduced so that robot actions are appropriate to the current human behaviors. In addition, the complete consideration of all potential situations of a robot's environment is nearly impossible in real-world applications, making it difficult for the co-robot to act appropriately and safely in new scenarios. This is true even when the pretrained model is highly accurate in a known situation. For effective and safe teaming with humans, we introduce a new generalizability indicator that allows a co-robot to self-reflect and reason about when an observation falls outside the co-robot's learned model. Based on topic modeling and two novel indicators, we propose a new Self-reflective Risk-aware Artificial Cognitive (SRAC) model. The co-robots are able to consider action risks and identify new situations so that better decisions can be made. Experiments both using real-world datasets and on physical robots suggest that our SRAC model significantly outperforms the traditional methodology and enables better decision making in response to human activities.
Probabilistic topic modeling provides a suite of tools for the unsupervised analysis of large collections of documents. Topic modeling algorithms can uncover the underlying themes of a collection and decompose its documents according to those themes. This analysis can be used for corpus exploration, document search, and a variety of prediction problems. In this tutorial, I will review the state-of-the-art in probabilistic topic models. I will describe the three components of topic modeling: (1) Topic modeling assumptions (2) Algorithms for computing with topic models (3) Applications of topic models In (1), I will describe latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which is one of the simplest topic models, and then describe a variety of ways that we can build on it. These include dynamic topic models, correlated topic models, supervised topic models, author-topic models, bursty topic models, Bayesian nonparametric topic models, and others. I will also discuss some of the fundamental statistical ideas that are used in building topic models, such as distributions on the simplex, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, and models of mixed-membership. In (2), I will review how we compute with topic models. I will describe approximate posterior inference for directed graphical models using both sampling and variational inference, and I will discuss the practical issues and pitfalls in developing these algorithms for topic models. Finally, I will describe some of our most recent work on building algorithms that can scale to millions of documents and documents arriving in a stream. In (3), I will discuss applications of topic models. These include applications to images, music, social networks, and other data in which we hope to uncover hidden patterns. I will describe some of our recent work on adapting topic modeling algorithms to collaborative filtering, legislative modeling, and bibliometrics without citations. Finally, I will discuss some future directions and open research problems in topic models.