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Social robots have been shown to be promising tools for delivering therapeutic tasks for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, their efficacy is currently limited by a lack of flexibility of the robot’s social behavior to successfully meet therapeutic and interaction goals. Robot-assisted interventions are often based on structured tasks where the robot sequentially guides the child towards the task goal. Motivated by a need for personalization to accommodate a diverse set of children profiles, this paper investigates the effect of different robot action sequences in structured socially interactive tasks targeting attention skills in children with different ASD profiles. Based on an autism diagnostic tool, we devised a robotic prompting scheme on a NAO humanoid robot, aimed at eliciting goal behaviors from the child, and integrated it in a novel interactive storytelling scenario involving screens. We programmed the robot to operate in three different modes: diagnostic-inspired (Assess), personalized therapy-inspired (Therapy), and random (Explore). Our exploratory study with 11 young children with ASD highlights the usefulness and limitations of each mode according to different possible interaction goals, and paves the way towards more complex methods for balancing short-term and long-term goals in personalized robot-assisted therapy.

In this paper, we propose the first machine teaching algorithm for multiple inverse reinforcement learners. As our initial contribution, we formalize the problem of optimally teaching a sequential task to a heterogeneous class of learners. We then contribute a theoretical analysis of such problem, identifying conditions under which it is possible to conduct such teaching using the same demonstration for all learners. Our analysis shows that, contrary to other teaching problems, teaching a sequential task to a heterogeneous class of learners with a single demonstration may not be possible, as the differences between individual agents increase. We then contribute two algorithms that address the main difficulties identified by our theoretical analysis. The first algorithm, which we dub SplitTeach, starts by teaching the class as a whole until all students have learned all that they can learn as a group; it then teaches each student individually, ensuring that all students are able to perfectly acquire the target task. The second approach, which we dub JointTeach, selects a single demonstration to be provided to the whole class so that all students learn the target task as well as a single demonstration allows. While SplitTeach ensures optimal teaching at the cost of a bigger teaching effort, JointTeach ensures minimal effort, although the learners are not guaranteed to perfectly recover the target task. We conclude by illustrating our methods in several simulation domains. The simulation results agree with our theoretical findings, showcasing that indeed class teaching is not possible in the presence of heterogeneous students. At the same time, they also illustrate the main properties of our proposed algorithms: in all domains, SplitTeach guarantees perfect teaching and, in terms of teaching effort, is always at least as good as individualized teaching (often better); on the other hand, JointTeach attains minimal teaching effort in all domains, even if sometimes it compromises the teaching performance.

This paper discusses the problem of room usage optimization for university timetables: given a timetable, we want to optimize the room occupation by determining the events allocated to each room, while ensuring that the rooms have enough capacity to “seat” all people participating in those events. This paper contributes with two approaches to the problem of optimizing the timetable scheduled for each room. The first approach consists of a two-stage Integer Linear Programming (ILP) which applies a lexicographic optimization wherein the goal of the first stage is to maximize the number of students seated and that of the second stage is to optimize the room occupation. This is provably optimal, in both optimization criteria. However, it is computationally demanding, requiring significant computation time for large problems. To address this issue, we propose a second approach, consisting of a greedy algorithm. The algorithm assigns lectures to rooms greedily, according to a specific cost function that seeks to maximize the number of students seated. We show that the proposed cost function guarantees that the greedy algorithm performs within 63% of the total number of students. We apply both algorithms in a case study involving real data from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the engineering school from Universidade de Lisboa. Our results confirm that the greedy algorithm is two orders of magnitude faster than ILP when considering large data sets. Comparing the performance of the two methods we observe that the performance of the greedy algorithm, when compared to the ILP-based approach, is within 2% for the number of seated students and 34% for the room occupation. The GRASP algorithm is a good extension of the greedy algorithm, which is able to improve in 12% the quality of the solution (in terms of compactness) without adding significant CPU time. Overall, the two proposed approaches provide significant gains for both optimization criteria when compared to the current hand-made solutions. Keywords: University timetabling, Room usage optimization, Integer linear programming, Greedy algorithms