Music Emotion Recognition has attracted a lot of academic research work in recent years because it has a wide range of applications, including song recommendation and music visualization. As music is a way for humans to express emotion, there is a need for a machine to automatically infer the perceived emotion of pieces of music. In this paper, we compare the accuracy difference between music emotion recognition models given music pieces as a whole versus music pieces separated by instruments. To compare the models' emotion predictions, which are distributions over valence and arousal values, we provide a metric that compares two distribution curves. Using this metric, we provide empirical evidence that training Random Forest and Convolution Recurrent Neural Network with mixed instrumental music data conveys a better understanding of emotion than training the same models with music that are separated into each instrumental source.

Auto battlers are a recent genre of online deck-building games where players choose and arrange cards that then compete against other players' cards in fully-automated battles. As in other deck-building games, such as trading card games, designers must balance the cards to permit a wide variety of competitive strategies. We present Ludus, a framework that combines automated playtesting with global search to optimize parameters for each card that will assist designers in balancing new content. We develop a sampling-based approximation to reduce the playtesting needed during optimization. To guide the global search, we define metrics characterizing the health of the metagame and explore their impacts on the results of the optimization process. Our research focuses on an auto battler game we designed for AI research, but our approach is applicable to other auto battler games.

Gin Rummy is a popular two-player card game involving choices to draw and discard cards to form sets of matching cards. Unlike other popular games such as Chess, Poker, and Go, there is little formal artificial intelligence research about how to make good decisions when playing Gin Rummy. In this paper, we develop an agent that plays Gin Rummy through a combination of known and expected card values, modeling the opponent to predict their cards of interest, and a conservative approach to assessing when to end the hand. In addition to discussing our observations about Gin Rummy that inspired our agent's design and how the agent works, we evaluate the relative importance of various features employed by our agent by competing agents which implement various subsets of those features.

Interaction between multiple agents requires some form of coordination and a level of mutual awareness. When computers and robots interact with people, they need to recognize human plans and react appropriately. Plan and goal recognition techniques have focused on identifying an agent's task given a sufficiently long action sequence. However, by the time the plan and/or goal are recognized, it may be too late for computing an interactive response. We propose an integration of planning with probabilistic recognition where each method uses intermediate results from the other as a guiding heuristic for recognition of the plan/goal in-progress as well as the interactive response. We show that, like the used recognition method, these interaction problems can be compiled into classical planning problems and solved using off-the-shelf methods. In addition to the methodology, this paper introduces problem categories for different forms of interaction, an evaluation metric for the benefits from the interaction, and extensions to the recognition algorithm that make its intermediate results more practical while the plan is in progress.

The use of robots in stroke rehabilitation has become a popular trend in rehabilitation robotics. However, despite the acknowledged value of customized service for individual patients, research on programming adaptive therapy for individual patients has received little attention. The goal of the current study is to model teletherapy sessions in the form of a generative process for autonomous therapy that approximate the demonstrations of the therapist. The resulting autonomous programs for therapy may imitate the strategy that the therapist might have employed and reinforce therapeutic exercises between teletherapy sessions. We propose to encode the therapist's decision criteria in terms of the patient's motor performance features. Specifically, in this work, we apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation on the batch data collected during teletherapy sessions between a single stroke patient and a single therapist. Using the resulting models, the therapeutic exercise targets are generated and are verified with the same therapist who generated the data.