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Showing posts from September, 2012

Constrained MDPs and the reward hypothesis

It's been a looong ago that I posted on this blog. But this should not mean the blog is dead. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Anyhow, I am back and today I want to write about constrained Markovian Decision Process (CMDPs). The post is prompted by a recent visit of Eugene Feinberg , a pioneer of CMDPs, of our department, and also by a growing interest in CMPDs in the RL community (see this , this , or this paper). For impatient readers, a CMDP is like an MDP except that there are multiple reward functions, one of which is used to set the optimization objective, while the others are used to restrict what policies can do. Now, it seems to me that more often than not the problems we want to solve are easiest to specify using multiple objectives (in fact, this is a borderline tautology!). An example, which given our current sad situation is hard to escape, is deciding what interventions a government should apply to limit the spread of a virus while maintaining economic

Student Response Systems

There are plenty Student Response Systems (SRSs) out there. Which one to choose? This brief document summarizes what I have found on the web before the Fall of 2012. Radio communication-based systems The systems differ in a few characteristics. The first is what type of devices the students can use. Classical, iClicker like systems require the student buy a device which communicates with a receiver that the teacher should possess. Since our school uses iClickers, let me focus on them. The overall cost of first generation iClickers is $10/device, assuming the student sells back the device to the bookstore (which they can). This is not a major cost but who likes to pay when you don’t have to? The first limitation of iClicker-like systems is that they are bound to the smart classrooms and the computers there. Thus, if you are like me and use your own computer for projection, you will need to switch between screens to show the results of a poll. This makes the use of iCli