Autonomous robots have been a vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. An important step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn to accomplish amultitude of different tasks triggered by environmental context and higher-level instruction. Early approaches to this goal during the heydays of artificial intelligence research in the late 1980s showed that handcrafted approaches do not suffice and that machine learning is needed. However, off the shelf learning techniques often do not scale into real-time or to the high-dimensional domains of manipulator and humanoid robotics. In this book, we investigate the foundations for a general approach to motor skilllearning that employs domain-specific machine learning methods. A theoretically well-founded general approach to representing the required control structures for task representation and executionis presented along with novel learning algorithms that can be applied in this setting. The resulting framework is shown to work well both in simulation and on real robots.

In the 1990s, a new type of learning algorithm was developed, based on results from statistical learning theory: the Support Vector Machine (SVM). This gave rise to a new class of theoretically elegant learning machines that use a central concept of SVMs-kernels—for a number of learning tasks. Kernel machines provide a modular framework that can be adapted to different tasks and domains by the choice of the kernel function and the base algorithm. They are replacing neural networks in a variety of fields, including engineering, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. Learning with Kernels provides an introduction to SVMs and related kernel methods. Although the book begins with the basics, it also includes the latest research. It provides all of the concepts necessary to enable a reader equipped with some basic mathematical knowledge to enter the world of machine learning using theoretically well-founded yet easy-to-use kernel algorithms and to understand and apply the powerful algorithms that have been developed over the last few years.

The concept of large margins is a unifying principle for the analysis of many different approaches to the classification of data from examples, including boosting, mathematical programming, neural networks, and support vector machines. The fact that it is the margin, or confidence level, of a classification--that is, a scale parameter--rather than a raw training error that matters has become a key tool for dealing with classifiers. This book shows how this idea applies to both the theoretical analysis and the design of algorithms. The book provides an overview of recent developments in large margin classifiers, examines connections with other methods (e.g., Bayesian inference), and identifies strengths and weaknesses of the method, as well as directions for future research. Among the contributors are Manfred Opper, Vladimir Vapnik, and Grace Wahba.