The use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to solve problems with multiple objectives (known as multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs)) has attracted much attention. Being population based approaches, EAs offer a means to find a group of Pareto-optimal solutions in a single run. Differential evolution (DE) is an EA that was developed to handle optimization problems over continuous domains. The objective of this paper is to introduce a novel Pareto-frontier differential evolution (PDE) algorithm to solve MOPs. The solutions provided by the proposed algorithm for two standard test problems, outperform the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm, one of the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms for solving MOPs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is finding more uses in the human society resulting in a need to scrutinise the relationship between humans and AI. Technology itself has advanced from the mere encoding of human knowledge into a machine to designing machines that “know how” to autonomously acquire the knowledge they need, learn from it and act independently in the environment. Fortunately, this need is not new; it has scientific grounds that could be traced back to the inception of computers. This paper uses a multi-disciplinary lens to explore how the natural cognitive intelligence in a human could interface with the artificial cognitive intelligence of a machine. The scientific journey over the last 50 years will be examined to understand the Human-AI relationship, and to present the nature of, and the role of trust in, this relationship. Risks and opportunities sitting at the human-AI interface will be studied to reveal some of the fundamental technical challenges for a trustworthy human-AI relationship. The critical assessment of the literature leads to the conclusion that any social integration of AI into the human social system would necessitate a form of a relationship on one level or another in society, meaning that humans will “always” actively participate in certain decision-making loops—either in-the-loop or on-the-loop—that will influence the operations of AI, regardless of how sophisticated it is.

Robotic control in a continuous action space has long been a challenging topic. This is especially true when controlling robots to solve compound tasks, as both basic skills and compound skills need to be learned. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning algorithm to learn basic skills and compound skills simultaneously. In the proposed algorithm, compound skills and basic skills are learned by two levels of hierarchy. In the first level of hierarchy, each basic skill is handled by its own actor, overseen by a shared basic critic. Then, in the second level of hierarchy, compound skills are learned by a meta critic by reusing basic skills. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a Pioneer 3AT robot in three different navigation scenarios with fully observable tasks. The simulations were built in Gazebo 2 in a robot operating system Indigo environment. The results show that the proposed algorithm can learn both high performance basic skills and compound skills through the same learning process. The compound skills learned outperform those learned by a discrete action space deep reinforcement learning algorithm.