AIMSA 2012 Workshop on Advances in Robot Learning and Human-Robot Interaction

Date: *** September 12, 2012 ***
Location: Varna, Bulgaria – Golden Sands resort (24 km from Varna airport)
Venue: The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence - AIMSA 2012

Workshop URL: http://kormushev.com/AIMSA-2012/
Conference URL: http://www.aimsaconference.org/


ORGANIZERS
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*** IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning *** with chairs:

Petar Kormushev, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy
Edwin Olson, University of Michigan, USA
Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell University, USA
Wataru Takano, University of Tokyo, Japan

The local organizer is the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (IICT), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.


OBJECTIVES
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The robot hardware is progressively becoming more complex, which leads to growing interest in applying machine learning approaches within the robotics community. At the same time, researchers in human-robot interaction often apply techniques borrowed from artificial intelligence. This workshop will focus on recent advances in applying machine learning and AI approaches to robotics in general, and in particular to the domain of human-robot interaction. Both theoretical and practical results are of interest.

The workshop will also serve as a 2012 kick-off for the new chairs of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning.


TOPICS
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The specific topics covered in the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• machine learning algorithms applied to robot learning and human-robot interaction
• developmental, epigenetic, and cognitive robotics
• reinforcement learning in robotics
• robot learning from demonstration
• hybrid learning, e.g. combining imitation and reinforcement learning
• learning models of robots, or tasks
• representations of robot movements, tasks, and learned policies
• unsupervised learning applied to robotics
• probabilistic learning methods for robot task planning and execution
• learning for robot locomotion
• applying learning algorithms to robot control
• evolutionary algorithms and meta-heuristic methods in robotics
• model-based learning in human-robot interaction
• simulations and real-world experiments of robot learning scenarios


INTENDED AUDIENCE
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The intended audience is robotics researchers who are actively engaged in machine learning or AI research, or who are interested in exploring machine learning ideas in their future work. We encourage especially students to participate, as they will have opportunity to see the most recent and advanced results in this field.


INVITED SPEAKERS
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*** Prof. Alexander Stoytchev, Iowa State University, USA ***
Director of the Developmental Robotics Laboratory at ISU

*** Assoc. Prof. Yukie Nagai, Osaka University, Japan ***
Visiting Researcher at Bielefeld University, Germany


IMPORTANT DATES
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Notification of interest: now open, please send e-mails to: petar.kormushev at iit.it

Paper submissions due: *** June 10, 2012 ***
Notification of paper acceptance: June 24, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: July 15, 2012
Workshop date: September 12, 2012


PROCEEDINGS
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The papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Cybernetics and Information Technologies (CIT). The maximum paper length is 12 pages. The publication procedure will be very fast, and the special issue will be ready before the start of the workshop.


PAPER SUBMISSION DETAILS
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Papers have to be submitted in PDF format to: petar.kormushev at iit.it
Papers must be written in English, and should not exceed 12 pages with font Times 11pt. For the camera-ready papers, authors are requested to follow the paper formatting style of the Journal of Cybernetics and Information Technologies. Author instructions for the manuscript format can be found at: http://www.cit.iit.bas.bg/cit_inst_authors.html. For any questions about the paper submission, please write to the above-mentioned e-mail address.