From jeedward at yahoo.com Fri Jan 16 16:23:11 2009 From: jeedward at yahoo.com (John Edward) Date: Fri Jan 16 12:25:29 2009 Subject: [DevRob] ARCS-09 final call for papers Message-ID: <713015.50861.qm@web45915.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> ARCS-09 final call for papers ? The 2009 International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Control Systems (ARCS-09) (website: http://www.PromoteResearch.org ) will be held during July 13-16 2009 in Orlando, FL, USA. We invite draft paper submissions. The conference will take place at the same time and venue where several other international conferences are taking place. The other conferences include: ????????? International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-09) ????????? International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics and Chemoinformatics (BCBGC-09) ????????? International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-09) ????????? International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking and Communication Systems (HPCNCS-09) ????????? International Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ISP-09) ????????? International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology and Applications (RAITA-09) ????????? International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-09) ????????? International Conference on Theory and Applications of Computational Science (TACS-09) ????????? International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TMFCS-09) ? The website http://www.PromoteResearch.org contains more details. ? Sincerely John Edward Publicity committee ? ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/pipermail/devrob/attachments/20090116/c314a592/attachment.htm From jeedward at yahoo.com Fri Jan 23 14:26:48 2009 From: jeedward at yahoo.com (John Edward) Date: Fri Jan 23 10:29:05 2009 Subject: [DevRob] Final call for papers: ARCS-09 Message-ID: <228445.11737.qm@web45902.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Final call for papers: ARCS-09 ? The 2009 International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Control Systems (ARCS-09) (website: http://www.PromoteResearch.org ) will be held during July 13-16 2009 in Orlando, FL, USA. We invite draft paper submissions. The conference will take place at the same time and venue where several other international conferences are taking place. The other conferences include: ????????? International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-09) ????????? International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics and Chemoinformatics (BCBGC-09) ????????? International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-09) ????????? International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking and Communication Systems (HPCNCS-09) ????????? International Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ISP-09) ????????? International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology and Applications (RAITA-09) ????????? International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-09) ????????? International Conference on Theory and Applications of Computational Science (TACS-09) ????????? International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TMFCS-09) ? The website http://www.PromoteResearch.org contains more details. ? Sincerely John Edward Publicity committee ? ? ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/pipermail/devrob/attachments/20090123/3d2f53e7/attachment.htm From alex at cs.iastate.edu Sat Jan 24 04:24:47 2009 From: alex at cs.iastate.edu (Alexander Stoytchev) Date: Sat Jan 24 00:27:08 2009 Subject: [DevRob] CFP: ICDL 2009, 8-th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (Shanghai, June 5-7, 2009) Message-ID: ======================================================================= CALL FOR PAPERS 8th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL2009) Shanghai, June 5-7, 2009 http://www.icdl09.org/ ICDL is a multidisciplinary conference pertaining to all subjects related to the development and learning processes of natural and artificial systems, including perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, emotional and all other mental capabilities that are exhibited by humans, higher animals, and robots. Its visionary goal is to understand autonomous development in humans and higher animals in biological, functional, and computational terms, and to enable such development in artificial systems. ICDL strives to bring together researchers in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, robotics and other related areas to encourage understanding and cross-fertilization of latest ideas. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to: (1) Biological and biologically inspired architectures and general principles of development (2) Neuronal, cortical and pathway plasticity (3) Autonomous generation of internal representation, including feature identification (4) Neural networks for development and learning (5) Dynamics in neural systems and neurodynamical modeling (6) Attention mechanisms and the development of attention skills (7) Visual, auditory, touch systems and their development (8) Motor systems and their development (9) Language acquisition & understanding through development (10) Multimodal integration through development (11) Conceptual learning through development (12) Motivation, value, reinforcement, and novelty (13) Emotions and their development (14) Learning and training techniques for assisting development (15) Biological and biologically inspired thinking models and development of reasoning skills (16) Models of developmental disorders (17) Development of social skills (18) Philosophical and social issues of development (19) Robots with development and learning skills (20) Using robots to study development and learning ICDL2009 will feature invited plenary talks by world-renowned speakers, a variety of special sessions aligned with the conference theme, pre-conference tutorials, as well as regular technical sessions, and poster sessions. Best Paper Awards will be offered. Four students will each receive $250 Travel Awards to support their travel to the conference. In addition to full-paper submissions, ICDL 2009 accepts one-page abstract submissions to encourage late-breaking results or for work that is not sufficiently mature for a full paper. Organizing Committee General Chair: Juyang Weng, Michigan State University, USA General Co-Chairs: Tiande Shou, Fudan University, China Xiangyang Xue, Fudan University, China Program Chairs: Jochen Triesch, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany Zhengyou Zhang, Microsoft Research, USA Publication Chair: Yilu Zhang, GM Research, USA Publicity Chair: Alexander Stoytchev, Iowa State University, USA Publicity Co-Chairs: Hiroaki Wagatsuma, RIKEN, Japan (Asia) Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest, France (Europe) Gedeon Deák, University of California at San Diego, USA (North America) Local Organization Sub-Committee: Hong Lu (Chair), Rui Feng (Hotel), Cheng Jin (Web), Yuefei Guo (Finance), Wenqiang Zhang (Publication) Important Dates January 25, 2009: Special session and tutorial proposals February 8, 2009: Full papers April 19, 2009: Accept/Reject notification for full papers April 26, 2009: One-page poster abstracts May 3, 2009: Accept/Reject notification for poster abstracts May 10, 2009: Final camera-ready papers Sponsors IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Cognitive Science Society Microsoft Research ======================================================================= Alex Stoytchev, ICDL-09 Publicity Chair http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~alexs/ From juergen at idsia.ch Thu Jan 29 05:17:53 2009 From: juergen at idsia.ch (Schmidhuber Juergen) Date: Thu Jan 29 01:20:12 2009 Subject: [DevRob] Simple Theory of Surprise, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Beauty, Art, Science, Music, Jokes Message-ID: Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes (2008). Based on keynote talk for KES 2008 and joint invited lecture for ALT 2007 / DS 2007. Variants to appear in SICE Journal & Proc. ABIALS. arXiv preprint: http://arXiv.org/abs/0812.4360 Abstract. I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more `beautiful.' Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non- arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and recent artificial systems. Overview site with papers (1990-2008) on the theory of surprise & interestingness & attention & curiosity etc: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html Juergen Schmidhuber, TUM & IDSIA http://www6.in.tum.de/Main/Schmidhu http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ PS: Jobs related to this topic: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2009.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/pipermail/devrob/attachments/20090129/ce90735f/attachment.htm From juergen at idsia.ch Thu Jan 29 05:42:48 2009 From: juergen at idsia.ch (Schmidhuber Juergen) Date: Thu Jan 29 01:45:03 2009 Subject: [DevRob] 10 jobs at IDSIA: 5 Postdocs & 5 PhD students Message-ID: <3CE10030-BBDC-4AC0-849C-39972CC74424@idsia.ch> The Robot Learning Group at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA is expanding. We are seeking 5 outstanding postdocs and 5 excellent PhD students with experience / interest in topics such as adaptive robotics http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/learningrobots.html , curiosity-driven learning & intrinsic motivations based on the theory of surprise and interestingness http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html , computer vision, reinforcement learning & policy gradients for partially observable environments http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ rl.html , artificial evolution http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/evolution.html , recurrent neural networks (RNN) http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html , RNN evolution http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnnevolution.html , hierarchical reinforcement learning http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/subgoals.html , statistical / Bayesian approaches to machine learning, statistical robotics http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/statisticalrobotics.html , unsupervised learning http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ica.html , general artificial intelligence http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai.html , universal learning machines http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html & http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html . Goal: to improve the state of the art in adaptive robotics and machine learning in general, in both theory and practice. Funding is provided by several new EU projects, one on developmental robotics with adaptive iCub humanoids exploring the world like little infants, one on learning to control artificial hands with antagonistic & stiff muscles, and one on self-reference and "humanobs." But all postdocs and students will interact with each other and resident IDSIAni - we are one big family! Our international project partners include leading neuroscientists, machine learners, psychologists, roboticists, and other experts from Germany, the UK, Italy, Scandinavia, the US, and other countries. Salary: commensurate with experience. Postdocs ~ SFR 72,000 / year (~ US$ 67,000 / ? 48,000 / ? 46,000 as of 1/1/09). PhD fellowships: ~ SFR 38,000 / year (~ $ 35,000 as of 1/1/09). Low taxes! There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences. Interviews: most will take place at IDSIA in Switzerland, but we will also arrange meetings in the period 5-17 March 2009 in the area Washington / New York / Boston, where JS will give the AGI-09 keynote and talks at various US East Coast labs. Instructions and background: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2009.html Juergen Schmidhuber --- IDSIA was the smallest of the world's top ten AI labs listed in the 1997 "X-Lab Survey" by Business Week magazine, and ranked in fourth place in the category "Computer Science - Biologically Inspired". IDSIA's most important work was done after 1997 though. It is small but visible, competitive, and influential. Its highly cited Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms broke numerous benchmark records and are now widely used in industry for routing, logistics etc (today entire conferences specialize on Artificial Ants). IDSIA is also the origin of the first mathematical theory of optimal Universal Artificial Intelligence and self-referential Universal Problem Solvers (previous work on general AI was dominated by heuristics). IDSIA's artificial Recurrent Neural Networks learn to solve numerous previous unlearnable sequence processing tasks through gradient descent, artificial evolution and other methods. Research topics also include complexity and generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory, forecasting, learning robots. IDSIA's results were reviewed not only in science journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, but also in numerous popular press articles in TIME, the NY Times, der SPIEGEL, etc. Many TV shows on Tech & Science helped to popularize IDSIA's achievements. Switzerland is a good place for scientists. It is the origin of special relativity (1905) and the World Wide Web (1990), is associated with 105 Nobel laureates, and boasts far more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation. It also has the world's highest number of publications per capita, the highest number of patents per capita, the highest citation impact factor, the most cited single-author paper, etc, etc. Switzerland also got the highest ranking in the list of happiest countries. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/pipermail/devrob/attachments/20090129/2dbdfb4b/attachment.htm