[ecoop-info] 1st CFP: ERLARS 2009 @ IROS 2009: Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Systems

[Nils T Siebel, ERLARS Workshop]

[Apologies if you receive this more than once!]

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF LOCATION AND DATES!

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ERLARS 2009

2nd INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON
EVOLUTIONARY AND REINFORCEMENT LEARNING FOR AUTONOMOUS ROBOT SYSTEMS

Held in conjunction with IROS 2009 in St. Louis, USA on October 15, 2009

Submission deadline: July 5, 2009

http://www.erlars.org/

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Objectives

Learning is essential for an autonomous robot system.  The range of
unexpected situations it can handle while performing its task depends on
its ability to adapt. Recent developments have taken autonomous robots
beyond industrial settings, for example at home as toys and cleaners.
However, production models usually interact with their environment
following a fixed control strategy, which limits their range of
application. More adaptable robots require control strategies that learn
more and better from interactions with their environment.  The ERLARS
workshop addresses the challenge to develop efficient and versatile
learning architectures for autonomous robot systems, with the main focus
on adequate evolutionary and reinforcement learning algorithms.

Relevant Topics

Papers are invited on all aspects of learning methods for the control of
autonomous robot systems, including, but not limited to:

 * Model-free visual servoing
 * Mobile robot navigation by means of reinforcement learning
 * Combining offline- and online learning methods for robot control
 * Reinforcement learning by evolutionary algorithms of neural
   network-based and other robot controllers
 * Hybrid systems that combine modelling and parameter estimation by
   reinforcement learning 
 * Learning from scratch and cascaded learning architectures
 * Developmental and epigenetic robotics
 * Balancing exploration and exploitation of acquired knowledge
 * Simulated environments for autonomous robot learning scenarios

Important Dates

 * July 5, 2009: Paper submission deadline
 * August 10, 2009: Notification of paper acceptance
 * August 23, 2009: Camera ready paper submission
 * October 15, 2009: Workshop takes place

Workshop Chairs

Nils T Siebel
Cognitive Systems Group, Institute of Computer Science,
Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel Kiel, Germany

Josef Pauli
Intelligent Systems Group, Department of Computer Science,
University of Duisburg-Essen Duisburg, Germany

Programme Committee

Andrew Barto (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
Peter Dürr (EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland)
Christian Igel (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)
Yohannes Kassahun (DFKI Lab Bremen, University of Bremen, Germany)
Takanori Koga (Yamaguchi University, Japan)
Tim Kovacs (University of Bristol, UK)
Jun Ota (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Josef Pauli (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Jan Peters (MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany)
Daniel Polani (University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK)
Marcello Restelli (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Stefan Schiffer (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Juergen Schmidhuber (Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland)
Marc Toussaint (TU Berlin, Germany)
Nils T Siebel (Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany)
Jeremy Wyatt (University of Birmingham, UK)


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More information on the workshop website: http://www.erlars.org/

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ERLARS - International Workshop on
Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for
Autonomous Robot Systems

http://www.erlars.org/

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Nils T Siebel
Cognitive Systems Group
Institute of Computer Science
Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel
Olshausenstr. 40
24098 Kiel, Germany.