Students

Path planning is a core problem in robotics. Lydia Kavraki developed a method called the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM), which caused a paradigm shift in the robotics community. The approach introduced randomization schemes that exploited local geometric properties and produced efficient solutions without fully exploring the underlying search space.

There’s a common misconception that decisions made by computers are automatically unbiased – as opposed to those made by humans. However, Chad Jenkins pointed out many ways in which AI can fail to deliver fair and reasonable results. He pointed out what needs to be done in AI to get the intellectual domain right and how the technology and understanding researchers generate can have a positive impact on the world.

Jan Andersen is Head of Research Office at the University of Southern Denmark. He has a background in Computer Science and Danish Language. He has been working with research strategy and research planning. He was involved in building up four very successful research support units. He was an advisor for Rectors of the Danish Technical University, University of Copenhagen, and the former Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University. He was responsible for the cross-faculty follow-up of the Danish university merger in 2007.

The tools available at our disposal for solving some of the really hard problems our society is facing today are old, inadequate, and need to be deprecated. Everyone is looking to Artificial Intelligence based solutions like it’s the next gold rush, without understanding how Machine Learning actually works.

In this talk, I review the Soar cognitive architecture, including the motivation for cognitive architecture, the history of Soar, the applications it has been applied to, and our current research on Interactive Task Learning. I then discuss Soar from the standpoint of an open-source research project: positives, negatives, and challenges.

In his captivating lecture, Frank Guerin examines the question about the integration between robot vision and a deeper understanding of tasks. As robot grasping is still an unsolved problem, he explores why and how human perception of objects is relevant to manipulation and explains what "transferrable toddler skills" are. The lecture is suitable for beginners.

Part 1: Kei Okada starts his first talk with a short introduction on the history of humanoid robotics research at JSK and presents various former projects such as HARP (Human Autonomous Robot Project) . He then continues to explore knowledge representation of everyday activities and knowledge-based object localization before concluding with motion imitation for robots. The compact and thorough presentation is suitable for beginners.

openEASE is a web-based Knowledge Processing Service for Robots and Robotics/AI Researchers. 

pracmln is a toolbox for statistical relational learning and reasoning and as such also includes tools for standard graphical models. pracmln is a statistical relational learning and reasoning system that supports efficient learning and inference in relational domains. pracmln has started as a fork of the ProbCog toolbox and has been extended by latest developments in learning and reasoning by the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen, Germany.

KnowRob is a knowledge processing system that combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods with techniques for acquiring knowledge and for grounding the knowledge in a physical system and can serve as a common semantic framework for integrating information from different sources. KnowRob combines static encyclopedic knowledge, common-sense knowledge, task descriptions, environment models, object information and information about observed actions that has been acquired from various sources (manually axiomatized, derived from observations, or imported from the web).