Xperience Summer School
October 2-5, 2013
Cala Millor, Mallorca, Hotel Sentido Castell de Mar
Spain
Aim
The European Project Xperience is organizing in conjunction with the Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology Goettingen a summer school for international students in the field of Cognitive Robotics. The school will bring together scholars from Robotics and Cognitive Science in a program, which will allow the interested student to learn about the cross-links between these fields and discuss topics with leading scientists.
Background
The Xperience Project addresses the problem of generative knowledge construction in robotics to rapidly create new concepts and react to unanticipated situations using experience. This problem is addressed by structural bootstrapping, an idea taken from language acquisition research: knowledge about grammar allows a child to infer the meaning of an unknown word from its grammatical role together with understood remainder of the sentence. Structural bootstrapping generalizes this idea for general cognitive learning: if you know the structure of a process the role of unknown actions and entities can be inferred from their location and use in the process. This approach enables rapid generalization and allow agents to communicate effectively.
Xperience aims at the implementation of complete robot systems for automating introspective, predictive, and interactive understanding of actions and dynamic situations based on structural bootstrapping. Xperience evaluates this on state-of-the-art humanoid robots (ARMAR and iCub) demonstrating rich interactions with humans.
Format
The school is mainly intended for PhD-Students and young PostDocs. Participants will present their work in an interactive poster Session on October 4. Selected student papers will be presented orally.
Topics covered
Perception & action, learning, cognitive vision, developmental robotics, humanoid robotics, developmental and cognitive psychology, language acquisition, and some more (see list of speakers).
Impressions
The Xperience team
Rüdiger Dillmann (KIT, Germany, coordinator)
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Chris Geib (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Norbert Krüger (Sued Dansk University, Odense, Denmark)
Ales Ude (Institut Jožef Stefan, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Justus Piater (University of Innsbruck)
Giorgio Metta (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy)
Guilio Sandini (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy)
Tamim Asfour (KIT, Germany)
Florentin Wörgötter (Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany)
