*4th Workshop on Semantic Policy and Action Representations for
Autonomous Robots (SPAR)*
November 8, 2019 - IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems - Macau, China
----*Call for Papers*
We are calling for contributions to our IROS 2019 workshop. We would
like to invite the attendees of this workshop to submit an extended
abstract explaining their current work or developed systems on the areas
of reasoning, perception, control, planning, and learning applied to
robotic systems.
This workshop is intended for roboticists interested in improving the
reliability and autonomy of robots. We hope to bring together
outstanding researchers and graduate students to discuss current trends,
problems, and opportunities in semantic action (policy) representations,
encouraging communication and common practices such as sharing data-sets
among scientists in this field.
We encourage 1-2 pages extended abstract of relevant work that has been
previously published, or is to be presented at the main conference. The
accepted abstracts will be posted on the workshop website in a compiled
yearbook and will not appear in the official IEEE proceedings. We
encourage researchers as well as companies (both hardware and software
companies) to contribute to the workshop. The reviewing is single blind,
and will be carried out by the workshop chairs.
Please submit your abstract to the workshop official email address
spar.workshop(a)gmail.com before *September 27*, 2019.
The accepted papers will have the opportunity to present their
work/ideas in a poster session. Two selective submissions will give a 15
min talk at the workshop. Please indicate in your email if you want to
present as a poster or oral presentation.
----*Important Dates*
Paper submission deadline: September 27, 2019
Notification of acceptance: October 20, 2019
Camera ready submission: October 31, 2019
Workshop day: November 08, 2019
----*Workshop URL*
https://sites.google.com/view/spar2019/home
Contact email: spar.workshop(a)gmail.com
----*Workshop objectives*
It has been a long-standing question whether robots can reach human
level of intelligence that understands the essence of observed actions
and imitates them even under different circumstances. Contemporary
research in robotics and machine learning has attempted to solve this
question from two different perspectives: One in a bottom-up manner by,
for instance, solely relying on perceived continuous sensory data,
whereas the other by approaching rather from the symbolic level in a
top-down fashion. Although there have been shown encouraging results in
both flows, understanding and imitation of actions have yet to be fully
solved.
Action semantics stands as a potential glue for bridging the gap between
a symbolic action representation and its corresponding continuous signal
level description. Semantic representation provides a tool for capturing
the essence of action by revealing the inherent characteristics. Thus,
semantic features help robots to understand, learn, and generate
policies to imitate actions even in various styles with different
objects. Thus, more descriptive semantics yields robots with greater
capability and autonomy. In this full-day workshop, we aim at answering
two major questions.
1. What have we learned from action semantics? In recent years, there
has been a substantial contribution in semantic policy and action
representation in the fields of robotics, computer vision, and machine
learning. In this respect, we would like to invite experts in academia
and motivate them to comment on the recent advances in semantic
reasoning by addressing the problem of linking continuous sensory
experiences and symbolic constructions to couple perception and
execution of actions. This is of fundamental importance to ease the
symbol grounding problem in robotics.
2. How much of semantic policy and action representation have been
transferred from controlled lab setups to industrial environments? We
would like to invite researchers from industry and initiate a discussion
between academic and industrial communities. Such a provocative
discussion catalyzes the interaction between the two communities by
addressing the scalability and generalization problems which still
remain unsolved. In this respect, we would like to discuss how to
transfer our current knowledge and experience about semantic policies to
new domains, for instance, industrial assembly tasks, with very little
human intervention.
This workshop focuses on new technologies that allow robots to learn
generic semantic models for different tasks. In this workshop, we will
bring together researchers from diverse fields, including robotics,
computer vision, and machine learning in order to overview the most
recent scientific achievements and the next break-through topics, and
also to propose new directions in the field.
----The topics that are indicative but by no means exhaustive are as
follows:
● AI-Based Methods
o Learning and adaptive systems
o Probability and statistical methods
o Action grammars/libraries
o Machine learning techniques for semantic representations
o Spatiotemporal event encoding
● Reasoning Methods in Robotics and Automation
o Signal to symbol transition (Symbol grounding/Object anchoring)
o Different levels of abstraction
o Semantics of manipulation actions
o Semantic policy representation
o Context modeling methods
o Concept formulation
● Human Behavior Recognition
o Learning from demonstration
o Object-action relations
o Bottom-up and top-down perception
● Task, Geometric, and Dynamic Level Plans and Policies
o PDDL high-level planning
o Task and motion planning methods
● Human-Robot Interaction
o Prediction of human intentions
o Linking linguistic and visual data
----*Invited Speakers (all confirmed)*
* Kei Okada, The University of Tokyo. Japan.
http://www.jsk.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~k-okada/index-e.html
* Tanja Schultz, University of Bremen.
https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/csl/team/staff/prof-dr-ing-tanja-schultz/
* Georg von Wichert, Siemens. Germany.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/georg-von-wichert-7a74796/
* Stefanos Nikolaidis, University of Southern California. USA
https://stefanosnikolaidis.net/
* Xiaoping Chen, University of Science and Technology of China.
http://ai.ustc.edu.cn/en/people/xpchen.php
* Joseph Lim, University of Southern California.
https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~limjj/
* Darius Burschka, Technical University of Munich.
http://robvis01.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/
* Chris Paxton, Nvidia Robotics lab.
https://research.nvidia.com/person/chris-paxton
* Jesse Thomason, University of Washington
https://jessethomason.com/
----*Organizers*
* Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
* Eren Erdal Aksoy, Halmstad University, Sweden
* Yezhou Yang, Arizona State University, USA
* Shiqi Zhang, SUNY Binghamton, USA
----*Advisory Board*
* Michael Beetz, University Bremen, Germany
* Yiannis Aloimonos, University of Maryland, USA
* Tamim Asfour, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Florentin Wörgötter, University of Göttinngen, Germany
--
Asst. Prof. Karinne Ramirez Amaro
Chalmers University of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering
Systems and Control Division
Mechatronics Group
IEEE Associate Vice President - Conference Operations
E-mail:karinne@chalmers.se
Office telephone: +46-31-772-1074
Address: SE-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
www.chalmers.se
######################## 2nd Call for Participation #####################
The 3rd RoboCup Asia-Pacific (RCAP 2019) Competition and Symposium
6 – 10 November 2019, Competition
11 November 2019, Symposium
Moscow, Russia
http://www.robocupap2019.org
###################### RoboCup Asia Pacific 2019 ######################
The 3rd RoboCup Asia Pacific (RCAP) Competition and Symposium will be held
in Moscow, Russia, 6-11 November 2019. This is the third official RoboCup
Super Regional event in the Asia-Pacific region.
*The pre-registration deadline has been extended to the 8th of September.*
*Leagues*
The RoboCup Asia-Pacific 2019 (RCAP 2019) competition leagues are as
follows:
*RoboCupSoccer:*
- Humanoid Leagues
- Kid Size
- Small Size League
- Standard Platform League
*RoboCup@Home:*
- RoboCup@Home Education
*RoboCupIndustrial:*
- RoboCup@Work
*RoboCupJunior:*
- Soccer
- Lightweight Primary
- Lightweight Secondary
- Open
- Rescue
- Rescue Line Primary
- Rescue Line Secondary
- Rescue Maze Primary
- Rescue Maze Secondary
- Rescue Simulation Primary
- Rescue Simulation Secondary
- OnStage
- Preliminary Primary
- Preliminary Secondary
- Advanced Secondary
*RoboCup Asia Pacific (RCAP) Challenges*
The RCAP 2019 Organizing Committee will be organizing RCAP Industry
Sponsored Leagues and RCAP Challenges. The RCAP Challenges will be as
follows:
- RCAP CoSpace Grand Prix Challenge
- RCAP CoSpace Rescue Challenge
- RCAP Junior Humanoid
- RCAP RoboCup@Home Education
- RCAP Junior @Home Education
- RTC Cup
*Participation*
All teams (including RC Junior teams) are required to pre-register through
the online form here: https://forms.gle/ENjvpQnFH7Gqbwmt8
The pre-registered teams are required to submit the relevant qualification
materials as per the leagues requirements. Teams are requested to contact
their league’s technical committee for more information about submission of
qualification materials. Junior teams must take note that they should also
submit a Team Description Paper (TDP).
*Important dates*
- Pre-Registration: 12 August – 08 September, 2019
- Announcement of qualified teams: 15 September, 2019
- Regular Registration: 16 September – 06 October, 2019
For further information please visit our official website at
http://www.robocupap2019.org
For inquiries please contact us via the hereunder email addresses:
General Enquiries and Travel Support: rusrcap(a)gmail.com
Registration, Competition, Leagues: moscow2019(a)robocupap.org
Regards,
RoboCup Asia-Pacific (RCAP) Office
RoboCup Asia-Pacific 2019 (RCAP 2019) Organizing Committee