*4th Workshop on Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)*

_*November 8*_, 2019 -*Room: LG-R10* - IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems - *Macau, China*

*----Workshop URL*

https://sites.google.com/view/spar2019/home

Contact email: s***********p@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.

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.

**** We have a very exciting program for the SPAR workshop*

Time                   Speaker 09:00 – 09:15       Welcome and introduction. Karinne Ramirez-Amaro & Yezhou Yang

09:20 – 09:55       Kei Okada, The University of Tokyo. "Task Instantiation from Life-long Episodic Memories of Service Robots"

10:00 – 10:35       Tanja Schultz, University of Bremen. "Biosignal Processing for Modeling Human Everyday Activities"

10:45 – 11:15       Coffee Break

11:20 – 11:55       Stefanos Nikolaidis, University of Southern California. "Learning Collaborative Action Plans from YouTube Videos"

12:00 – 12:35       Darius Burschka, Technical University of Munich. "Understanding the Static and Dynamic Scene Context for Human-Robot    Collaboration in Households"

12:40 - 13:05       Joseph Lim, University of Southern California. TDB

13:05 – 14:00       Lunch

14:00 – 14:35       Georg von Wichert, Siemens. TBD

14:40 - 15:15       Chris Paxton, Nvidia Robotics lab. "From Pixels to Task Planning and Execution"

15:20 - 15:40       Spotlight talks

15:45 – 16:15       Coffee Break and poster presentations

16:20 – 16:40       Poster presentations

16:45 - 17:20       Jesse Thomason, University of Washington. "Action Learning from Realistic Environments with Directives"

17:25 - 17:40       Final remarks and end of the Workshop

*----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/

* 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