oliver.obst.eu

Finally, the book Computers in Sport (edited by P. Dabnicki and A. Baca) appeared. In this book, my colleagues and I have a chapter “Approaching a Formal Soccer Theory from the Behavior Specification in Robotic Soccer“, where we discuss a top-down approach to modelling soccer knowledge, as it can be found in soccer theory books. The goal is to model soccer strategies and tactics in a way that they are usable for multiple robotic soccer leagues in the RoboCup. We investigate if and how soccer theory can be formalized such that specification and execution are possible. The advantage is clear: theory abstracts from hardware and from specific situations in different leagues. We introduce basic primitives compliant with the terminology known in soccer theory, discuss an example on an abstract level and formalize it. The formalization of soccer presented here is appealing. It goes beyond the behaviour specification of soccer playing robots. For sports science a unified formal soccer theory might help to better understand and to formulate basic concepts in soccer. The possibility of the formalization to develop computer programs, which allow to simulate and to reason about soccer moves, might also take sports science a step further.
Get your copy of the book at your local book shop or at Amazon .

Technorati Tags: book, sport, computers, robocup, robots, theory

The Idiap research institute (http://www.idiap.ch) seeks several PhD
students in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to work in the
team of Prof. José del R. Millán (http://people.epfl.ch/jose.millan).

The doctoral student will work in the framework of European and Swiss
projects related to the development of noninvasive brain-actuated
devices in areas ranging from communication to neuroprostheses, and from
interaction to rehabilitation. Projects aim at developing practical BCI
technology, but will also investigate basic questions such as online
adaptation, cognitive processes, multimodal signal fusion, and
brain-robot interaction.

Interested candidates should apply through the Idiap online recruitment
system http://jobs.idiap.ch and send the requested material.

Technorati Tags: job, phd, positions, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, bci, europe

There is an international summer school on Functional Genomics at the Baia Samuele Conference Centre, Scicli, Sicily, Italy, July 5th-19th 2008. The webpage is http://www.functional-genomics.it/school, registration deadline May 20th.

Also in Italy, there is the Bertinoro International Summer School of Natural Computation – BNC 2008. It is to be held at the University Residential Center – Bertinoro (Forlì-Cesena), Italy, September 20-27, 2008. See the webpage at http://www.dmi.unict.it/~bnc/index.html for details.

Finally, in Porto, there is NN2008, the 2008 summer school on neural networks in classification, regression and data mining. July 7-11, Porto, Portugal. http://www.nn.isep.ipp.pt.

Technorati Tags: summer school, italy, portugal, neural networks, genomics, call for participation

Special issue of the Elsevier Journal of Algorithms in Cognition, Informatics and Logic.

Submissions connected to the following non-exhaustive list of topics are particularly encouraged:

• new learning paradigms of RNNs such as unsupervised learning or reservoire learning
• biologically plausible methods
• integration of RNNs and symbolic reasoning
• universal approaches for general data structures such as sets or graphs
• methods which address the generalization ability of RNNs
• challenging applications which have the potential to be benchmark problems
• visionary papers concerning the future of RNNs

Deadline for submissions is 18th of July, 2008.

Technorati Tags: neural networks, rnn, journal, cfp, special issue, recurrent neural networks

The 2008 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA’08) will be held at the Australian National University (ANU) Canberra, during 3-5 December 2008.

We invite participation in the conference by researchers in all areas of robotics, automation and mechatronics. At this year’s conference we will be celebrating the 10th Anniversary of ACRA. For more information, please visit the
conference website. Submission of papers deadline is 5 September 2008.

Technorati Tags: cfp, robotics, conference, australia, robots, canberra

There is a new international Springer journal on social robotics, covering quite a range of topics in this field. Authors are invited to submit scientific, technological and philosophical advances in social robots, and their interactions and communications with humans, especially innovative ideas and concepts, new discoveries and improvements, as well as novel applications on the latest fundamental advances in the core technologies that form the backbone of Social Robotics, distinguished developmental projects, as well as seminal works in aesthetic design, ethics and philosophy, studies on social impact and influence pertaining to, and its interaction and communication with human beings and its social impact on our society.

The submission deadline is the 1st July, 2008. For details, check http://www.editorialmanager.com/soro/.

Technorati Tags: cfp, springer, journal, robotics

“Robotstadium” is an on-line simulated Nao RoboCup competition based on the new Nao RoboCup Standard League. This official RoboCup competition will take place on the Internet from April 15th, 2008 to June 30th, 2008 and the finals will be held in Suzhou, China during the RoboCup event on July 2008. The competition relies on a Webots-based realistic simulation. The competitors will have to program a team of 4 Nao robots using the URBI middleware and the Java programming language. This contest is open to anyone and free of charge. The winning team will receive a real Nao robot and a software package including Webots PRO and URBI for Webots.Registration is open from today April 8th, 2008, till June 30th, 2008 on www.robotstadium.org.

Technorati Tags: RoboCup, competition, Nao, robots

There’s an open Postdoctoral Fellowship in Robotics software, tools, systems and evaluation at the Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.The description sais “The Robotics Laboratory’s long term goal is to produce intelligent robotic assistants for humans. Currently our work focuses in three areas. Human robot interaction is a key area for robot assistants. Robot programming systems are also important because humans often need to resort to programming robots for new tasks. Thirdly we focus on two application areas, agriculture and healthcare, where we can explore our ideas in human robot interaction and robot programming systems. More details are available at: http://robotics.ece.auckland.ac.nz.” 

Technorati Tags: job, robotics, postdoc, new zealand

The Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems deals with new methodologies, algorithms, hardwares, system architectures to realize advanced distributed robotic systems. Topics include but are not limited to:

Architectures for teams of robots, Ambient Intelligence, Biologically inspired systems, Control issues in multi-robot systems, Distributed decision making/problem solving, Distributed/cooperative perception, Distributed planning, Distributed task execution, Human and robot interaction, Learning and adaptation in teams of robots, Multi-robot applications in exploration, search and rescue, Mobiligence (Emergence of Intelligence through Mobility), Modular robotics, Network robotics, Performance metrics for robot teams, Reconfigurable robots, Robot societies, Self-organizing robotic systems, Sensor networks, Swarm robotics, Task allocation.

The conference takes place in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, Nov. 17-19, 2008. Full paper submission is June 30, 2008. For details, check out the web page.

Technorati Tags: CFP, conference, robotics, distributed systems, autonomous robots

Our paper “Spatiotemporal Anomaly Detection in Gas Monitoring Sensor Networks” is currently being presented at the European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN’08) in Bologna, Italy. In this paper, we use Bayesian Networks as a means for unsupervised learning and anomaly (event) detection in gas monitoring sensor networks for underground coal mines. We show that the Bayesian Network model can learn cyclical baselines for gas concentrations, and by this reduce false alarms usually caused by flatline thresholds. You can check out the details here.

Technorati Tags: paper, sensor networks, bayesian networks, anomaly detection, coal mines