oliver.obst.eu

You are invited to submit to and/or attend The First Australasian Workshop on Computation in Cyber-Physical Systems (CompCPS-2010).
We are organising this event here in Sydney, on the 15-16 July, in the Lecture Theatre at the CSIRO Marsfield site.

The name “cyber-physical system” (CPS) was chosen by the NSF and other United States federal agencies for systems that coherently combine computational and physical elements.

The CPS field builds up on knowledge and practical experiences of embedded systems, sensor networks, multi-robot teams, modular/swarm robotics, amorphous computing, programmable materials, evolvable/adaptive hardware, etc., and yet promise to form a unique field.

This Workshop will focus on distributed computation in CPS – the computation processes that integrate multiple data streams, compress and structure high-dimensional information, synchronise the distributed dynamics, adapt to topological changes within networks, optimise multiple sensorimotor loops, etc.

Several prominent invited speakers from Australia, Spain and USA will present different aspects of this rapidly developing research field.

Anyone interested in participating in the workshop is encouraged to submit a two-page extended abstract by May 16, 2010. Notifications will be sent by June 11, 2010 to all those who will be invited to the workshop. All accepted submissions will be allocated an oral presentation slot. See the Workshop Web Page for details.

cyber-physical systems, workshop, australia, call for papers, Sydney, australasia, sensor networks

To get a quick overview on what is happening this year at NIPS, I have taken the titles of accepted papers and used the resulting text to produce a word cloud (a screen shot created using http://www.wordle.net/). The word cloud shows the hottest topics as the largest words (unsurprisingly, ‘learning’ is the most prominent word in all the titles). But see for yourselves…

(more…)

In a paper that was recently accepted at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN 2009), we look at different ways to influence the performance of echo state networks. Traditionally, echo state networks and other reservoir computing approaches use a fixed random connected reservoir, which leads to significant variation in performance. Only few problem specific optimisation procedures are known to date. We study a general initialization method using permutation matrices and derive a new unsupervised learning rule based on intrinsic plasticity (IP) for echo state networks. Using three different benchmarks, we show that networks with permutation matrices for the reservoir connectivity have much longer memory than the other methods, but are also able to perform highly non-linear mappings. We also show that IP based on sigmoid transfer functions is limited concerning the output distributions that can be achieved.

Studies on Reservoir Initialization and Dynamics Shaping in Echo State Networks,
J. Boedecker, O. Obst, N.M. Mayer, M. Asada. The full paper will be available after the conference (April) is now available.

neural networks, intrinsic plasticity, echo state networks, reservoir computing

ICDL is a multidisciplinary conference pertaining to all subjects related to
the development and learning processes of natural and artificial systems,
including perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, emotional and all other mental
capabilities that are exhibited by humans, higher animals, and robots. Its
visionary goal is to understand autonomous development in humans and higher
animals in biological, functional, and computational terms, and to enable such
development in artificial systems. ICDL strives to bring together researchers
in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, robotics and other
related areas to encourage understanding and cross-fertilization of latest
ideas. ICDL2009 is held in Shanghai, June 5-7, 2009.
For a list of topics of see the CfP at http://www.icdl09.org/.

icdl, conference, cfp, learning, development, robotics

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

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

At IPSN 2008, I’m going to present our work “Using Echo State Networks for Anomaly Detection in Underground Coal Mines”. In this work, we investigate the problem of identifying anomalies in monitoring critical gas concentrations using a sensor network in an underground coal mine. In this domain, one of the main problems is a provision of mine specific anomaly detection, with cyclical (moving) instead of flatline (static) alarm threshold levels. An additional practical difficulty in modelling a specific mine is the lack of fully labelled data of normal and abnormal situations. We present an approach addressing these difficulties based on echo state networks learning mine specific anomalies when only normal data is available. Echo state networks utilize incremental updates driven by new sensor readings, thus enabling a detection of anomalies at any time during the sensor network operation. We evaluate this approach against a benchmark — Bayes Network based anomaly detection, and observe that the quality of the overall predictions is comparable to the benchmark. However, the echo state networks maintain the same level of predictive accuracy for data from multiple sources. Therefore, the ability of echo state networks to model dynamical systems make this approach more suitable for anomaly detection and predictions in sensor networks. Check out the details here.

Technorati Tags: Sensor networks, Echo State Networks, Neural Networks, Anomaly detection, IPSN, 2008, Paper, Computer Science

There’s a special session at AHS-2008: the NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (June 22-25, 2008, Noordwijk, The Netherlands) on “Evolutionary and Self-Organizing Sensors, Actuators and Processing Hardware” (ESOSAPH). Recent technology has witnessed the advent of cheap ubiquitous sensing, processing and actuating capabilities for isolated, distributed or collective robotic systems. These appear in the form of intelligent materials, nano-motors and -sensors, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), grid processors, Avogadro-scale digital circuits and similar structures. Established conventional AI computation paradigms do not harness the full potential of this new type of technological ability that includes dynamic reconfiguration, addition or removal of sensors, actuators or processing hardware. Classical AI paradigms are inadequate to deal with the requirements of (more…)

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