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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

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…)

The scope of development and learning covered by this conference includes perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, emotional and all other mental capabilities that are exhibited by humans, higher animals, artificial systems and robots. Investigations of the biological and computational mechanisms of mental development are expected to improve our understanding of the working of the whole range of mental capabilities in humans and to enable autonomous development of these highly complex capabilities by robots and other artificial systems. The International Conference on Development and Learning strives to bring together researchers in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence and robotics and other related areas to encourage understanding and cross-fertilization of the latest ideas and results from the different disciplines. Full papers are due March 14. ICDL 2008 takes place Aug 9th-12 in Monterey, California. For details see http://www.icdl08.org/.

Two post-doctoral jobs are open at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense working on biologically based robotics. Closing date for applications is 28 January 2008. The first post is related to a project on active sonars, the second is associated with a project studying the principles underpinning the use of hair sensors in three animal groups.

A postdoctoral position is available for an inventive Mechanical Engineer to spearhead a team designing and building a new type of robot composed of soft materials. The work will be carried out in a new multidisciplinary facility (the Advanced Technologies Laboratory, ATL) at Tufts University in Medford, part of the greater Boston area in Massachusetts, USA. More information is available at: http://ase.tufts.edu/bdl.

Finally, a postdoctoral research position is available immediately in the Distributed Robotics Laboratory at CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge MA USA (PI Prof. Daniela Rus, groups.csail.mit.edu/drl). Interested applicants should send a CV(with a brief research statement) and a list of references by email to Marcia Davidson.

Artificial life investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through simulating and synthesizing biological entities and processes in artificial media. Papers are welcome in all areas of the field, including Synthesis and origin of life, self-organization, self-replication, artificial chemistries, Evolution and adaptation, evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary games, coevolution, major evolutionary transitions, levels of selection, ecosystems, Unconventional and biologically inspired computing, Bio-inspired robots and embodied cognition, autonomous agents, evolutionary robotics, information in Complex Systems and Artificial Life, … .
All authors are encouraged to explain how their work sheds light on the
fundamental properties of living systems and makes progress on the important
open questions identified at previous meetings.

Several artificial life themes have been proposed as live research topics around which conference sessions may organise. See here for details.

The conference will be held in Winchester, paper submission is 29 February, conference date is 5-8 August, 2008.

The 2008 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference will bring together researchers working on algorithmic or mathematical foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotic systems. High quality, original papers are solicited in all areas of robotics. The final program will be the result of a highly selective review process designed to include the best work of its kind in every category. The conference will be single track to allow attendees an opportunity to experience the best research in all areas of robotics. The program will include invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. The main conference (June 25-27, 2008) will be followed by one day of workshops. RSS2008 is held in Zurich, Switzerland. Paper submission deadline is an January 15. See www.roboticsconference.org.

The objective of this interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researchers in computer science, artificial intelligence, alife, control, robotics, neurosciences, ethology, evolutionary biology, and related fields so as to further our understanding of the behaviors and underlying mechanisms that allow natural and artificial animals to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. The conference will focus on experiments with well-defined models — robot models, computer simulation models, mathematical models — designed to help characterize and compare various organizational principles or architectures underlying adaptive behavior in real animals and in synthetic agents, the animats. SAB’08 is in Osaka, July 7-12, 2008. Paper submission deadline is January 14th, workshop proposals are due to February 1st. For details, see the SAB’08 webpage.

The workshop will review and discuss the available technologies, their limitations, their adaptability to different environmental natural or artificial calamities (humanitarian demining obviously but also Earthquake, fire, chemical pollution, natural disaster, CBRN-E threat, etc) and discusses the development efforts to automate tasks related  to demining / detection / interventions  processes wherever possible through the use of Robotics Systems and other technologies.  Abstract deadline is December 15, the workshop takes place 28-30 March, 2008, at the American University in Cair, Egypt. For details, go to www.iarp-robotics.org.

AMAM08 is the fourth international symposium dedicated to the neuromechanics, sensory perception, and intelligence behind adaptive movement in animals, and the modeling, analysis, and technical development of adaptive movement in animals and machines. Abstract deadline is January 21, 2008, the conference takes place June 1-6, 2008, Cleveland, OH, USA. For details, see the AMAM08 Web page.