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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

“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