Machine Learning Seminars by SimulaMet

Next Seminar

Speaker: Eric Medvet

  • Universtiy of Trieste, Italy

Personal Website

Time and Date: 11:00am on Tuesday 11 February 2020

Location: Pilestredet 52, OsloMet AI Lab

Title:

Voxel-based soft robots: a platform for investigating Learning, Evolution, and Everything

Abstract:

Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs) are aggregations of many simple soft blocks (voxels) that can perform complex tasks by varying the volume of single blocks. The design of the body and the brain of a VSR for performing a given task is challenging, if tackled by hand, but can be successfully achieved by means of optimization (e.g., evolutionary computation and reinforcement learning). Indeed, VSRs optimization has been used for investigating various research topics, well beyond optimization and robotics. For example, VSRs have been used as a case study for reasoning about the interaction between development and evolution, two sorts of change that occurs to a lifeform on different time scales. Being aggregations of simple elements, VSRs pose also interesting challenges concerning modularity and reconfigurability that might be tackled building on the recent advancements in learning representations and multi-agent systems. The talk will present VSRs, descibe how they can be simulated, and discuss ongoing attempts to physically build them. It will cover recent research results involving VSRs and outline open questions and potentially interesting research opportunities.

Upcoming Seminars:

  • Mon 23 March, Jørgen Kanters, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • April, Claudio Galicchio, University of Pisa, Italy
  • Mon 11 May, Haesun Park, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
  • June, Max Pfeffer, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

Past Seminars:

Autumn 2018

Spring 2019

Autumn 2019

  • Mon 26 Aug 2019, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, University of Bergen
  • Mon 23 September, Håvard Rue, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
  • Thu 17 October, Essam Badreddin, University of Heidelberg, Germany
  • Mon 20 November, Hans de Sterck, University of Waterloo, Canada
  • Mon 16 December, Klaus Schoeffman, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Spring 2020