History

Previous SPAR Workshops

The organizers have a successful tradition on hosting different types of workshops. For example, Eren Erdal Aksoy, Yezhou Yang, and Neil Dantam were the core organizers of the first two SPAR workshops at IROS 2015 and 2017. Karinne Ramirez-Amaro and Gordon Cheng vastly contributed to the success of the second edition of the workshop series. These two workshops attracted both industry and academia attendees making the discussion of topics more diverse and productive. The previous workshops had a very good number of attendances as shown in the pictures shown below.

Links to the previous SPAR workshops:

• First workshop: http://legacydirs.umiacs.umd.edu/~yzyang/spar.html
• Second workshop: https://www.ics.ei.tum.de/index.php?id=210

Special Issue

Our last two successful IROS workshops held in 2015 and 2017 have received a substantial attention from academics and also industry. As a follow-up outcome, besides this third-edition of the workshop, we are also proposing a special issue for the journal “Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS)“ on “Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)“. With this special issue we aim at providing a collection of latest state-of-the-art semantic-based policy and action representation approaches in robotics and machine learning.

More information on the RAS-SPAR Special issue is available at

• https://www.journals.elsevier.com/robotics-and-autonomous-systems/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-semantic-policy-and-action-representations