First Workshop on Autonomy, Robotics and Cognition

Mon Oct 02, 2017 9:30 AM

Monday, October 2 and Tuesday, October 3
Starting at 9:30 a.m. both days

Colony Ballroom (Room 2203)
Stamp Student Union
University of Maryland
College Park, Md.

This workshop is supported in part by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

The workshop features internationally recognized experts and consists of invited presentations and panels. Topics include:
-Autonomy
-Perception and Planning
-Learning and Action
-Language and Cognition

The complete workshop schedule can be found here. It can also be viewed on the workshop website (using Google Chrome as your browser).

Why this workshop:
It has been repeatedly argued that the mind of higher level animals and humans, or an intelligent autonomous system, is an amalgam of several competences: computational capabilities related to perception, planning, control and reasoning. Thus, the design of an autonomous system depends on the integration of principles, methods and algorithms from multi-sensory based perception, learning, cognition, control theory, reasoning and planning (artificial intelligence). It is generally accepted that achieving the needed multi-disciplinary integration that may give rise to autonomy is a hard problem.

This workshop, the first of its kind, gathers experts from all these disciplines surrounding intelligent behavior, to address a number of basic questions: what kinds of description should an autonomous system extract about the world? Should it be a general purpose description that then different processes will utilize, or should an autonomous system directly produce a plethora of different representations about the world? Could autonomy be accomplished with one sense, or is a sensor fusion a necessary ingredient for autonomy and intelligence? How much prediction is required to achieve autonomy and how does this constrain the planning sub-system as it needs to be integrated with sensing? How much of the system’s time should be devoted to computation and how much to communication? Does autonomy require some sort of language, like natural language?

Participants will have opportunities to participate on the discussion of these and other related topics, as well as defining promising directions of research. A White Paper summarizing the discussions, findings and research directions will be produced and disseminated to participants, shortly after the end of the Workshop.

This is the first in a series of annual workshops on this theme at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Registration is required
This workshop is free of charge but participants should register (using Google Chrome as your browser) as space is limited and so that breakfast and lunch can be provided during the workshop days.