Subject: [Fwd: CFP: European Workshop on Learning Robots]
From: De Sound Surfer <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 11:37:13 +0100

Subject: CFP: European Workshop on Learning Robots
From: [email-masked] ( John Demiris)
Date: 8 Mar 1998 13:21:47 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.neural-nets,comp.robotics,comp.cog-eng,bionet.neuroscience,sci.cognitive,comp.ai.alife,comp.ai.fuzzy,comp.robotics.misc

---------------------------- Call for Papers -------------------------------
European Workshop on Learning Robots 1998 (EWLR-7) - Edinburgh, 20 July 1998
============================================================================

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----

The seventh European Workshop on Learning Robots will take place at the
Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in
Scotland, on the 20th of July 1998, immediately before the International
Symposium on Intelligent Robotic Systems (SIRS-98).

Introduction
------------

Robot Learning is an area of interest to many different scientific fields 
such as Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Neuroscience, 
and Cognitive Science. The main goal of EWLR-7 is to bring together 
researchers of different scientific fields working on or interested in 
Robot Learning. EWLR envisages to be an interdisciplinary workshop
and aims to stimulate an exchange of ideas across the different fields. 

EWLR has good foundations to achieve this ambitious goal. The European 
Machine Learning and Robotics community has already organised a series of
six successful workshops (Vienna (1993), Torino (1994), Heraklion (1995), 
Karlsruhe (1995), Bari (1996), Brighton (1997)) incorporating researchers 
from various fields over the years.

Scope
-----

Topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):

* Learning and Adaptation in robot control
* Reinforcement learning
* Robot implementations of human motor learning mechanisms
* Evolutionary learning in robots
* Connectionist approaches to robot learning
* Machine learning techniques applied to robot problems
* Learning from interaction with humans
* Learning by observation, imitation, and cooperation
* Learning in multi-robot systems
* Industrial applications of robot learning
* Hardware issues in learning robots including Evolware
* Robot-Learning and cognition

The EWLRs focus on - but are *not* restricted to - European research.

Program Committee
-----------------

* Minoru Asada, Osaka University, Japan.
* Luc Berthouze, Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan.
* Daniel Bullock, Cognitive and Neural Systems Department, Boston
  University, USA.
* Thomas Christaller, GMD, Germany.
* Kerstin Dautenhahn, Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading, UK.
* Edwin De Jong, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, VUB, Belgium.
* Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
* Ruediger Dillmann, Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany.
* Philippe Gaussier, Neurocybernetics group, ETIS, ENSEA, France.
* John Hallam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of
  Edinburgh, UK.
* Gillian Hayes, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of
  Edinburgh, UK.
* Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan.
* Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIA, CSIC, Spain.
* Henrik Lund, Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark.
* Stefan Schaal, University of Southern California and ERATO / Japan Science
  and Technology Corporation.
* Patrick van der Smagt, Institute of Robotics and System Dynamics, German
  Aerospace Research.
* Jun Tani, Sony Computer Science Lab, Tokyo, Japan.
* Sebastian Thrun, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
* Carme Torras, Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial, UPC, Spain.
* Jeremy Wyatt, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.

Important Dates
---------------

* May   1,  deadline for submission of papers.
* June  2,  notification of acceptance/rejection.
* July  3,  deadline for submission of final manuscripts.
* July 20,  workshop in Edinburgh.

Submission information
----------------------

Electronic submission is encouraged. Submitted papers (max 10 A4 pages,
two columns, single-spaced, body text size 10 pt, LaTeX files available
at the workshop's WWW page) should be in postscript format (try using 
'gzip' and 'uuencode' to reduce the size, and check whether the size of 
the file you are sending is within the size limits of your e-mailer), 
and should be sent to [email-masked] 

Alternatively, 5 hard-copies of the paper should be submitted to REACH the 
chair by the deadline.

Papers should include full contact details (including email address) 
and affiliation of authors. 

Publication
-----------

All accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of the workshop,
which will be available at the workshop. Similar to last year, we aim to
publish a selection of the best papers in a book (last year's publisher 
was Springer-Verlag, LNAI).

Facilities available at the venue
---------------------------------

The audio-visual equipment available at the venue includes overhead
projectors, slide projectors, and barco projector connected to video player
(PAL/NTSC), to UNIX colour X-terminal (connected to the Internet for live
demos if needed), and to PC machines running MS-Windows. The venue is next
to the Mobile Robots Research Laboratory, where standard RWI and Khepera
robots are available for live demonstrations if authors are interested. Sun
and Intel-based workstations are also available, and all possible technical
support will be given to people that would be interested in bringing along
their own robots for demonstrations.

EWLR-8 in 1999 
--------------

In addition to this call for papers for EWLR-7, proposals are invited 
for the organisation of EWLR-8. Please send submissions to the 
organisers, who will collect them and present them during EWLR-7 for 
selection from the attendees. Since this is the second time that the 
workshop is being organised in the UK, proposals from other parts of 
Europe are particularly welcome. 

Organisers
----------

Chair                              Co-Chair

John Demiris                       Andreas Birk
Dept. of Artificial Intelligence   Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
University of Edinburgh            Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK            Brussels, Belgium
[email-masked]                [email-masked]

----
 ** The workshop has a frequently updated WWW page with additional information
    on travel, accomodation, etc, at 
    http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/conferences/ewlr7/
----