Download IET Travel Award Report on the trip to AAAI-‐16 - Events

IET Travel Award Report on the trip to AAAI-­‐16 Shan Luo, King’s College London I really appreciate the generous support from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) for my trip to 13th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-­‐16) in Phoenix, Arizona USA, 12-­‐17 February 2016. The AAAI conference is recognized as one of the top conferences in Artificial Intelligence thus it is a great opportunity to meet top scholars, review up-­‐to-­‐date ongoing research and get more research ideas in Artificial Intelligence there. I was selected as one of the PhD students for the AAAI-­‐16 Robotics Fellowships. The fellowships aim to attract PhD students from robotics labs that do not typically publish at artificial intelligence (AI) venues but would like to attend AAAI-­‐16 and learn about AI techniques of relevance to robotics. I gave a short talk on my works in ROB3 session: RSS Invited and Robotics Fellowship III. A novel framework is proposed to integrate vision, kinaesthetic cues and tactile sensing to localize tactile sensor contact on the interacted object. A visual picture of the object is taken as a map in which tactile readings are localized. The key objective of this work is to enable robots to have multisensory perception system as humans. My presentation was also supported with a poster in the robotics session, which exposed my works to interested participants and attracted more discussions in depth. I benefit a lot from discussing my work with people there, e.g., recognizing what confuses people and receiving their ideas and suggestions. Based on their feedback, I can modify my future methodologies in a better way and it will be helpful to my future research. The object grasping is a tough but essential problem in robotics. Employing the state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art AI techniques could provide promising solutions to facilitate the grasping, combined with my past and ongoing research in fusing vision and tactile sensing. In addition to the dedicated session, I participated and enjoyed the whole conference. There are several sessions/events impressed me much during the participation. Opening speech given by Prof Peter Norvig, who is the President of the AAAI association. He gave his perspective on the state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art AI techniques. He first introduced the need of robust AI for the development of high-­‐stakes applications, such as self-­‐driving cars, automated surgical surgeries, that are quite robotics based. It followed the approaches toward robust AI such as tips learned from biology. His talk gave me a quick review of the modern AI developments and increased my knowledge in AI. Keynote speech by Demis Hassabis, who is the co-­‐founder and CEO of DeepMind and leads Google’s general AI efforts. I was attracted by the ambitious research program at DeepMind during his speech, and even impressed by their AlphaGo’s win over Go champion Lee Se-­‐Dol one month later. He introduced the deep reinforcement learning framework for AlphaGo and their recent advancement in neural Turing machines. It makes the audience have a sight into the great program they are developing. Deep Learning tutorial: from Foundations to Implementations. As object recognition is one important part of my PhD research, I am interested in applying deep learning techniques in my research. The tutorial gave a broad but rigorous introduction to deep learning, including the intuition, context and perspectives. It was also a good chance to discuss with the top scholars, such as Prof Gregory D. Hager from Johns Hopkins University and Zhi-­‐hua Zhou from Nanjing University, and PhD students in AI and apply the algorithms learned there in more applications in future. By attending sessions in various AI topics and the poster sessions in the evenings, I exchanged ideas and made connections with people from different fields. By fostering contact with researchers in the AI field, I can keep update of the cutting edge AI research and apply them in my research. I really thank the IET for the generous support for my conference travel. Without their support, I would have been unable to attend such a prestigious conference in the AI field. By attending the conference, I have not only kept update of the state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art AI techniques but made connections with the top AI scholars, which will definitely benefit the development of my future academic career.