Call for papers

IROS 2018 Workshop on Language and Robotics

Submission deadline: August 26, 2018

OBJECTIVES

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Recent advances in machine learning techniques, including deep learning and hierarchical Bayesian modeling, are providing us with new possibilities to integrate high-level and low-level cognitive capabilities in robotics. Such a hierarchical integration of cognitive capabilities is required to enable a robot to use language to communicate and collaborate with people in the real-world environment. Because language is highly dependent on the context, this hierarchical integration in both bottom-up and top-down processes is also needed to make language processing reliable: the first-pass “perceived” phonemes/words may be updated later based on higher level priors or context.

In this workshop, we will investigate how we can create a robot that can acquire, use and understand language. Future robots are expected to have such abilities in a wide range of human-robot interactions. To this end, we aim to share knowledge about the state-of-the-art machine learning methods that contribute to modeling language-related capabilities in robotics, and to exchange views among cutting-edge robotics researchers with a special emphasis on language in robotics. The workshop will include keynote presentations from established researchers in robotics, machine learning, natural language processing, and cognitive science. There will be a poster session highlighting contributed papers throughout the day.

INVITED SPEAKERS

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We will have distinguished speakers who are the forerunners of this interdisciplinary research effort.

Tetsuya Ogata, Waseda University Daichi Mochihashi, Institute of Statistical Mathematics Andrzej Pronobis, University of Washington Kuniyuki Takahashi, Preferred Networks Scott Heath, University of Queensland

SUBMISSION

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Submissions must be in PDF following the IEEE conference style in two-columns and be limited to 2 pages:

http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php

All submissions will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be presented during the workshop in a poster session. A number of selected papers will be presented as oral presentations or spotlight talks.

Send your PDF manuscript indicating [LangRobo 2018] in the subject to the following email: langrobo2018[at]apple.ee.uec.ac.jp

TOPICS

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We invite contributions in the following topics that are

indicative but by no means exhaustive:

* Language acquisition by robots

* Symbol grounding/emergence in Robotics

* Multimodal communication

* Emergence of communication

* Learning complex motor skills and segmentation of time-series information

* Concept formation

* Probabilistic programming and reasoning in robotics

* Human-robot communication and collaboration based on machine learning

* Deep learning for robotics

* Bayesian modeling for high-level cognitive capabilities

* Application in communicable service robots

* Language understanding by Robots

IMPORTANT DATES

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Submission of abstracts: August 26, 2018 (Extended!)

Notification of acceptance: August 31, 2018

Workshop: October 1, 2018

ORGANIZERS

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* Takato Horii, The University of Electro-Communications, Japan

* Emre Ugur, Bogazici University, Turkey

* Tadahiro Taniguchi, Ritsumeikan University / Panasonic, Japan

* Xavier Hinaut, INRIA, France

* Tetsunari Inamura, National Institute of Informatics, Japan

* Takayuki Nagai, The University of Electro-Communications, Japan

* Michael Spranger, Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., Japan

* Michael Beetz, University Bremen, Germany

CONTACT

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Takato Horii,

The University of Electro-Communications, Japan

takato@uec.ac.jp