Meeting Structure

• Business and introduction of new participants (5-10 minutes).
• A formal presentation, usually a tutorial requiring little background (40-50 minutes) with the presenter optionally explaining how the subject impinges on their own research (10 minutes). You can get background papers in advance of the meeting from URLs provided on this page, or by contacting the presenter.
• Participants optionally break into small groups to discuss the presented subject in more detail, informally present their own work, and bring issues from their research before the group for brainstorming (up to 30 minutes).

Schedule of 1999 Meetings

• January 28, Professor Tom Caudell of EECE, "A Virtual Reality Interface to Autonomous Perceptual Neural Network Systems" (overview of the Homunculus/Encephalon Project). Plus introductions and a discussion of topics for Spring 1999 meetings.
• March 11, Professor Barak Pearlmutter of CS, overview of his research program on neural networks, including their application to source separation.
• "Playing the matching-shoulders lob pass game with logarithmic regret" by Joe Kilian, Kevin J. Lang, and Barak A. Pearlmutter. Seventh Annual ACM Workshop on Computational Learning Theory.
• "A context-sensitive generalization of ICA" by Barak A. Pearlmutter and Lucas C. Parra. 1996 Conference on Neural Information Processing.
• March 25, discussion of papers on cooperative behavior. The first paper is a comprehensive survey of the field, while the second and third present relevant approaches to cooperative robotics.
• "Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions" by Y. Cao, A. S. Fukunaga and A. B. Kahng, entry#27
• "Behavior-Based Control: Examples from Navigation,

Learning, and Group Behavior" by Maya J. Mataric, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, special issue on Software Architectures for Physical Agents, 9(2-3), A. Hexmoor, I. Horswill, and D. Kortenkamp, eds., 1997, 323-336, http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~maja/publications/jetai-arch.ps.gz .
• "Alliance: An Architecture for Fault Tolerant Multi-Robot Cooperation" by Lynne E. Parker, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 14(2), 1998 (1646113 bytes, compressed), http://saturn.epm.ornl.gov/~parkerle/publications/TRA.ps.Z .
• April 15, Lisa Desjarlais, "SoftLab: A Soft Computing Framework for Control System Design, Simulation, and Optimization". Plus, how to implement a genetic algorithm for a particular test problem within SoftLab through an interpreted script--no need to compile or link! Plus, you bring your control/simulation needs, we'll brainstorm about how to implement them in SoftLab. We'll start by considering reinforcement learning and behavior-based control architectures.
• April 29???, George Luger of CS, overview of his research program on artificial intelligence.
• To be determined!!!

Schedule of 1998 Meetings

• July 14 (our inaugural meeting!), Marco de Oliveira, "Overview of Collective Behavior".
• "Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions" by Y. Cao, A. S. Fukunaga and A. B. Kahng, entry#27
• Presentation slides
• Handouts
• July 28, Sigal Berman, "Hierarchical Control of Cooperative Mobile Robots".
• August 11, Lisa Desjarlais, "Applications of Machine Learning to Robotics".
• August 25, Lisa Desjarlais, "Reinforcement Learning". Also a demonstration by Eric Gottlieb of the Umbra simulation/visualization software package and its use in modeling multi-agent behavior.
• September 14, Dr. Greg Starr, "LEGO Robots". Includes demonstrations of actual LEGO robots and videos of LEGO robots in competition.
• September 28, open discussion of papers on two applications of reinforcement learning: "Improving Elevator Performance Using Reinforcement Learning" by Robert Crites and Andrew Barto, "Temporal Difference Learning and TD-Gammon" by Gerald Tesauro, "Co-Evolution in the Successful Learning of Backgammon Strategy" by Jordan Pollack and Alan Blair.
• October 19, Marco de Oliveira, "Sensor Fusion".
• November 2, Marco do Oliveira, open discussion of papers on Sensor Fusion.
• November 16, Lisa Desjarlais and Sigal Berman, open discussion of papers on Cooperation Among Autonomous Agents.
• November 30, Dan Geiger, "BEAM Robotics".
• ?? Dr. Barak Pearlmutter and/or Marco de Oliveira?, "Neural Networks".
• ??, Russell Stewart, "Statistical Mechanics Models of Swarm Robotics".
• ??, ??, "Communication for Autonomous Agents".
• ??, Marco de Oliveira and Denise Padilla, "Strategies for Robot Soccer".
• ??, ??, "Simulation of Autonomous Agents" or "Moving from Simulation to Real Robots".
• ??, ??, "Statistically Based Learning Methods".

How to contact us

• Write our mailing list at acc@cs.unm.edu .
• Join our mailing list by sending mail to majordomo@cs.unm.edu with the line "subscribe acc" in the body of the message, and receive regular notices about relevant events and news.
• Contact one of the group's organizers:
Lisa Desjarlais, lisa@cs.unm.edu, (505)277-9211, FEC 301e
Marco de Oliveira, assfalk@eece.unm.edu, (505)277-1437

• Sigal Berman            berman@eece.unm.edu
• David Bowers            jbowers@unm.edu
• Tom Caudell             tpc@eece.unm.edu
• Guy Chun                 dgchun@eece.unm.edu
• Shannon Delgado      smir@unm.edu
• Marco de Oliveira     assfalk@unm.edu
• Lisa Desjarlais          lisa@cs.unm.edu
• Mark Fleharty           spark@arc.unm.edu
• Dan Geiger                dgeiger@unm.edu
• Erich Gens                egens@unm.edu
• Eric Gottlieb             ejgottl@isrc.sandia.gov
• Ron Hightower          high@cs.unm.edu
• Lee Jensen                  lajense@sandia.gov
• Rene Morris              remorris@unm.edu
• Eric Olsson                eolsson@cs.unm.edu
• Denise Padilla            dgonzale@unm.edu
• Edward Pena             epena@unm.edu
• Barak Pearlmutter      bap@cs.unm.edu
• Dan Pless                    dpless@flash.net
• Greg Starr                  starr@unm.edu
• Russell Stewart          diamond@unm.edu
• Christy Warrender      christy@cs.unm.edu
• Michael Zibulevsky    michael@cs.unm.edu