EvoROBOT 2017 2nd Call for Papers

EvoROBOT 2017
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 19 – 21 April 2017

Call for Papers

Evolutionary Computation in Robotics

The EvoROBOT track is part of EvoApplications, the European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Amsterdam is famous for its central role in European history, its tolerant character, and its extraordinary beauty . Attractions range from the Rijksmuseum and the house of Anne Frank to the Bloemenmarkt (floating flower market), the red light district, the cafés, and the world-class nightlife. The conference venue is centrally located.

The EvoROBOT track focusses on evolutionary robotics: the application of evolutionary computation techniques to automatically design the controllers and/or hardware of autonomous robots, real or simulated. This is by nature a multi-faceted field that combines approaches from other fields such as neuro-evolution, evolutionary design, artificial life, robotics, et cetera.

We invite high quality contributions dealing with state-of-the-art research in the area of evolutionary robotics.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Evolution of (neural or otherwise) robot controllers;
• Evolution of modular robot morphology;
• Hardware/morphology and controller co-evolution;
• Open-ended evolution in robotics;
• Robotic evolutionary Artificial Life;
• Evolutionary self-assembly and self-replication;
• Evolution, development and learning;
• Evolutionary and co-evolutionary approaches.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: 1 November 2016
Notification: 9 January 2017
Camera-ready: 25 January 2017
EvoStar dates: 19 – 21 April 2017

Publication Details

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings of EvoStar, published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, which will be available at the Conference.

Best Paper Award

Frontiers in Robotics and AI is offering the best paper award at the upcoming EvoROBOT track. The Evolutionary Robotics specialty grants the winner afull waiver of the publication fee for the submission of an extended version of the work presented at EvoROBOT in Amsterdam.

Naturally, the final decision to publish the extended version will be made adhering to the Frontiers policies of originality and review.

Submission Details

Submissions must be novel and original. Submissions will be peer
reviewed by at least three members of the program committee and authors
of accepted papers are required to address the reviewer’s comments to
produce a camera-ready version of their manuscripts if accepted. At
least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference
and attend the conference to present their work.

The reviewing process will be double-blind and any information that may
identify the authors should be removed from the initial submission.
Please submit your contribution to EvoROBOT in Springer LNCS format. The
page limit is 16 pages.

Track Chairs

Evert Haasdijk
Jacqueline Heinerman

Further Information

Visit http://www.evostar.org or join the EVOstar group on LinkedIn for
more details and updates.

Four PhD positions at the Department of Computer Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) is a leading, innovative and growing university that is at the heart of society and actively contributes to new developments in teaching and research. Our university has ten faculties which span a wide range of disciplines, as well as several institutes, foundations, research centres, and support services.

Research at the Faculty of Sciences focuses on the areas of Life & Health, Networked World, Fundamentals of Science, and Energy & Sustainability. At international level, the faculty cooperates closely with leading scientific institutes and other partners.

The Department of Computer Sciences has approximately 170 members, including 35 tenured staff members and 40-50 PhD students. We are currently embarking on an ambitious collaboration with the UvA Informatics Institute. This will result in the largest conglomeration of computer science research in The Netherlands, and one of the largest in Europe.

The Department of Computer Sciences has four PhD positions in strategic areas. Each PhD project is cooperation between two different chairs led by two collaborating professors. Deadlines for applications vary between September 1 and September 15. Please use the following links to see more details.

PhD position on The Human in the Internet-of-Things

PhD position Web and Media Science 

PhD position on Self-Adapting Intelligent eHealth Apps

PhD position in Process Modeling and Mining in Medical Care

 

EvoSphere website on-line

After extensive media coverage of our research into embodied evolution of robot morphologies, we’ve decided to launch the EvoSphere website to collate information for the general public as well as researchers. Head on over to have a look at this cool project.

PostDoc position in Evolutionary Robotics available

We’re seeking a PostDoc researcher for the H2020 EU research project DREAM.

DREAM aims to incorporate sleep and dream-like processes within cognitive architectures. This enables an individual robot or groups of robots to consolidate their experience into more useful and generic formats, thus improving their future ability to learn and adapt.
Our focus within this project is to develop methods that allow robots to exchange knowledge and/or experiences to enable joint learning.

More information about this position at: http://bit.ly/1ZfnjDG

Situational Analytics

We’re looking for a PhD student (AiO) for a joint research project with TNO on the novel topic of Situational Analytics.

Because this field is so new, the PhD position offers a large amount of freedom to define your own research. In turn this requires a creative, associative mind: there are no set methodologies or techniques, and the project can develop in different directions.

As an indication of the type of application that we’d be looking at, consider this scenario:

In a command & control room, a commander has to assess the risks of moving a squad from Kunduz (A) to Taleqan (B). His/her job is to inform the squad-leader on which route to take, and for each part of the route; what to look out for.

There are various sources of information at the commander’s disposal to assess the risk along the route:

• A drone tracks (using visual sensors) all vehicle movement along all major and minor roads in the area
• Recent weather reports of the whole area
• Scout reports indicating the current sentiment in Kunduz, Khanabad and Taleqan
• Data about the current and water level along the Khanabad river
• At position C is a checkpoint registering all passing traffic
• Intelligence reports indicating the current position, speed and heading of possible threats
• A database containing of previous incidents the exact location, date & time, and the type of incident (and all relevant information at that time).

The goal of the project is to identify, develop and test relevant AI approaches to automatically asses risks along the route as well as maintain and update these assessments as new information comes in.

More information: http://vu.nl/nl/werken-bij-de-vu/vacatures/2015/15264.asp

BTW, Note hat TNO will conduct an MIVD B screening for this position, meaning that it will be difficult to hire candidates from outside the EU.

 

 

 

3 yr Postdoc position in data-driven lifestyle support through smart devices

The position

Amsterdam Data Science, an initiative of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU University Amsterdam (VU), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), involving 15 researchers at the postdoc/PhD level. These positions are funded by the Amsterdam Academic Alliance (AAA), a joint initiative of the UvA and VU aimed at intensifying collaboration with each other and knowledge institutions in the region, to cement Amsterdam’s position as a hub of academic excellence. These positions are partially co-funded by CWI, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the UvA, HvA, ORTEC,
Philips, Spinoza fund of Prof. Vossen, and VUmc.

Amsterdam Data Science provides a network in which some 300 Amsterdam-based scientists exchange Data Science knowledge and forge  partnerships within and outside the academic community. This comprises the foundations of data science and data science for the life sciences, social analytics, business analytics, and digital humanities.

This post concerns one of the 15 positions. This postdoctoral researcher position is with Prof. Eiben, Dr. Hoogendoorn and Dr. Haasdijk, in the Computational Intelligence Group of the Department of Computer Science of the VU University Amsterdam and Philips Research.

The position is focused on the development and application of machine learning and computational intelligence techniques in the domain of healthy living and population health. The overall aim is to develop techniques to collect lifestyle and health related data from large
collectives of heterogeneous devices (smart phones, watches, smart environments) and to build user models from such data to provide
customized support over extended periods of time. The “device cloud” is to operate in a collaborative and collective way, adapting to the circumstances and to various clusters of similar users. The project foresees in several user experiments to evaluate the technology and the algorithms. The project is a close collaboration between the VU Amsterdam and Philips Research and while the PostDoc will be based at VU Amsterdam it is expected that (s)he will also spend time at the High
Tech Campus in Eindhoven.

Tasks

• Conducting research in the area of machine learning and computational intelligence to create adaptive devices for population health, resulting in high quality publications.
• Contribute to the teaching program of the Department of Computer Science (supervision of Master students, contributing to a course within the department’s curricula)
• Writing research proposals to fund future collaborations between the parties involved (and if desired to fund extensions of the current position)
• Act as a linking pin between the two parties involved in the collaboration (VU Amsterdam and Philips Research).

Requirements

• The candidate should have a strong background (PhD) in related field of Computer Science, such as Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.
• Experience with the development and implementation of machine learning/computational intelligence techniques.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Affinity with the domain of eHealth and Population health.
• Experience in teaching and supervision of Master students.

Further particulars

The initial appointment will be for a period of three years at VU University Amsterdam. You can find information about our excellent employment conditions at www.workingatvu.nl.

• Remuneration of 8,3% end-of-year bonus and 8% holiday allowance;
• Solid pension scheme (ABP);
• A minimum of 232 holiday hours in case of full-time employment;
• Possibilities to save up holidays for sabbatical leave.
• A commuting allowance (65%) based on public transport.

Salary

The salary will be in accordance with university regulations for academic personnel, and depending on experience, range from a minimum of €2.476 gross per month up to a maximum of € 3.908 gross per month (salary scale 10) based on a full-time employment.

About the organization

VU University Amsterdam is one of the leading institutions for higher education in Europe and aims to be inspiring, innovative, and committed to societal welfare. It comprises ten faculties and has teaching facilities for 23.000 students.

The Faculty of Sciences performs research in the areas Life & Health, Networked World, Fundamentals of Science, and Energy &  sustainability.

More than 1700 students participate in mono- and interdisciplinary bachelor and master courses. The staff is hosted in the  departments of Physics, Chemistry & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Sciences.

Further information

For additional information please contact:

Dr. M. Hoogendoorn
Email: m.hoogendoorn@vu.nl
Phone: +31 20 59 87772

Prof. A.E. Eiben
Email: a.e.eiben@vu.nl
Phone: +31 20 59 87758

You may find the following websites useful:
• Amsterdam Data Science amsterdamdatascience.nl/
• Computer Science VU www.cs.vu.nl
• Computational Intelligence Group http://www.cs.vu.nl/ci

Application

Applications may only be submitted via informatica.secretariaat.few@vu.nl before January 7 2016. To process your application immediately, please quote the vacancy number and the title of the position you are applying for in the subject-line.

Applications must include a detailed curriculum vitae, a motivation letter explaining why you are the right candidate, list of projects you have worked on with brief descriptions of your contributions and the names and contact addresses of two academic references from which information about the candidate can be obtained. All these should be collated into a single PDF attachment.

Call for Submissions: Artificial Life Journal Special Issue on the Evolution of Physical Systems

We are inviting submissions to a forthcoming special issue of Artificial Life Journal devoted to the topic of the Evolution of Physical Systems (EPS). This special issue emerges from a series of successful workshops held at the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) sponsored conferences ECAL and ALIFE. We use the term EPS to refer to evolutionary algorithms which occur in real-world physical substrates rather than in simulation. The term encompasses both parallel Embodied Evolution (Watson et al., 2002), in which evolution is distributed across a population of robots, as well as Evolutionary Robotics (Floreano and Mondada, 1994) where evaluation is serialized on a single robot. Notable examples of EPS occur across a wide variety of systems, ranging from Robotics (Zykov et al., 2004)] to FPGAs (Thompson, 1996) to 3D printers (Rieffel and Sayles, 2010).

While submissions describing reality-based and model-free work is encouraged, we would also be interested in submissions aimed at crossing the “Reality Gap” between simulation and reality.

keywords: evolutionary robotics, embodied evolution, reality gap, evolvable hardware

More details on the special issue website.

Please direct all correspondence to rieffelj@union.edu

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: April 15, 2016
Author Notification: July 1, 2016
Expected Publication: November 1, 2016

 

Workshop on Evolving Collective Behaviors in Robotics at GECCO

At this year’s GECCO, Abraham Prieto, Nicolas Bredeche and I are organising the first workshop on Evolving Collective Behaviors in Robotics.

This workshop brings together researchers interested in the automatic design of coordinated behaviors in decentralized collective systems, putting the emphasis on evolutionary robotics techniques. The goal of the workshop is to provide an updated perspective of this field, both from a theoretical and practical perspective, and to consider different areas of applicability for such techniques including design for engineering and modelling for biology.

This is a vibrant and interesting research topic where evolutionary techniques are uniquely positioned to tackle issues  beyond the scope of control theoretic research.

So, see you in Madrid?

Frontiers sponsor EvoROBOT Best Paper Award

Frontiers in Robotics and AI is offering the best paper award at the upcoming EvoROBOT track at the EvoApplications conference. The Evolutionary Robotics specialty grants the winner a full waiver of the publication fee for the submission of an extended version of the work presented at EvoROBOT in Copenhagen this year. Naturally, the final decision to publish the extended version will be made adhering to the Frontiers policies of originality and review.

CI Group photo

Our research group got together to shoot some photos today.