Flowing Epigenetic Robots and Systems

A holy grail in robotics and artificial intelligence is to design a machine that can accumulate adaptations on developmental time scales of months and years. From infancy through adulthood, such a system must continually consolidate and bootstrap its knowledge, to ensure that the learned knowledge and skills are compositional, and organized into meaningful hierarchies. Consolidation of previous experience and knowledge appears to be one of the main purposes of sleep and dreams for humans, that serve to tidy the brain by removing excess information, to recombine concepts to improve information processing, and to consolidate memory. Our approach – Deferred Restructuring of Experience in Autonomous Machines (DREAM) – incorporates sleep and dream-like processes within a cognitive architecture. 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. DREAM relies on Evolutionary Neurodynamic ensemble methods (Fernando et al, 2012 Frontiers in Comp Neuro; Bellas et al., IEEE-TAMD, 2010 ) as a unifying principle for discovery, optimization, restructuring and consolidation of knowledge. This new paradigm will make the robot more autonomous in its acquisition, organization and use of knowledge and skills just as long as they comply with the satisfaction of pre-established basic motivations. DREAM will enable robots to cope with the complexity of being an information-processing entity in domains that are open-ended both in terms of space and time. It paves the way for a new generation of robots whose existence and purpose goes far beyond the mere execution of dull tasks. http://www.robotsthatdream. eu 9.3. 2. Collaborations in European Programs, except FP7 & H2020 9.3. 2.1. IGLU Title: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding (IGLU) Programm: CHIST-ERA Duration: October 2015 September 2018 Coordinator: University of Sherbrooke, Canada Partners: University of Sherbrooke, Canada Inria Bordeaux, France University of Mons, Belgium KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden University of Zaragoza, Spain University of Lille 1 , France University of Montreal, Canada Inria contact: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer Language is an ability that develops in young children through joint interaction with their caretakers and their physical environment. At this level, human language understanding could be referred as interpreting and expressing semantic concepts (e.g. objects, actions and relations) through what can be perceived (or inferred) from current context in the environment. Previous work in the field of artificial intelligence has failed to address the acquisition of such perceptually-grounded knowledge in virtual agents (avatars), mainly because of the lack of physical embodiment (ability to interact physically) and dialogue, communication skills (ability to interact verbally). We believe that robotic agents are more appropriate for this task, and that interaction is a so important aspect of human language learning and understanding that pragmatic knowledge (identifying or conveying intention) must be present to complement semantic knowledge. Through a developmental approach where knowledge grows in complexity while driven by multimodal experience and language interaction with a human, we propose an agent that will incorporate models of dialogues, human emotions and intentions as part of its decision-making process. This will lead anticipation and reaction not only based on its internal state (own goal and intention, perception of the environment), but also on the 60 Activity Report INRIA 2018 perceived state and intention of the human interactant. This will be possible through the development of advanced machine learning methods (combining developmental, deep and reinforcement learning) to handle large-scale multimodal inputs, besides leveraging state-of-the-art technological components involved in a language-based dialog system available within the consortium. Evaluations of learned skills and knowledge will be performed using an integrated architecture in a culinary use-case, and novel databases enabling research in grounded human language understanding will be released. IGLU will gather an interdisciplinary consortium composed of committed and experienced researchers in machine learning, neurosciences and cognitive sciences, developmental robotics, speech and language technologies, and multimodal/multimedia signal processing. We expect to have key impacts in the development of more interactive and adaptable systems sharing our environment in everyday life. http://iglu-chistera.github. io/ 9.4. International Initiatives 9.4. 1. Inria Associate Teams Not Involved in an Inria International Labs 9.4. 1.1. NEUROCURIOSITY Title: NeuroCuriosity International Partner (Institution Laboratory Researcher): Columbia Neuroscience (United States) Cognitive Neuroscience JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB Start year: 2016 See also: https://flowers.inria. fr/neurocuriosity Curiosity can be understood as a family of mechanisms that evolved to allow agents to maximize their knowledge of the useful properties of the world. In this project we will study how different internal drives of an animal, e.g. for novelty, for action, for liking, are combined to generate the rich variety of behaviors found in nature. We will approach such challenge by studying monkeys, children and by developing new computational tools. 9.4. 1.2. Idex Bordeaux-Univ. Waterloo collaborative project on curiosity in HCI Title: Curiosity International Partner (Institution Laboratory Researcher): University of Waterloo (Canada), Edith Law’s HCI Lab and Dana Kulic’s Robotics lab. Start year: 2018 Pierre-Yves Oudeyer collaborated with Edith Law’s HCI research group at University of Waterloo on the topic of "Curiosity in HCI system". They obtained a grant from Univ. Bordeaux to set up a project with Inria Potioc team and with Dana Kulic, Robotics lab, Univ. Waterloo. They organized several cross visits and collaborated on the design and experimentation of an educational interactive robotic system to foster curiosity-driven learning. This led to an article accepted at CHI 2019. 9.4. 1.3. Informal International Partners Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Didier Roy have create a collaboration with LSRO EPFL and Pr Francesco Mondada, about Robotics and education. The two teams co-organize the annual conference "Robotics and Education"in Bordeaux. Didier Roy teaches "Robotics and Education" in EPFL several times a year. Didier Roy has created a collaboration with HEP VAud (Teachers High School) and Bernard Baumberger and Morgane Chevalier, about Robotics and education. Scientific discussions and shared professional training. Florian Golemo and PY Oudeyer have had an active collaboration with Aaron Courville from MILA Montreal to work on the IGLU project together. William Schueller and PY Oudeyer continued to collaborate with Vittorio Loreto (CNR Rome and Sony CSL Paris). Project-Team FLOWERS 61 A collaboration with Johan Lilius and Sebastien Lafond from Abo Akademi University, Turku (Finland) is ongoing to sign an Erasmus contract for researchers and students visits on the topic of autonomous boats. Funding applications have been submitted jointly with Davide Maltoni and Vincenzo Lomonaco from University of Bologna (Italy) on the topic of continual learning. Also the project https://www.continualai. org/ is being further developed jointly and on the way to become a non-profit organization. 9.4. 2. Participation in Other International Programs David Filliat participates in the ITEA3 DANGUN project with Renault S.A. S. in france and partners in Korea. The purpose of the DANGUN project is to develop a Traffic Jam Pilot function with autonomous capabilities using low-cost automotive components operating in France and Korea. By incorporating low-cost advanced sensors and simplifying the vehicle designs as well as testing in different scenarios (France & Korea), a solution that is the result of technical cooperation between both countries should lead to more affordable propositions to respond to client needs in the fast moving market of intelligent mobility. 9.5. International Research Visitors 9.5. 1. Visits of International Scientists • Bart de Boer, VUB Brussels (Dec 2018) • Dan Dediu, Univ. Lyon (Dec 2018) • Kenny Smith, Univ. Edinburgh (Dec 2018) • Jochen Triesch, Univ. Frankfurt (Nov 2018) • Vincenzo Lomonaco, University of Bologna, Italy (Aug. 2018) 9.5. 2. Internships • Ashley Hill, Univ. Paris-Sud, Paris Saclay. • René Traoré, UPMC, Sorbonne Universite, Paris. • Josias Lévi Alvarès, ENSC, Bordeaux. • Sandy Manolios, Univ. de Lyon, Lyon. • Rémy Portelas, UPMC, Paris. • Chuan Qin, ENSTA, Paris Saclay.