Learning from Multiple Sources with Applications to Robotics
NIPS Workshop, December 12, 2009, Whistler, BC, Canada
Invited Talks

Invited talk 1 (07:30). Ingmar Posner, University of Oxford. Where's What? - Towards Semantic Mapping of Urban Environments.

The availability of continuous streams of data from multiple modalities covering the same workspace has long been recognised as a privilege by robotics researchers. Data fusion has a successful track record in the field leading to the by now routine generation of high-quality large scale metric and topological maps of unstructured environments. With this success, however, comes the realisation that prominent applications in robotics -- such as action selection and human machine interaction -- require information beyond mere metric or topological representations. As a result, researchers throughout the community are becoming increasingly interested in adding higher-order, semantic information to the maps obtained. In this context, the availability of a rich set of data from complimentary modalities once again comes into its own. In this talk we provide a snapshot of ongoing work aiming to enrich standard metric or topological maps as provided by a mobile robot with higher-order semantic information. Environmental cues are considered for classification at different scales. The first stage considers local scene properties using a probabilistic bag-of-words classifier. The second stage incorporates contextual information across a given scene (spatial context) and across several consecutive scenes (temporal context) via a Markov Random Field (MRF). Our approach is driven by data from an onboard camera and 3D laser scanner and uses a combination of visual and geometric features. We demonstrate the virtue of considering such spatial and temporal context during the classification task and analyse the performance of our technique on data gathered over 17 km of track through a city.

Invited talk 2 (15:30). Chris Williams, University of Edinburgh. Multi-task Learning with Gaussian Processes, with Applications to Robot Inverse Dynamics.

Abstract: I will discuss multi-task learning, and a number of ways in which transfer between tasks can take place, mainly in a co-kriging (or Gaussian process) framework. I will then go into more detail on multi-task Gaussian process learning of robot inverse dynamics (joint work with Kian Ming Chai, Stefan Klanke, Sethu Vijayakumar).


Workshop Schedule

07:30Invited talk: Ingmar Posner, University of Oxford. Where's What? - Towards Semantic Mapping of Urban Environments.
08:20Talk: Simon T. O'Callaghan and Fabio T. Ramos. A Bayesian Approach to Occupancy Mapping With Uncertain Inputs[pdf]
08:40Talk: David M. Bradley and J. Andrew Bagnell. Domain Adaptation For Mobile Robot Navigation[pdf]
09:00Coffee break
09:30Talk: Sildomar T. Monteiro, Fabio Ramos, and Peter Hatherly. Learning CRF Models from Drill Rig Sensors for Autonomous Mining[pdf]
09:50Poster spotlights
10:00Poster session
  • Brenna D. Argall, Eric L. Sauser, and Aude G. Billard. Demonstration, Tactile Correction and Multiple Training Data Sources for Robot Motion Control. [pdf]
  • Bertrand Douillard, Alex Brooks, Fabio Ramos, and Hugh Durrant-Whyte. Combining Laser and Vision for 3D Urban Classification.[pdf]
  • Amrish S. Kapoor, Piyush Rai, and Hal Daumé III. Factor Regression Combining Heterogeneous Sources of Information.[pdf]
  • Jesús Martínez-Gómez, Alejandro Jiménez-Picazo, Ismael García-Varea, and Jose A. Gámez. Using odometry and invariant visual features for a Monte-Carlo based robot localization method.[pdf]
  • Arman Melkumyan and Fabio Ramos. Multi-Kernel Gaussian Processes.[pdf]
10:30Session break
15:30Invited talk: Chris Williams, University of Edinburgh. Multi-task Learning with Gaussian Processes, with Applications to Robot Inverse Dynamics.
16:20Talk: Piyush Rai and Hal Daumé III. Multitask Learning using Nonparametrically Learned Predictor Subspaces[pdf]
16:40Talk: C. Mario Christoudias, Raquel Urtasun, and Trevor Darrell. Bayesian Localized Multiple Kernel Learning[pdf]
17:00Coffee break
17:30Talk: Ilkka Huopaniemi, Tommi Suvitaival, Janne Nikkilä, Matej Orešič, and Samuel Kaski. Multi-Way, Multi-View Learning[pdf]
17:50Talk: Yiming Ying, Kaizhu Huang, and Colin Campbell. Information Theoretic Kernel Integration[pdf]
18:10Discussion and Future Directions