Information

Course Description

Materials

Readings, Assignments

Grading

Links

General Information

Professor: Douglas Blank, 246B Park Hall, 526-6501
E-Mail:dblank@cs.brynmawr.edu or dblank@brynmawr.edu
My Homepage: http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu
Course Homepage: http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/cs380
Course notes: wiki.cs.brynmawr.edu/?CS380 - Wiki notes
Course management system: http://edventure.brynmawr.edu/ - send email to edventure@edventure.brynmawr.edu with subject 'password' to reset your password.
Lecture Hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10:00 - 11:30PM
Lab Hours: TBA
Room: Park 230

Laboratory Assistants:

None.

Laboratories:
• Emergent Intelligence Laboratory, Room 230 Park Science Building. You will be given keys to this room.
• Computer Science Computer Laboratory, Room 232 Park Science Building. This is a PC lab with Linux installed which is available for use when classes are not meeting in that room. All of the software will be available here as well as the EI Lab.

Course description

This course will focus on the special topic of developmental robotics, a newly emerging paradigm of research. The goal of this research is to create intelligent robots by allowing them to go through a developmental process, rather than being directly programmed by human engineers. By endowing a robot with an appropriate initial control architecture and adaptive mechanisms, it learns through continual interactions with the world, developing self-organized mental structures. We will be studying the following sorts of questions. What should be innate in the robot? What adaptive mechanisms are needed? What motivates the robot to act? Would such a system need emotions?

The course is made-up of two components: seminar discussions and laboratory work. Each class meeting, we will spend the first half having a discussion about the assigned readings and the second half experimenting with various robot control methods.

Books & Readings

• Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi, and Plunkett (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Articles provided online or in reading packets.

Evaluation

• Class Participation & Reaction Notes: 20%

  Your reactions to each week's readings will be due by 8:00am on the morning of class. You will be posting your reactions to the online courseware package Edventure. Your username on this system will be the same as the username on your College email account. To get your password to the system, send an email from your College account to edventure@edventure.brynmawr.edu with a subject of password. Once you post your reaction, you will be able to read other students' reactions for that week. You should read them before class time and be ready to respond to at least one question or comment raised by someone else. Your reactions should not be summaries of the papers, instead they should be the product the reading process (e.g., questions that were raised, points that were not clear, connections to previous material you've read, etc). You are expected to be an active participant in class discussions and should come prepared for class every week.

• Labs: 20%

  The labs will introduce you to a variety of robot control methods. We will be using a system called Pyro, which stands for Python Robotics. Pyro allows you to experiment with various robots and robot simulators while only having to learn one interface. You will write the control programs in the Python programming language. For a good introduction to Python, try How to think like a computer scientist: Learning with Python.

• Midterm Project: 20%

  There will be a mid-semester paper assigned the week of February 17th and due the week of March 3rd. The goal of this midterm project is to give you a preview, on a smaller scale, of what will be expected on the final project.

• Final Project: 40%

  You will be asked to design a project related to developmental robotics. During the first half of the semester you should be thinking about possible project topics. These projects may be carried out alone or as groups of two or three students. A project proposal is due in class the week of March 24th. Each student or team will be asked to present their project to the class at the end of the semester, either during the week of April 14th or the week of April 21st. Each student or team will also turn in a research paper describing the project and the results, including a bibliography of related work. The final project paper is due on Friday, May 16 by noon.

Schedule

WEEK	DATE	TOPIC	READING	ANNOUNCEMENTS	LAB
1	1/20	Introduction	none	-	PyroIntroduction
2	1/27	Development	Rethinking Innateness Ch. 1	Drop/add ends Friday 1/31	PyroDirectControl
3	2/3	Connectionism	Rethinking Innateness Ch. 2	-	PyroNeuralNetworks
4	2/10	Connectionism Applications	Rethinking Innateness Ch. 3	-	PyroModuleNeuralNetworks Due: Fri Feb 14, 5pm
5	2/17	Self-organization	No class on Thursday	Midterm project assigned	PyroModuleSelfOrganizingMap Due: Mon Feb 24, 5pm
6	2/24	Innateness	Rethinking Innateness Ch. 6-7	-	Continue midterm project
7	3/3	Developmental robotics	Week 6 papers	-	Finish midterm project
-	3/10-3/14	Spring Break	-	-	-
8	3/17	Developmental Robotics	"Bringing Up Robot"	-	Lab #6
9	3/24	Computer Vision	PyroModuleComputerVision Due: Mon Feb 24, 5pm	Final project proposal due Last day to withdraw Friday 3/28	Lab #7
10	3/31	Computer Vision	PyroModuleComputerVision Due: Mon Feb 24, 5pm	-	Continue Lab #7
11	4/7	Evolutionary Systems	PyroModuleEvolutionaryAlgorithms	-	Lab #8
12	4/14	Evolutionary Systems	PyroModuleEvolutionaryAlgorithms	-	Continue Lab #8
13	4/21	Projects	-	Project presentations	-
14	4/28	Projects	-	Project presentations	-
Finals	5/8-5/17	*** No final exam ***	-	PROJECT DUE noon, Friday 5/16	-

1. Fodor, J.A. (1997). Review of the book Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Times Literary Supplement, May 16, 1997.
2. D. Blank, D. Kumar, and L. Meeden (2002). Bringing up robot: Fundamental mechanisms for creating a self-motivated, self-organizing architecture. Presented at the conference on Simulation and Adaptive Behavior. Available online via PostScript, and PDF
3. Y. Munakata, J. McClelland, M. Johnson, and R. Siegler (1997). Rethinking infant knowledge: Toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence tasks. Psychological Review, Volume 104, Number 4. Available online
4. K. Plunkett, C. Sinha, M. Moller, and O. Strandsby (1992). Symbol grounding or emergence of symbols? Vocabulary growth in children and a connectionist net. Connection Science, Volume 4, Numbers 3 and 4.
5. D. Mareschal, K. Plunkett, and P. Harris (1995). Developing object permanence: A connectionist model. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, edited by J.D Moore and J.F. Lehman, pages 170-175. Available online
6. J. Weng, J. McClelland, A. Pentland, O. Sporns, I. Stockman, M. Sur, and E. Thelen (2001). Autonomous Mental Development by Robots and Animals. Science, Volume 291, Number 5504. Available online
7. P. Cohen, T. Oates, N. Adams, and C. Beal (2001). Robot Baby 2001. Invited talk at the Twelfth International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory. Available online
8. T. Oates (2002). An Unsupervised Algorithm for Finding Recurring Patterns in Time Series. Submitted to The Nineteenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2002). Available online
9. C. Mautner and R. K. Belew (1999). Evolving robot morphology and control. In K. Aihara, editor, Proceedings of the Artificial Life and Robotics Conference (AROB99). Available online
10. F. Dellaert and R. D. Beer (1994). Toward an Evolvable Model of Development for Autonomous Agent Synthesis, Artificial Life IV. Available online
11. J. Kodjabachian and J. Meyer (1995). Evolution and development of control architectures in animats. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 16, Numbers 2-4. Available online
12. Angelo Cangelosi, Stefano Nolfi, and Domenico Parisi (In press). On Growth, Form and Computers. In press Kumar, S and Bentley, P.J (eds). Available online
13. Frederic Gruau, Kameel Quatramaran (1996). Cellular Encoding for Interactive Evolutionary Robotics. Available online
14. M. Schmill and P. Cohen (2001). A Motivational System That Drives the Development of Activity. University of Massachusetts Computer Science Department Technical Report 01-12. Available online
15. Jean-Yves Donnart and Jean-Arcady Meyer (1996). Learning Reactive and Planning Rules in a Motivationally Autonomous Animat. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part B: Cybernetics, Volume 26, Number 3. Available online
16. Jeffery Elman (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small. Cognition, v. 48. Available online.
17. Stefano Nolfi and Jun Tani. Extracting Regularities in Space and Time Through a Cascade of Predicting Networks: the case of a mobile robot navigating in a structured environment. online: ps, pdf.
18. Generalization and scaling in reinforcement learning (1990). David Ackley and Michael Littman. ps, pdf
19. Blank, D.S., Meeden, L.A., and Marshall, J. (1992). Exploring the Symbolic/Subsymbolic Continuum: A case study of RAAM. In The Symbolic and Connectionist Paradigms: Closing the Gap. ps, pdf.
20. Meeden, L.A., McGraw, G.E., and Blank, D.S. (1993). Emergent Control and Planning in an Autonomous Vehicle. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Cognitive Science Society Conference. ps, pdf.