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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

NEUROCURIOSITY
  • Title: NeuroCuriosity

  • International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

    • Columbia Neuroscience (ÉTATS-UNIS)

  • Duration: 2013 - 2015

  • One of the most striking aspects of human behavior is our enormous curiosity, drive for exploration. From a child feverishly examining a new toy with its hands and its eyes, to a tourist exploring a new city, to a scientist studying the brain, humans incessantly want to know. This exuberant curiosity shapes our private and social lives, and is arguably a key cognitive feature that allows our species to understand, control and alter our world. We aim to develop a novel unified biological and computational theory, which explains curiosity in the domain of visual exploration and attention as a deliberate decision motivated by learning progress. This theory will build and improve upon pioneer computational models of intrinsic motivation elaborated in developmental robotics, and be empirically evaluated in the context of visual exploration in monkeys through behavioral and brain imaging techniques. This will be the first attempt at a biological-computational framework of intrinsic motivation and perceptual exploration and their underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Inria International Partners

Informal International Partners

Jonathan Grizou, Manuel Lopes, and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer collaborated with Inaki Itturate (EPFL) and Luis Montesano (Zaragoza University) on Calibration-Free Brain-Computer Interaction. This collaboration leaded to the following publications [45] , [44] . Since then, more experiments have been performed and a journal paper will be submitted in January 2015.

Jonathan Grizou and Manuel Lopes collaborated with Sammuel Barret and Peter Stone (LARG groupd, University of Texas at Austin) on extending our work on adaptive interaction to the multi-agent domain in the adhoc team framework. Their collaboration is still active and a joint paper is in preparation for beginning of 2015.

Anna-Lisa Vollmer, Jonathan Grizou, Manuel Lopes, and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer collaborated with Katharina Rohlfing (Bielefeld University) for studying the co-construction of interaction protocol in collaborative tasks with humans. We develloped a new experimental setup to investigate the processes used by humans to negotiate a protocol of interaction when they do not already share one. This collaboration leaded to the following publication [66] .

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer worked with Linda Smith (Psychological and brain sciences department, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, US) on computational modeling of cognitive development, in particular on the role of curiosity driven processes on the evolution of language (see http://www.pyoudeyer.com/OudeyerSmithTopicsCogSci14.pdf ).

Thibaut Munzer and Manuel Lopes worked with Bilal Piot (Supelec), Mathieu Geist (Supelec) and Olivier Pietquin (Lille University) to develop an Inverse Reinforcement Learning algorithm for Relational Domains.

Thibaut Munzer and Freek Stulp worked with Olivier Sigaud (ISIR, UPMC) to study regression algorithm for DMP and their impact on DMP optimization. From this collaboration resulted the publication [61] .

Freek Stulp has started a cooperation with Michael Mistry at the University of Birmingham on learning inverse dynamics models. This has lead to a joint publication at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, where Freek Stulp and Michael Mistry presented a poster.

A cooperation with Laura Herlant of Carnegie Mellon University on discovering skill options lead to a joint publication at the 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, where Laura Herlant gave a presentation.

Gennaro Raiola and Freek Stulp presented a poster titled “Libraries of Motion Primitives as Active Virtual Fixtures for Co-manipulation” at the Forum STIC Paris-Saclay http://www.digiteo.fr/forum-stic-paris-saclay .

Egor Sattarov and Alexander Gepperth presented a poster entitled "MODALSENSE-multimodal perception architecture for intelligent vehicles" at the Forum STIC Paris-Saclay http://www.digiteo.fr/forum-stic-paris-saclay .

Alexander Gepperth and Mathieu Lefort are collaborating with the university of applied sciences of Bottrop (Germany) on the subject of multimodal hand gesture recognition. In the context of this collaboration, Alexander Gepperth supervises a PhD student, Thomas Kopinski.

Gennaro Raiola has started partially working at CEA LIST to integrate his work on virtual mechanism on the Alfred robot at CEA. This is done under the joint supervision of Freek Stulp and Xavier Lamy (CEA LIST), in the context of the DIGITEO-funded project “PrActIx”