Connectionists: Winter School on Intrinsic Motivations: from Brains to Robots

[Jochen Triesch]

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

IM-CLeVeR/FIAS Winter School on:
INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS: FROM BRAINS TO ROBOTS

Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany
December 3-8, 2012

Application deadline: November 1, 2012

We invite applications from PhD students and post-docs for a one-week intensive winter school on biological and computational aspects of intrinsic motivations. The school will comprise interdisciplinary lectures by leading experts in the field and hands-on work on a mini-project (data analysis, computational modeling, experiments with real or simulated robots). The school is restricted to 20 participants. For details see: http://www.im-clever.eu/announcements/events/fias-winter-school

SPEAKERS:
Gianluca Baldassare, CNR Rome
Andrew Barto*, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Peter Dayan*, Gatsby Computational Neuoscience Unit, UCL, London
Ralf Der, MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig
Clay Holroyd*, University of Victoria, Canada
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA, Bordeaux
Peter Redgrave, University of Sheffield
Constantin Rothkopf, FIAS, Frankfurt
Jürgen Schmidhuber*, IDSIA, Lugano
Bert Shi*, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Jochen Triesch, FIAS, Frankfurt
(*=invited)

FORMAT:
The school will comprise lectures by leading experts in the morning and work on a small group project in the afternoons and evenings. Projects will be supervised by the school's speakers and additional project supervisors. The results will be presented at the end of the school.

LOCATION AND ARRANGEMENTS:
Frankfurt is a cosmopolitan city with easy access from across the globe and it has a vibrant neuroscience community. The Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) is a Foundation of the Goethe University Frankfurt and is located in the new science city Frankfurt-Riedberg.

The registration fee is 150 Euros. Costs of accommodation and meals are covered by the school. Students' travel to and from Frankfurt is expected to be covered by the student's home institution. In exceptional cases, students can apply for partial reimbursement of travel expenses. This should be indicated in the application (see below). The school is funded by the European Union project IM-CLeVeR (Intrinsically Motivated Cumulatively Learning Versatile Robots, http://www.im-clever.eu) and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.

APPLICATIONS:
Applications should include:
- Cover letter describing your motivation to participate in the school and your previous experience with reinforcement learning (max. 1 page)
- CV including list of publications
- Recommendation letters from 1-2 current or previous research supervisors
- Request for partial reimbursement of travel expenses (if applicable)
Applications should be sent electronically to Ms Gaby Ehlgen: ehlgen at fias.uni-frankfurt.de
Deadline is November 1, 2012.

SPONSORING:
The school is organized and funded by the European Union project IM-CLeVeR (Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots, http://www.im-clever.eu) and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS, http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de).


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Prof. Dr. Jochen Triesch
Johanna Quandt Research Professor
Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies
http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/~triesch/
Tel: +49 (0)69 798-47531
Fax: +49 (0)69 798-47611