Connectionists: NIPS 2013 Workshop on Planning with Information Constraints

[Pedro Ortega]

Call for Papers: NIPS 2013 Workshop on Planning with Information Constraints
December 9 or 10, Lake Tahoe (NV), USA
Website: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~ope/workshop

** Call for Papers **

The NIPS 2013 Workshop on

Planning with Information Constraints
for Control, Reinforcement Learning,
Computational Neuroscience, Robotics and Games

invites authors to submit contributions.

Authors are encouraged to submit their related work to the workshop by
9th of October 11:59 PM PDT (UTC -7 hours) in NIPS format. Submissions
should be 4-8 pages long with an extra page for references. Full
submission instructions will be posted soon. Authors of the selected
papers will be notified to present their work through short presentations
or posters.

** About **

How do you make decisions when there are way more possibilities than
you can analyze? How do you decide under such information constraints?

Planning and decision-making with information constraints is at the heart
of adaptive control, reinforcement learning, robotic path planning,
experimental design, active learning, computational neuroscience and
games. In most real-world problems, perfect planning is either impossible
(computational intractability, lack of information, diminished control) or
sometimes even undesirable (distrust, risk sensitivity, level of cooperation
of the others). Recent developments have shown that a single method,
based on the free energy functional borrowed from thermodynamics,
provides a principled way of designing systems with information
constraints that parallels Bayesian inference. This single method -known
in the literature under various labels such as KL-control, path integral
control, linearly-solvable stochastic control, information-theoretic bounded
rationality- is proving itself very general and powerful as a foundation for
a novel class of probabilistic planning problems.

** Organizers **

Bert J. Kappen
Naftali Tishby
Jan Peters
David H. Wolpert
Evangelos Theodorou
Pedro A. Ortega

For more information, please visit:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~ope/workshop