EPIA'03 - 11th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Invited Presentations and Tutorials

Alexander BockmayrConstraint Programming in Computational Molecular Biology
Amilcar CardosoComputational Creativity
Dario Floreano

From Wheels to Wings with Evolutionary Spiking Circuits

Dario Floreano

Autonomous Systems Lab, Institute of Systems Engineering

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne,

Switzerland

I will give an overview of the EPFL indoor flying project, whose goal is to evolve neural controllers for autonomous, adaptive, indoor micro-flyers. Indoor flight is still a challenge because it requires miniaturization, energy efficiency, and control of non-linear flight dynamics. This ongoing project consists in developing a flying, vision-based micro-robot, a bio-inspired controller composed of adaptive spiking neurons directly mapped into digital micro-controllers, and a method to evolve such a neural controller without human intervention. The talk describes the motivation and methodology used to reach our goal as well as the results of a number of preliminary experiments on vision-based wheeled and flying robots.

This is a joint work with Jean-Christophe Zufferey (ASL-EPFL) and Jean-Daniel Nicoud (DIDEL S.A., www.didel.com)

Eckhard BickThe VISL system: Constraint Grammar based NLP-products
Harold BoleyAn Introduction to Object-Oriented RuleML
Pedro DomingosLearning from Networks of Examples
Pieter AdriaansGrammar induction and adaptive information disclosure
Veronica DahlUnderstanding Implicit Language Structures
Vitor Santos CostaPerformance Matters in Prolog Applications!