Organising the "9th Joint IEEE International Conference of Developmental Learning and Epigenetic Robotics" in Oslo, 2019

The ICDL-EpiRob scientific conference is an annually held event gathering 120-140 participants from all over the world to share their knowledge and late-breaking work on learning mechanisms seen in humans and apply them within psychology-inspired robotics. It is a unique interdisciplinary conference gathering researchers from both computer science and psychology to share knowledge and research findings on how humans develop sensing, reasoning and actions, including social properties through interaction with the environment, and how these capabilities can be mimicked in computing systems and robots. This is with the goal of both understanding human development and how this can be applied to improve future intelligent technology, including for robots that will be in close interaction with humans. One of the motivations for hosting the conference in Norway was to draw attention to the related Norwegian research including our RCN funded project "Engineering Predictability with Embodied Cognition (EPEC)" and Centre of Excellence "RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion?, as well as the Norwegian robotics industry. The conference was organized by the Robotics and Intelligent Systems (ROBIN) group at University of Oslo (UiO), and held in the Ingeniørenes Hus conference venue downtown Oslo. The program consisted of one workshop day first with six workshops, followed by three days of regular conference with four keynote talks, 21 oral and 30 poster papers (peer-reviewed) and 11 additional posters accepted based on abstract submission. A UiO lab tour to ROBIN and RITMO was organised in one of the evenings. Social events included a reception in Oslo City Hall and an Oslo Fjord cruise banquet with Lady Mack. We were able to attract a larger number of attendees than in recent years for the conference (140 for the main conference and 30 additional on the workshop day), and those attending expressed much satisfaction with the organising (average overall score 4.7 on a scale from 1 to 5). With 51 regular papers accepted, we got about to three attendees for each paper. One reason the people were enjoying the conference, we think was - in addition to a strong program and good organization - due to lunches being included and the social events being informal and good for networking.

The project has contributed to a successful organizing of the ICDL-EpiRob-2019 conference in Oslo. The conference had a larger number of attendees than in recent years and with high participant satisfaction. This has the potential to contribute to further strengthening connections with the leading international research community. We had a number of Norwegian researchers and students participating at the conference as presenters, attendees, volunteers and workshop organisers. We see that having local students engaged as volunteers have contributed positively to their interest in targeting a future career in research. The Norwegian humanoid service robot manufacturer Halodi Robotics also had an exhibition at the conference where they demonstrated their new robot Eve. We exposed the international attendees to Norwegian research through a well-attended guided evening tour at both the RITMO Centre of Excellence and the ROBIN research group at UiO.

The ICDL-EpiRob scientific conference is an annually held event gathering 120-140 participants from all over the world to share their knowledge and late-breaking work on psychology-inspired learning mechanism seen in humans and how to apply them within robotics. It is a unique conference gathering researchers from both computer science and psychology to share knowledge and research findings on how humans develop sensing, reasoning and actions, including social properties through interaction with the environment and how these capabilities can be mimicked in computing systems and robotics. This is with the goal of both understanding human development and how this can be applied to applied to improve future intelligent technology including for robots that will be in close interaction with humans. By hosting the conference in Norway, we would like to draw attention to the related Norwegian research including our RCN funded project "Engineering Predictability with Embodied Cognition (EPEC)" and Centre of Excellence "RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion Faculty of Humanities", as well as the Norwegian robotics industry. The conference is organized by the University of Oslo, and will be held in a conference venue in Oslo. It will contain tutorials, workshops, invited talks by leading international researchers, oral and poster presentations of accepted papers (reviewed by an international program committee). The expected audience are researchers from Europe, USA and Asia. Funding from the Research Council of Norway will be of major importance to keep the registration fee paid by each conference participants at a moderate level. Thus, more people would be able to attend and experience a comprehensive conference program.