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INTPART-International Partnerships for Excellent Education and Research

Collaboration on Intelligent Machines 2 (COINMAC-2)

Alternative title: Samarbeid om intelligente maskiner (COINMAC)-2

Awarded: NOK 3.5 mill.

Technology is transforming society and the way we work and interact. We are surrounded by technology and computer interfaces that have recently become more intelligent and are able to adapt to our needs and preferences. Thanks to progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we see a major transition from ourselves adapting to fixed technology and services to these by themselves adapting to us human users. Thus, technology works more seamlessly in a continuously increasing number of domains. This includes robots that have traditionally only been used for manufacturing but are now arriving at work and at home as service robots. The success of these would be highly dependent on their behaviour capabilities that depend on their skills in learning and adaptation. We see a rapid progress in both learning algorithms and robotics, and it is challenging for a single research group to both provide an updated set of courses in addition to undertaking state-of-the-research. This project is concerned with further developing international collaboration with leading partners in the US, Brazil and Japan within the domains of such self-learning systems and robotics. The project is led by the research group Robotics and Intelligent Systems (ROBIN) at the University of Oslo. The collaboration consists of a number of different activities such as short-term and long-term reciprocal stays by students and staff for collaboration in research, curriculum development and teaching materials, guest lectures, and organising intensive courses/workshops. It was not the best starting a project in international cooperation while a pandemic was going on and with strict travel restrictions. However, we had contact with project partners in various ways, such as e-mail and online meetings. We have collaborated on article writing based on previous master's / PhD student exchanges which have resulted in two peer-reviewed articles published in 2021. There has also been ongoing research where two PhD students have collaborated across borders, and which has led to a published journal article in 2022 about how a robot can keep track of commonly used objects in a house. We have also been guest editors for special issues of the two journals “IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems” and “Frontiers in Robotics and AI” (published in 2022). One of our PhD students at UiO made in 2022 a four-month exchange to the Univ. of Michigan-Dearborn. That resulted in a conference paper published in 2023 about how a security mechanism can be added to a vehicular communication network using machine learning. Several other papers have been published by work undertaken by master´s students. As the pandemic has weakened, we have restarted the exchange of master´s students. The outgoing students do their full master´s project abroad while the incoming ones perform a part of their project at UiO. In the study year 2022/23, we had four outgoing master students to four different universities in Japan (Kyushu Univ., Nagoya Univ., Toyohashi Univ. and Tsukuba Univ.) and one to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, USA. At the same period, we had one incoming student from Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). In the current study year (2023/24), we have one outgoing student to each of the universities in Toyohashi and Kyushu in Japan. In Brazil, there is another outgoing student at UFRGS. We also have an incoming exchange student from Kyushu University. We have also had active collaboration through the Master / PhD course IN5490 / IN9490 - Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence for Intelligent Systems. Here, representatives from several different partners contribute with scientific guest lectures, and project proposals and supervision of research projects that are an important part of the course. We have also been active in presenting our research and the COINMAC-2 project to the international research community through a number of invited talks and tutorials at international conferences. We have e.g., given a tutorial at the 2023 Conference on Artificial Life in Sapporo, Japan, on how to automatically design a robot body and control in a simulation environment. We have also given a number of other tutorials about AI Ethics. Staff from the University of Oslo have also visited the labs hosting our outgoing students while the students are there. This is often combined with giving guest lectures. We have established a new collaboration with researchers at Tohoku University, where a PhD student from the Univ. of Oslo went for a 6-month exchange in 2023. We are now continuing the collaboration and are working on a paper submission. Contact and collaboration have also been established with new partner institutions in the USA, China and Canada (through relocated researchers from partners). The project manager has since August 2023 become the contact and co-chair for the “Technical Committee on Robot Ethics” of the IEEE RAS Society.

Technology is transforming society and the way we work and interact. We are surrounded by technology and computer interfaces that have recently become more intelligent and are able to adapt to our needs and preferences. Thanks to progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we see a major transition from ourselves adapting to fixed technology and services to these by themselves adapting to us human users. Thus, technology works more seamlessly in a continuously increasing number of domains. This includes robots that have traditionally only been used for manufacturing but are now arriving at work and at home as service robots. The success of these would be highly dependent on their behavior capabilities that depend on their skills in learning and adaptation. We see a rapid progress in both learning algorithms and robotic systems, and it is challenging for a single research group to both provide an updated set of courses in addition to undertaking state-of-the-research. This project would be concerned with further developing international collaboration with leading partners in the US, Brazil and Japan within the domains of such self-learning systems and robotics. However, two partners are new, and we target now to transfer developed teaching material and concepts between partners. We also plan to have student group collaboration with members from different partners. The project is highly relevant to our current Research Council of Norway funded researcher projects. Thus, it would provide extended momentum to these projects by collaboration in research, teaching, and in strengthening the interaction between the two domains. This will be through a set of different activities like short-term and long-term reciprocal mobility stays by students and staff for collaboration in research, curriculum and teaching material development and organizing intensive courses/workshops.

Publications from Cristin

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INTPART-International Partnerships for Excellent Education and Research