Sebastian Thrun studied Computer Science at the Universities of Hildesheim and Bonn. There, he wrote his diploma thesis under the supervision of Prof. G.Veenker.
He wrote his PhD thesis also at the University of Bonn under the supervision of Prof. A.B. Cremers.
After a eight year professorship at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), he went to Stanford University
to become head of the legendary Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL).
Sebastian Thrun is the author of over 300 scientific papers, won many awards and organized a series of international conferences.
The DARPA Grand Challenge is one of the biggest open challenges for the robotics community to date. It requires a robotic vehicle to follow a given route of up to 175 miles across punishing desert terrain, without any human supervision. The Challenge was first held in 2004, in which the best performing team failed after 7.3 miles of autonomous driving. The speaker heads one out of 195 teams worldwide competing for the 2 Million Dollar price. Thrun will present the work of the Stanford Racing Team, which is developing an automated car capable of desert driving at up to 50km/h. He will report on research in areas as diverse as computer vision, control, fault-tolerant systems, machine learning, motion planning, data fusion, and 3-D environment modeling.
Profile:
Professor of Computer Science (at the moment part-time) at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), founder and director (from 1983) of the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-founder and chairman (from 1990 until 1995) of the VUB Computer Science Department (Faculty of Sciences).
The scientific research interests cover the whole field of artificial intelligence, including natural language, vision, robot behavior, learning, cognitive architecture, and knowledge representation. At the moment my focus is on dialogs for humanoid robots and fundamental research into the origins of language and meaning. Current work focuses on developing the foundations of semiotic dynamics and on fluid construction grammars.
The talk presents recent research showing how a population of distributed autonomous agents might be able to self-organise a communication system without central control nor prior design. The agents engage in situated language games in which they negotiate not only the linguistic conventions they are going to use in their communication but also the underlying ontologies. I will also discuss applications of this techniques for peer-to-peer information exchange.
Profile:
Ian Horrocks is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Manchester. His FaCT system revolutionised the design of Description
Logic systems, redefining the notion of tractability for DLs and
establishing a new standard for DL implementations. He is a member of
the Joint EU/US Committee on Agent Markup Languages, and was heavily
involved in the development of the OIL, DAML+OIL and OWL ontology
languages. He has published over 100 research papers, most of which are
available from http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications.
Description Logics (DLs) are a family of logic based knowledge representation formalisms. Although they have a range of applications (e.g., configuration and information integration), they are perhaps best known as the basis for widely used ontology languages such as OWL (now a W3C recommendation). This decision was motivated by a requirement that key inference problems be decidable, and that it should be possible to provide reasoning services to support ontology design and deployment. Such reasoning services are typically provided by highly optimised implementations of tableaux decision procedures. In this talk I will introduce both the logics and decision procedures that underpin modern ontology languages, and the implementation techniques that have enabled state of the art systems to be effective in applications in spite of the high worst case complexity of key inference problems.