ASME IDETC & CIE Conference 2006

I presented a paper on Verve at the 2006 ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineering) IDETC & CIE conference (International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering... whew). The official reference is the following:

Streeter, T., Oliver, J., & Sannier, A. 2006. A General Purpose Open Source Reinforcement Learning Toolkit. In Proceedings of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.

The presentation went pretty well. I was put in a strange topic area, though (Knowledge Management in Design Automation). I think the audience liked the live demos, and I had some good questions from them afterwards. The paper and presentation slides are available in the publications section of my website.

I attended a talk called "The Spirituality of Engineering" by two professors from Delft University in the Netherlands. They showed a video of a grad student from Russia doing a 6 month research internship in Paris (developing a control algorithm for the inverted pendulum problem). Then the speakers and the audience talked about various types of symbolism present in the film.

I also went to two industry/government panel discussions: "Challenges Confronting Mechanical Systems with Emphasis on Intelligence," and "Industry & Government Perspective on Issues and Challenges for Robotics." James Albus gave a presentation at the first one called "Building Brains for Thinking Machines," which was a brief summary of his work on hierarchical control systems. I talked with Dr. Albus briefly before his talk about some of his books (Intelligent Systems and Engineering of Mind).