About Workshops

RIACS holds and sponsors workshops that address computer science issues in depth by bringing together NASA and RIACS scientists with leading researchers in the field from universities and industry. As part of its mission of fostering ties with the academic community in IT, RIACS provides financial, administrative, and technical support for selected workshops involving RIACS scientists.

2005 Workshops

IJCNN 2005 - Verification, Validation and Certification of Neuro-Adaptive Controllers in Safety-Related Areas

This workshop was organized by RIACS and held during the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) in Montreal, Canada - August 8, 2005. The workshop was a great success with active participation from prominent industry as well as academic community.

2004 Workshops

VIB Workshop

Sponsored by RIACS and held at Ames and in Monterey March 31 - April 2, 2004 had over 90 participants. RIACS Scientist, Dr. Julian Gomèz organized this workshop under the leadership of Dr. David Maluf (an IPA with RIACS).

SET Workshop

Co-sponsored by RIACS and held in Houston - April 19 - 23, 2004.

AR-IDU Workshop

Co-sponsored by RIACS and held in San Diego - February 3 - 6, 2004.

 

2003 Workshops

 

Intelligent Physical Agents

RIACS co-sponsored with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition of the University of Florida on hosting the annual meeting of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents October 14-18, 2002. The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was formed in 1996 to produce software standards for heterogenous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. In the production of these standards, FIPA requies input and collaboration from its membership and from the agents field in general to build specificatios that can be used to achieve interoperatbility between agent-based systems developed by difference companies and organization. Intelligent Agents is one of the important research areas for NASA Ames Research Center and RIACS. The purpose of this workshop was to further the development of software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems.

 

3rd Annual NASA International Planning and Scheduling

This workshop was the third in a regular series that started in October 1997. Since that time, automated planning and scheduling has become increasingly important to NASA. The missions that NASA is contemplating in the near future willl require significant levels of autonomy over long periods of time. Central to this autonomy will be long-running planning and scheduling systems, checked by humans only periodically. There are still many challenges facing the planning and scheduling commity as it strives to meet NASA's long-range needs.

 

Robosphere

This workshop was the first of its kind. Robosphere is a project to explore the possibility of long term or continuous robotic presence on planetary surfaces and in space, in order to increase scientific returns, decrease exploration costs and greatly decrease any chances of mission failures. The underlying notion is that of self-sustaning robotic ecologies, where the continuous survival and exploration activities of robotic teams and colonies are dependent on the exchange of matter, energy and information among robotic individuals and "species". This workshop was held November 15, 2002 and brought together leading researchers in robotic autonomy.
http://robosphere.arc.nasa.gov/

 

Workshop.html Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS)

RIACS helped support the Mobile Agents Field Test on March 28-April 5, 2003 in Hanksville, Utah. MDRS, run by the Mars Society, features a Mars-analogue habitat. The Mobile Agents project is validated through a series of increasingly complex field tests in harsh Mars-analogue environments on Earth. Mobile Agents is a project at NASA Ames Research Center studying how teams of humans and robots can cooperate in carrying out scientific tasks in harsh environments, such as the surface of Mars. These teams consist of humans wearing planetary space suits interacting with robots and other mobile computing plateforms. Since traditional interfaces cannot be used interaction between humans and robots are completed entirely by using spoken language. For further information on MDRS please refer to http://www.marssociety.org/

 

Workshop on Analog Sites and Facilities for the Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars

This workshop was supported by NASA's Human Exploration and Development of Space Enterprise and sponsored by RIACS and the Colorado School of Mines. The scientific community has a long tradition of seeking and using terrestrial analog sites for planetary features to better understand the features and to develop strategies for and train scientists involved in planetary exploration. The human exploration community has used terrestrial analog sites and facilities as testing grounds for technologies and for training astronauts for planetary exploration. This workshop was held May 2003 to explore the commonalities between these two uses of analog sites and facilites and to evaluated the characteristics of analogs that could best serve both uses.

 

International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling

RIACS co-sponsored with Istitute Trentino di Culture on hosting the International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling (ICAPS'03). This conference is the result of the merging of the International AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and the European Conference on Planning (ECP). ICAPS was held in Trento, Italy on June 9- 13, 2003. The conference is a premier forum for researchers and practitioners in planning and scheduling - two technologies critical to manufacturing, space systems, software engineering, robotics, education, and entertainment. The scope encompasses a wide variety of approaches to planning and scheduling. Further information can be found at http://icaps03.itc.it

 

Evolvable Hardware (EH-2003)

RIACS worked collaborative with the Information Power Grid group to support the Evolvable Hardware Conference, July 9 - 11, 2003. Evolvable Hardware is a an emerging field that applies evolution to automate design adaption of physical reconfigurable and morphable structures such as electronic systems, antennas, MEMS and robots. The focus of this years conference was on evolvable hardware for reliability. Reliablity issues range from fault-recovery and survivable NASA/DOD systems operating in extreme environments to intelligent adaptive and learning systems for protection of areas and security of communications. RIACS scope of work in autonomous reasoning complements these areas of research.

 

International Workshop on Bayeian Data Analysis (BAYES 2003)

RIACS in collaboration with the University of California - Baskin School of Engineering co-sponsored the BAYES 2003 in Santa Cruz, California on August 7 - 10, 2003. The focus was on Bayesian data analysis; starting with a real prolem in science or decision-making, using Bayesian methods to solve the original probem with significan attention to interplay between the real-world context and the Bayesian mode building. Bayesian methods play a significan role at NASA in the Auto Bayes project and in RIACS grups devoted to Bayesian inference. These methods are expected to continue to grow in importance in the 21st century as hardware speeds increase and Bayesian computing algorithms become even more sophisticated.

 

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2003)

RIACS co-sponsored participants of the IJCAI conference, August 9-15, 2003. IJCAI is the premier artificial intelligence organization and serves as a forum for leading international researchers and practitioners in information integration -technology critical to unprecedented information-gathering capabilities on the World Wide Web. The purpose of this meeting was to bring together leading researchers in a variety of areas related to the larger problem of integrating information on the Web. It brought together technologists, researchers, and end-users in the filed of machine learning, data mining, automatic planning, constraint reasoning, databases, view integration, information extraction, semantic web and web services.

 

Intelligent Motion and Interaction within Virtual Environments

RIACS co-sponsored with the University College, London on hosting the Intelligent Motion/Virtual Environments Conference, September 15 - 17, 2003. This conference assessed motion and interaction fidelity within virtual environments. The focus was primarily on training and user interfaces that emphasize visual-motor interactivity, as it is within this domain that VE training systems may uniquely excel. The organizing hypothesis of the conference was that a sense of intelligent interaction with agents arises when simpler lower level aspects of the agent, such as its kinematics and dynamic descriptions, are simulated with high fidelity. Internally recognized researchers gathered to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the organizing hypothesis.