Postdocs openings @ SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering

[Paul Weng]

Sorry for cross-posting.

*** Postdocs openings @ SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering ***

The SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering (JIE), which is a partnership between Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) and 

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), is a graduate engineering school located in Guangzhou, China. JIE’s research focuses 

on four main thrust areas:

- Supercomputing & Big Data
- Biomedical applications
- Autonomous driving
- Smart grids and power systems

As an international institute, the working language is English. For more information about JIE, please visit https://jie.cmu.edu.

We are seeking postdocs to work on planning, learning or optimization problems with applications to robotics or energy.
Prospective candidates must have a PhD in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, robotics or a related field. 

Research will be carried out with guidance from Paul Weng (http://weng.fr/), with opportunity of collaboration with SYSU 

and/or CMU faculty, and possibility of supervision of PhD students.
The positions are for one to two years, beginning (ideally) in Fall 2016.

Please apply with a CV, including a statement of research interests to paw...@cmu.edu.

Best,
Paul Weng
Assistant Professor
SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering
SYSU-CMU Shunde International Joint Research Institute
http://weng.fr/

[Paul Weng]

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Call for Paper for Asian Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (AWRL 2016)

The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand - November 16, 2016
In conjunction with the 8th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2016)

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The first Asian Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (AWRL 2016) focuses on both 

theoretical models and algorithms of reinforcement learning (RL) and its practical 

applications. In the last few years, we have seen the growing interest in RL of 

researchers from different research areas and industries. We invite reinforcement 

learning researchers and practitioners to participate in this world-class gathering. 

We intend to make this an exciting event for researchers and practitioners in RL 

worldwide, not only for the presentation of top quality papers, but also as a forum 

for the discussion of open problems, future research directions and application 

domains of RL. AWRL 2016 will consist of keynote talks (TBA), contributed paper 

presentations, discussion sessions spread over a one-day period.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an active field of research that deals with the problem 

of (single or multiple agents') sequential decision-making in unknown possibly partially 

observable domains, whose (potentially non-stationary) dynamics may be deterministic, 

stochastic or adversarial. RL's objective is to develop agents' capability of learning 

optimal policies in unknown environments (possibly in face of other coexisting agents) 

by trial-and-error and with limited supervision. Recent developments in exploration-

exploitation, online learning, planning, and representation learning are making RL more 

and more appealing to real-world applications, with promising results in challenging 

domains such as recommendation systems, computer games, or robotics systems. 

We would like to create a forum to discuss interesting results both theoretically and 

empirically related with RL. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to bring together 

diverse viewpoints in the RL area in an attempt to consolidate the common ground, 

identify new research directions, and promote the rapid advance of RL research 

community.

** Topics

The workshop will cover a range of sub-topics in RL, from theoretical aspects to 

empirical evaluations, including but not limited to:

• Exploration/Exploitation

• Function approximation in RL

• Deep RL

• Policy search methods

• Batch RL

• Kernel methods for RL

• Evolutionary RL

• Partially observable RL

• Bayesian RL

• Multi-agent RL

• RL in non-stationary domains

• Life-long RL

• Non-standard Criteria in RL, e.g.:

• Risk-sensitive RL

• Multi-objective RL

• Preference-based RL

• Transfer Learning in RL

• Knowledge Representation in RL

• Hierarchical RL

• Interactive RL

• RL in psychology and neuroscience

• Applications of RL, e.g.:

• Recommender systems

• Robotics

• Video games

• Finance

** Paper Submission

Workshop submissions and camera ready versions will be handled by EasyChair. 

Papers should be formatted according to the ACML formatting instructions for the 

Conference Track. Submissions need not be anonymous.

AWRL is a non-archival venue and there will be no published proceedings. However, 

the papers will be posted on this website. Therefore it will be possible to submit to 

other conferences and journals both in parallel to and after AWRL 2016. Besides, 

we also welcome submissions to AWRL that are under review at other conferences 

and workshops. For this reason, please feel free to submit either anonymized or 

non-anonymized versions of your work. We have enabled anonymous reviewing 

so EasyChair will not reveal the authors unless you chose to do so in your PDF.

At least one author from each accepted paper must register for the workshop. Please 

see the ACML 2016 Website for information about accommodation and registration.

** Important Dates

• Submission deadline: Aug. 31, 2016

• Notification of acceptance: Oct. 10, 2016

• Camera ready deadline: Oct. 24, 2016

• Workshop date: Nov. 16, 2016

• ACML dates: Nov. 16-18, 2016

** Organizing Committee

Jianye Hao, Tianjin University, China
Paul Weng, SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering, China
Yang Yu, Nanjing University, China
Zongzhang Zhang, Soochow University, China

[Paul Weng]

*** Update ***

The deadline for submission has been extended to **Sep.15, 2016**!

Besides, the list of invited speakers has been finalized:

- Lihong Li from Microsoft Research will give an invited talk at AWRL 2016!

- Olivier Pietquin from Deepmind and University Lille 1 (France) will give an invited talk at AWRL 2016!

** Important Dates

• Submission deadline: Sep. 15, 2016

• Notification of acceptance: Oct. 10, 2016

• Camera ready deadline: Oct. 24, 2016

• Workshop date: Nov. 16, 2016

• ACML dates: Nov. 16-18, 2016

** Organizing Committee

Jianye Hao, Tianjin University, China
Paul Weng, SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering, China
Yang Yu, Nanjing University, China
Zongzhang Zhang, Soochow University, China

[Paul Weng]

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Call for Paper for the 2nd Asian Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (AWRL 2017)
November 15, 2017, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
In conjunction with the 9th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2017)
****************************************************************************************************

** Invited speakers

Thomas G. Dietterich, Oregon State University
more to be announced soon


** Motivation

The Asian Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (AWRL) focuses on both theoretical foundations, models, algorithms, and practical applications. In the last few years, we have seen a growing interest in RL of researchers from different research areas and industries. We invite reinforcement learning researchers and practitioners to participate in this world-class gathering. We intend to make this an exciting event for researchers and practitioners in RL worldwide, not only for the presentation of top quality papers, but also as a forum for the discussion of open problems, future research directions and application domains of RL.
AWRL 2017 (in conjunction with ACML 2017) will consist of keynote talks, contributed paper presentations, and discussion sessions spread over a one-day period.

AWRL is a non-archival venue and there will be NO published proceedings. However, the papers will be posted on this website. Therefore it will be possible to submit to other conferences and journals both in parallel to and after AWRL 2017. Besides, we also welcome submissions to AWRL that are under review at other conferences and workshops. For this reason, please feel free to submit either anonymized or non-anonymized versions of your work. We have enabled anonymous reviewing so EasyChair will not reveal the authors unless you chose to do so in your PDF.
At least one author from each accepted paper must register for the workshop. Please see the ACML 2017 Website for information about accommodation and registration.
Papers are recommended to be formatted according to the ACML formatting instructions for the Conference Track. Submissions need not be anonymous.

Workshop submissions and camera ready versions will be handled by EasyChair.

** Important Dates

• Submission deadline: Aug. 20, 2017
• Notification of acceptance: Sep. 10, 2017
• Camera ready deadline: Oct. 10, 2017
• Workshop date: Nov. 15, 2017
• ACML dates: Nov. 15-17, 2017


** Organizing Committee

Tao Qin, Microsoft Research Asia

[Paul Weng]

NEWS: Deadline extension to Aug. 27 and list of invited speakers

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Call for Paper for the 2nd Asian Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (AWRL 2017)
November 15, 2017, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
In conjunction with the 9th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2017)
****************************************************************************************************

** Invited speakers

Thomas G. Dietterich, Oregon State University, USA
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Google Deepmind, USA
Alessandro Lazaric, Facebook AI Resarch, France
Wee Sun Lee, National University of Singapore
Shie Mannor, Technion, Israel
Songhwai Oh, Seoul National University, South Korea
Bruno Scherrer, INRIA, France

• Submission deadline: Aug. 27, 2017