[CFP] NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Touch Processing: a new Sensing Modality for AI
Roberto Calandra
We are pleased to announce the
NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Touch Processing: a new Sensing Modality for AI.
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: 25 September 2023 (AOE).
- Notification: 25 October 2023 (AOE)
Workshop: 15 or 16 December 2023 in New Orleans, United States.
Description:
Touch is a crucial sensor modality for both humans and robots, as it allows us to directly sense object properties and interactions with the environment. Recently, touch sensing has become more prevalent in robotic systems, thanks to the increased accessibility of inexpensive, reliable, and high-resolution tactile sensors and skins. Just as the widespread availability of digital cameras accelerated the development of computer vision, we believe that we are rapidly approaching a new field of computational science dedicated to touch processing.
However, a key question is now becoming critically important as the field gradually transitions from hardware development to real-world applications: How do we make sense of touch? While the output of modern high-resolution tactile sensors and skins share similarities with computer vision, touch presents challenges unique to its sensing modality. Unlike images, touch information is influenced by temporal components, intrinsically active nature, and very local sensing, where a small subset of a 3D space is sensed on a 2D embedding.
We believe that AI/ML will play a critical role in successfully processing touch as a sensing modality. However, this raises important questions regarding which computational models are best suited to leverage the unique structure of touch, similar to how convolutional neural networks leverage spatial structure in images.
The development and advancement of touch processing will greatly benefit a wide range of fields, including tactile and haptic use cases. For instance, advancements in tactile processing (from the environment to the system) will enable robotic applications in unstructured environments, such as agricultural robotics and telemedicine. Understanding touch will also facilitate providing sensory feedback to amputees through sensorized prostheses and enhance future AR/VR systems.
The goal of this first workshop on touch processing is to seed the foundations of a new computational science dedicated to the processing and understanding of touch sensing. By bringing together, for the first time ever, experts with diverse backgrounds we hope to start discussing and nurturing this new field of touch processing and pinpoint its scientific challenges in the years to come. In addition, through this workshop we hope to build awareness and lower the entry bar for AI researchers interested in approaching this new field. We believe this workshop can be beneficial for building a community where researchers can work together in the intersection of touch sensing and AI/ML.
Call for Papers:
We welcome submissions focused on all aspects of touch processing, including but not limited to the following topics:
Computational approaches to process touch data.
Learning representations from touch and/or multimodal data.
Tools and libraries that can lower the barrier of touch sensing research.
Collection of large-scale tactile datasets.
- Applications of touch processing
Submissions can follow this template. There is a 4 page limit for technical content with no page limit on references and appendices. We encourage relevant works at all stages of maturity, ranging from initial exploratory results to polished full papers. Accepted papers will be presented in the form of posters, with certain papers being selected for spotlight talks. For more information see the website.
Please contact work...@touchprocessing.org if you have any questions.
Invited Speakers:
Roland S Johansson (Umeå University, Sweden)
Nathan Lepora (University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
Katherine J. Kuchenbecker (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany)
Chiara Bartolozzi (Italian Institute of Technology, Italy)
Jiajun Wu (Stanford University, United States)
Ted Adelson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States)
Veronica Santos (University of California, Los Angeles, United States)
Jeremy Fischel (Sanctuary AI, United States)
Satoshi Funabashi (Waseda University, Japan)
Mustafa Mukadam (Meta AI, United States)
Organizing Committee:
Roberto Calandra (TU Dresden, Germany)
Haozhi Qi (UC Berkeley, United States)
Perla Maiolino (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
Mike Lambeta (Meta AI, United States)
Jitendra Malik (UC Berkeley, United States)
Yasemin Bekiroglu (Chalmers / University College London, United Kingdom)