Meeting Notes February 2023 | Chair of Cyber-Physical-Systems

Meeting 02/02

Follow up CR-VAE
- Files on the papers folder
- Create simple code to run experiments as described on paper
  - Upload on gitea
- Create a webpage for CR-VAE paper
- Wait for reviews (March 13)
- Rebuttal (March 19)
Extend the representation learning work towards disentanglement
- Literature Review
- Dig deeper into Transformers
Literature Review on SOTA RL algorithms
- Read and implement basic and SOTA RL algorithms
  - Can be the base of an RL course too.
Use CR-VAE with SOTA RL algorithms
- First experiments with SAC
- Explore sample efficiency
- Explore gradient flow ablations
Develop an AR-ROS2 framework
- Create a minimal working example of manipulating a physical robot (UR3) with Hololens2

M.Sc. Students/Interns

Melanie
- Thesis Review
- Code submission
Sign Language project
- Define the project more clearly
  - Feedback needed
- Send study details to the applicant
AR project
- Is it within the scope of our research?

Ph.D. registration
- Mentor
  - Ortner Ronald?
  - Other UNI?
Retreats
- expectations/requirements
Summer School
Neural Coffee (ML Reading Group)
- When: Every Friday 10:00-12:00
- Where: CPS Kitchen (?)
- Poster
Floor and Desk Lamps

create a new research draft
- implement CURL
- substitute contrastive learning with CR-VAE representations
Literature review on unsupervised learning (Hinton’s work) to find out ankles that have room for improvement
- write a journal on that

Melanie: thesis review done
Iye Szin:
- Gave her resources to study (ML/NN/ROS2)
- Discussed a plan for internship

PhD in Computer Science
- Not possible
- probably doesn’t matter(?)
Call with Dean of Studies
Mentor
- I would like someone exposed to sample-efficient and robust Reinforcement Learning. Hopefully to Robot Learning too
- Someone that can also extend my scientific network of people
- Can I ask professors from other universities?
Mentor Candidates
- Marc Toussaint, Learning and Intelligent Systems lab, TU Berlin, Germany
- Abhinav Valada, Robot Learning Lab, University of Freiburg, Germany
- Georgia Chalvatzaki, IAS, TU Darmstadt, Germany
- Edward Johns, Robot Learning Lab, Imperial College London, UK
- Sepp Hochreiter, Institute of Machine Learning, JKU Linz, Austria
Write a paper with a mentor

Jupyter notebooks or old code? If Jyputer notebooks, why not google collab?
What will the context of lectures be so that I can prepare exercises accordingly?
- lectures are up
20% of the final exam is from the lab exercises
Decide on the lecture format
Find an appropriate dataset

Science Breakfast @MUL: 14/02 11:00-12:00

Anymal Robot at Mining chair on 15/02?

Feedback on CPS presentation template:
- Size: Make the slide size the same as PowerPoint (more rectangular).
- Outline (left outline)
  - We could skip the subsections. Keep only the higher sections
  - Make the fonts darker. They are not easily visible on a projector
- Colors
  - Color of boxes (frames) must become darker, otherwise it is not easily distinguishable from the white background on a projector
Idea: Create a Google Slide template
- Easier to use
- Can add arrows, circles, etc
- Easier with tables

Iye Szin:
- starts 2 March
- Elmar has to sign documents (permanent position)
- Allocation of HW
- transpornder

Mentor can be from anywhere
Mentor has to be a recognized scientist (with a “venia docendi” if he/she is from the German-speaking world)
No courses or ects needed
the mentor must not be a reviewer of your thesis. He can be an examiner, though.
Email to Marc Toussaint?
Officially: no obligations
Unofficially: propose common reasearch

Google Collab
- Uses the jupyter format.
- Runs online
- Even supports limited access to GPU/TPU
- Speeds up learning process
Do we need latex?
- yes
Update slides for the Lab accordingly
Submission at a folder in the cloud
- ipynb file
- report
- zipped and named : firstname_lastname_m00000_assignment1.zip
Online lectures -> webex more stable
Google slides template
Grading
- 100 pts
- latex report: +10
- optional exercise: +20
tweetback: 3 questions