Meeting Notes February 2023

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Meeting 02/02

Research

  • 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?

ML Assistantship

  • Syllabus
  • Prepare exercises 

Miscellaneous

  • 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

Meeting 16/02

Research

  • 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

Summer School

  • Cv &  motivation letter feedback
  • Applied

M.Sc. Students/Interns

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

Ph.D. registration

  • 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

ML Course

  • 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

Miscellaneous

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

Anymal Robot at Mining chair on 15/02?

Effective Communication In Academia Seminar

  • 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

Meeting 28/02

Research

  • air-hokey challenge

M.Sc. Students/Interns

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

Ph.D. registration

  • 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

ML Course

  • 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

Miscellaneous

    • IAS retreat
    • Melanie’s presentation