Presentation Tomorrow: Computational Necromancy with Reinforcement Learning

[Jerry]

Who: Dr. Bill Smart, Associate Professor of Computer Science, WUSTL
When: Monday, Nov 2nd at 3pm
Where: EB 1012

What: Animating the Dead: Computational Necromancy with Reinforcement Learning

Anthropologists are often interested in questions such as "What do
chimpanzees optimize for when they walk, and when they climb?", "What
would Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) look like when it walked?", and
"How did the modern human musculoskeletal system evolve from its
evolutionary ancestors?".  All of these problems can be cast as learning
a controller for a complex biomechanical system that optimizes some
criteria.  Reinforcement learning offers a set of techniques to address
this problem formulation, if we can overcome the problems of learning in
a high-dimensional, non-linear system, continuous in states, actions,
and time.

In this talk, I will outline the types of biomechanics problems that
anthropologists are interested in, and show how reinforcement learning
can be used to address them.  In particular, I will describe how
Differential Dynamic Programming can be used to learn controllers for
complex musculoskeletal simulations of humans, chimpanzees, and extinct
hominins, and how these learned controllers can be used to answer
fundamental questions in physical anthropology.

[Jerry]

More information about Dr. Smart's visit:

Washington University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering is
hosting an information day about our research-based graduate programs, on
Nov. 14, 2009.  There is a website:

http://cse.wustl.edu/graduateprograms/Pages/FallVisitDay.aspx

The intention is to make a day that is friendly and approachable for
students who are questioning, "is graduate school the right thing for
me?", as well as those students who are planning to apply to graduate
schools and want to know more about Wash. U.

There will be an opportunity to meet several faculty, tour the
department and find out more about our programs.  Also, the Director of
Graduate Admissions will give a general presentation on what makes a
good graduate application, applicable to applications to any school.

Questions?
Contact:  Robert Pless
Associate Professor of Computer Science,
Washington University in St. Louis
314-935-7546