6th March 2020: We are sorry to announce that NICE 2020, scheduled to be held on March 17-20 2020, will be postponed to a later date. Please see here for the new date in March 2021
NEUROTECH event: Future Application Directions for Neuromorphic Computing Technologies: agenda and registration (free, but mandatory). A half-day event with special focus on potential application of neuromorphic computing.
Travel info:
Getting to the venue:
the nearest tram stop to the meeting venue is "Heidelberg Bunsengymnasium" (marked in the map linked above) [online timetable]https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de//bin/query.exe/en?Z=Neuenheim+Bunsengymnasium,+Heidelberg), provided by German Railway. Here you can also buy tickets online
via Railway from the train station directly attached to the airport "Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof": online timetable by German Railway (tickets are also sold online via this website)
via airport shuttle service directly to the hotel. We have good experience with TLS Heidelberg. A single, shared ride costs about 40 Euro / person / ride
Hotels:
These hotels are relatively close to the meeting venue (Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics, see the map above). A lot more hotels are listed in online hotel booking sites (e.g. on booking.com)
Relational Neurogenesis for Lifelong Learning Agents
Tej Pandit and Dhireesha Kudithipudi
Reinforcement learning systems have shown tremendous potential in being able to model meritorious behavior in virtual agents and robots. The ability to learn through continuous reinforcement and interaction with an environment negates the requirement of painstakingly curated datasets and hand crafted features. However, the ability to learn multiple tasks in a sequential manner, referred to as lifelong or continual learning, remains unresolved. Current
implementations either concentrate on preserving information in fixed capacity networks, or propose incrementally growing networks which randomly search through an unconstrained solution space. This work proposes a novel algorithm for continual learning using neurogenesis in reinforcement learning agents. It builds upon existing neuroevolutionary techniques, and incorporates several new mechanisms for limiting the memory resources while expanding neural network learning capacity. The algorithm is tested on a custom set of sequential virtual environments which emulate meaningful scenarios.
Tej Pandit et al.
17:40‑18:10 (30 min)
open mic / discussions
18:20‑18:30 (10 min)
Wrap-up / adjourn
18:30
End of NICE 2020 for non-tutorial attendants
19:00‑20:30 (90 min)
Dinner (only for tutorial attendants)
Friday, 20 March 2020
09:00
NICE 2020, Tutorials day: NOTE: NICE will be POSTPONED!
The tutorial day can be booked as one of the registration options. On the tutorial day hands-on interactive tutorials with several different neuromorphic compute systems will be offered:
Intel Loihi platform tutorial (Lecture style. To follow along from your own laptop your need to engage with Intel’s Intel’s Neuromorphic Research Community beforehand (email inrc_interest@intel.com for more information).