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The Fourth International Conference on Advanced Cognitive Technologies and Applications COGNITIVE 2012 |
| Tutorials |
T1: Evolutionary and Adaptive Robotics
by Stefano Nolfi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies/Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-ISTC) - Roma, Italy
T2: How to Port an Application Between Clouds?
by Dana Petcu, West University of Timisoara, Romania
DETAILS
T1: Evolutionary and Adaptive Robotics
by Stefano Nolfi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies/Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-ISTC) - Roma, Italy
With the term Adaptive Robotics we refer to Evolutionary and/or Developmental methods that allow to synthesize robots that evolve/develop their skills autonomously in interaction with the physical, and eventually social, environment on the basis of an adaptive process driven by the ecological condition in which the robot operate and on the basis of an utility function designed by the experimenter. This means that the way in which the robots solve their adaptive task as well as the detailed characteristics that allow the robot to display their skills in interaction with environment are shaped by the adaptive process (i.e. are not designed by the experimenter). As we will illustrate in this tutorial, these methodologies are particularly suitable for the development of robots that are embodied (i.e. that are able to exploit properties originating from the numerous interactions occurring over time between their body and the environment) and situated (i.e. that are able to exploit the properties arising from the fact that they can modify the next experienced sensory states through their action). In other words robots that, besides being provided with a physical body and beside being situated in a physical environment, are able to exploit the opportunities that their embodied and situated nature provides to them. Moreover, as we will demonstrate, these methodologies are particularly suitable for the development of embodied cognition skills, i.e. internal processing capabilities that are “grounded” on simpler behavioral and cognitive skills and, ultimately, on fine-grained sensory-motor interactions.
T2: How to Port an Application Between Clouds?
by Dana Petcu, West University of Timisoara, Romania
The tutorial will be split in two parts: theory and case study. The theoretical part will include the reasons for portability between the Clouds and a deep and critical analysis of the available solutions supporting the portability of the Clouds, like open APIs, open protocols, standards, abstraction layers or semantic repositories.
The starting points will be the overviews recently exposed in the papers “Portability and interoperability between Clouds: challenges and case study” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24755-2_6) and “Portable Cloud Applications - from Theory to Practice” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2012.01.009), as well in the collection of the contributions gathered in “European Research Activities in Cloud Computing” (http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/European-Research-Activities-in-Cloud-Computing1-4438-3507-2.htm).
Passing from the abstract level to the practical level, the case study part will include a description of a particular solution for portability (including demos). The solution under discussion is the one provided by the open-source API and platform developed in the frame of the mOSAIC project (http://www.mosaiccloud.eu). The focus will be put on the programming style as well on the platform features for deployment and execution monitoring. At least one simple Web application will be used as example.
A preview of the support for the second part of the tutorial can be obtained from the open-source code repository (http://bitbucket.org/mosaic) – including application examples, the platform documentation (http://developers.mosaic-cloud.eu), or the short video available on YouTube (http://youtu.be/ctO9fqaDMBc).
