RWARL 2012 - IJCNN 2012 special session on Real World Applications of Reinforcement Learning

IJCNN 2012
special session on Real World Applications of Reinforcement Learning,
part of the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence
(IEEE WCCI 2012), Brisbane, Australia, June 10-15, 2012.
http://como.vub.ac.be/rwarl2012
AIM AND SCOPE
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have long left the tiny grid
worlds of the early years. From robot control to autonomous navigation,
research labs have been applying RL to address increasingly difficult
problems, showing that this paradigm is ready for the real world.
In recent years, a number of papers have shown successful practical
applications, in fields as diverse as production control, finance,
scheduling,
communications, autonomous vehicle control. While such examples are
relevant, they do not abound, and RL is still far from being routinely
applied
as more mature supervised machine learning techniques are. Moreover,
conferences and journals tend to dismiss "mere application" papers
which
do not carry relevant contributions at the theoretical level.
With this special session, we intend to gather recent examples of the
application of RL to real-world problems, focusing in particular on
the practical difficulties of applying existing RL algorithms, rather
than on theoretical innovations. The aim is to give an updated
picture of the state of the art of real world applications of RL.
We solicit original submissions describing applications of all
flavors of reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic
programming in a real-world scenario.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the application
of:
* Approximate dynamic programming
* Reinforcement learning
* Batch RL
* Policy gradients
* Options learning
* Hierarchical RL
* Multi-objective RL
* Multi-agent RL
* Bandit problem solvers
* Markov Decision Processes
in fields such as
* Industrial control
* Production control
* Automotive control
* Autonomous vehicles control
* Logistics
* Telecommunication networks
* Sensor networks
* Ambient intelligence
* Robotics
* Finance
In preparing your submission, please motivate the use of RL;
point out the difficulties encountered in your implementation;
discuss potential bottlenecks and limitations of your approach;
and, if possible, compare its performance with that of a more
traditional method.
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: Extended to Jan 18 2012
Acceptance notification: Feb 20, 2012
Final version submission: April 2, 2012
Early registration: April 2, 2012
Conference: June 10-15, 2012
Please check the main WCCI site for updates:
http://www.ieee-wcci2012.org/ieee-wcci2012/
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Papers should not exceed 8 pages in the IEEE double column format,
US Letter paper size. Please prepare your submission according to
the common instructions for WCCI conferences, available here:
http://www.ieee-wcci2012.org/ieee-wcci2012/index.p...
Upload your paper via the IJCNN 2012 submission page:
http://ieee-cis.org/conferences/ijcnn2012/upload.p...
*selecting the special session as main research topic* :
S35. Real World Applications of Reinforcement Learning
Accepted papers will be published in the WCCI 2012 proceedings.
ORGANIZERS
Matteo Gagliolo, Peter Vrancx and Ann Nowé
AI Lab, Computational Modeling group (CoMo)
Department of Informatics
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
Brussels, Belgium