Tony Belpaeme

Tony Belpaeme is Reader in Intelligent Systems at the University of Plymouth. He is associated with the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems and is a member of the University of Plymouth Marine Institute. He is a member of the College of the EPSRC. His research interests include cognitive robotics, concept formation and artificial intelligence in general. At Plymouth he works alongside Angelo Cangelosi, Davide Marocco, Phil Culverhouse and Guido Bugmann on building intelligent and adaptive systems.
Until April 2005 he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Flemish fund for scientific research (FWO Vlaanderen), and was affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, directed by Luc Steels, at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He held a guest professorship at the same university, where he taught introductory artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.

The Concept project is drawing to a close. The LightHead robot, being developed since 2009, was presented at the RobotVille festival at the Science Museum in London. Frederic Delaunay and Joachim De Greeff spent an entire week demonstrating the robot to the public. There was some interesting coverage of our robot, among others on the CNN site, the Evening Herald and Vimeo.

A number of interesting retro-projected robot faces have sprouted up in 2011, there is MaskBot at Munchen and FurHat from KTH.

Our work and specifically the ALIZ-E project has received quite some attention in the media recently (Scientific Amerian, IEEE Explore, BBC, ...). Perhaps time to get some facts right.

The Alife Approaches to Artificial Language Evolution (AAALE 2011) is a Satellite Workshop at ECAL2011. The workshop brings together researchers who are attempting to simulate the emergence and cultural evolution of communication systems with properties similar to those found in human natural languages. The workshop focuses in particular on experiments that use physically embodied humanoid robots and target communication systems that exhibit grammatical structure and involve rich grounded conceptualizations of the world co-evolving with language.

The AAALE workshop (pronounced as "Triple Ale") will be held at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2011), at the Cité Universitaire de Paris (France).

Submission deadline: 15 May 2011

Organisers: Luc Steels (University of Brussels and Sony CSL Paris) and Tony Belpaeme (University of Plymouth).

The 11th Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems took place in Plymouth, UK from 31 August to 2 September 2010. The three day conference closed with an industry workshop, bringing together the leading UK robotics industry and leading academics in personal robotics.

• The ALIZ-E project "Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term Social Interaction". Integrated project under the 7th framework programme of the European Union.  Plymouth coordinates the 8.3 M€ 4.5-year project, of which Plymouth receives 1.4 M€. The ALIZ-E consortium consists of 7 academic partners (Tony Belpaeme as coordinator, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, Imperial College, University of Hertfordshire, National Research Council Padova), one hospital (San Raffaele del Monte Tabor, Italy) and one SME (Gostai, Paris). ALIZ-E runs from 2010 to 2014.
• The CONCEPT project on "Linguistic and direct transmission of concepts in human-robot networks" is an EPSRC funded project (£192,291, 2008-2011) studying how robots can acquire concepts using language and how conceptual information can be transferred between robots.
• The ITALK project. ITALK "Integration and Transfer of Action and Language Knowledge in Robots" is an Integrated Project under the 7th Framework Programme, studying how language and action interact with cognition. This €6.25M project (of which Plymouth receives €1.68M) running from 2008 to 2012 will use a humanoid robot, the iCub, as a test platform and will help us understand how intelligence can be recreated.
• The Marine Institute has kindly provided a grant on which Simon Oliver, Phil Culverhouse and myself study automated classification of marine zooplankton.
• The P-ARTS project (Plymouth Advanced Robot Training Suite) is an Apple Research and Technology Support project funded in kind by Apple. Davide Marocco, Tony Belpaeme, Angelo Cangelosi and Rob Ellis will use Apple Xserve machines to support cognitive robotics research.
• The ROBOT-DOC project is a Marie Curie Initial Training Networks (ITN) led by the University of Plymouth. ROBOT-DOC unites top European universities to jointly train early career researchers to study the development of cognition in robotics. Partners include the University of Zurich, the Italian Institute of Technology, the University of Skovde (SE), the University of Bielefeld (D), the University of Sunderland, Uppsala University, Yale University (USA), RIKEN (Japan) and companies Telerobot and Honda.