Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

• Clément Moulin-Frier was recruited as CRCN permanent research scientist.

• PY Oudeyer was invited to give plenary keynote talks at several international AI conferences, including ICLR 2019 in New Orleans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bJ0fnvPLaA) and ACM International Conference on Virtual Agents (ACM IVA 2019), Paris.

• The team published papers in several major machine learning conferences, including ICML [33], Neurips [32], CoRL [38] and IJCNN [36], [37], and one in a major educational technology conference, CHI 2019 [29].

• PY Oudeyer was awarded an individual "Chaire IA" in the context of the national plan on artificial intelligence.

• The Poppy Station association, initiated by the team from the Poppy Education project, and co-directed by Didier Roy, was created and gathers several major national and international educational associations. It aims at scaling up and disseminating the educational robotics kits designed by the Flowers team, and now used in many educational and artistic projects, see https://www.poppy-station.org.

• The work of the PhD of Sébastien Forestier (sup. by PY Oudeyer) on curiosity-driven learning of tool use in robots and children, was integrated as a video interview in the new permanent exhibition on robots at Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Paris, see http://www.cite-sciences.fr/fr/au-programme/expos-permanentes/expos-permanentes-dexplora/robots/lexposition/.

Awards

• Y Oudeyer was awarded the Atos Joseph Fourier prize for his work on curiosity-driven machine learning.