Munich AI Lectures

Insights & Ideas
from Experts in the Field

Next Lecture:

Marc Toussaint, professor at the TU Berlin, comes to Munich!

Marc Toussaint - Planning in the Age of Learning

Monday, April 8th, 5pm

Arcisstr. 21, 80333 Munich, Room 2750 (3rd floor)

Abstract

When a system (say, transformer model) is trained to output full plans conditional to a situation – would one call this planning?

Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) became a standard problem formulation within robotics to describe the complex behavior we strive for. However, despite the word Planning in TAMP, it doesn’t mean that one has to use planning methods in the traditional sense – it rather characterizes the behavior we want to see. In this talk, Marc Toussaint will discuss his own work on TAMP, covering both, planning (i.e., optimization & sampling) and learning methods, and try to clarify these characteristics. He will also spend some time discussing whether “getting things to work” is the only goal, and the “call for more data” the solution.

Bio

Marc Toussaint is professor for Intelligent Systems at TU Berlin and was previously professor for Machine Learning and Robotics at University of Stuttgart, Max Planck Fellow at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, visiting scholar at MIT, and some months head of the Core ML Robotics team at Amazon. In his view, a key in AI is the interplay of learning and reasoning. His research therefore combines planning, optimization, inference, and machine learning to tackle fundamental problems in robotics and physical reasoning. As board member of CoRL and R:SS, he is actively supporting the international community in the intersection of robotics, AI and ML.

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Our lectures consist of a short presentation followed by a Q&A to enable a lively discussion with our speakers. Each lecture lasts about one hour and will be streamed live on our YouTube channel. Recordings will be available  afterwards.