Tim de Bruin van de TU Delft heeft samen met twee andere studenten de Europese Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QlnF) prijs gewonnen. De Bruin dankt zijn uitverkiezing aan zijn voorstel voor meer diepgravend onderzoek naar het autonoom leren van robots. Door gebruik te maken van
deep learning in combinatie met bekrachtigingstechnieken, kunnen robots een uniforme representatie van hun omgeving aanleren en in deze omgeving geheel zelfstandig nieuwe taken aanleren. Het jaarlijkse QlnF-programma van de Amerikaanse halfgeleiderfabrikant richt zich op het erkennen, belonen en begeleiden van de meest innovatieve PhD-studenten op het vlak van engineering. De andere winnaars zijn Elias Muegller en Jason Lee, beiden van ETH Zurich. De uitverkoren studenten winnen met hun plan een bedrag van 40.000 dollar en mentorschap van een Qualcomm-onderzoeker.
Voor meer informatie over het QlnF-programma, klik hier.
Zie hieronder het volledige Engelstalige persbericht:
Qualcomm Announces the Winners of the Europe Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Program
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., today announced the winners of the Europe Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF) program. QInF is an annual program that focuses on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring the most innovative engineering PhD students across Europe and the United States.
Elias Mueggler from ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, Tim de Bruin from TU Delft and Jason Lee from ETH Zurich have been selected as the winning students for their outstanding proposals. Each winning student will receive $40,000 as part of the fellowship along with mentoring by a Qualcomm researcher.
“This year’s proposals focused on hot topic areas of research including, computer vision, machine learning, and autonomous navigation,” said Peter Rauber, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm International, Inc. “Qualcomm’s culture is about invention, and collaboration to encourage the advancement of new technologies that can make a tremendous impact on the future of mobile. QInF helps us support external innovation by working with top PhD students from elite universities across Europe to mentor them and help propel their ideas forward.”
Europe QInF program winners:
- Elias Mueggler, supervised by Professor Davide Scaramuzza, has been selected for his proposal: “Event-based Vision for High-Speed Robotics” which focuses on investigating how to use event-based cameras in autonomously moving robots such as drones. The work will be an important first step towards bringing microsecond-resolution image processing to fast moving mobile robots. Elias will work on creating a generic six-degrees-of-freedom SLAM system with event based cameras which will advance the state of the art.
- Tim de Bruin, supervised by Professor Robert Babuska and Professor Karl Tuyls, has been selected for his proposal “Unsupervised Multimodal State-representation Learning for Robotics" which combines reinforcement- and deep learning to make robots learn a uniform representation of their state and their environment to learn new tasks autonomously. Tim will investigate learning control policies in high dimensional state spaces which still adhere to physical rules. This project will look to improve autonomous learning for robots.
- Jason Lee, supervised by Professor Thomas Hofmann, has been selected for his proposal “A Unified Neural Language Model for Morphology, Grammar and Coherence” which aims to bring together the benefits of character-level and sentence-level language models. Jason will model morphology, grammar and coherence jointly with a single neural network-based model. The model will incorporate past sentences and words to predict the next word. Having no pre-defined linguistic rules to start from, the project will improve language-agnostic natural language processing.
The QInF Europe program continues to expand its reach with the addition of two new universities: for the first time this year, the Technical University Delft (Netherlands) and KU Leuven (Belgium) were invited to participate in the program, bringing the total number of participating universities to six.
“This was the first year that we consolidated the Europe program and brought all of the region finalists together to present their proposals to a panel of technology topic expert judges who determined the winning proposals. It was great to have the different European universities together to meet and discuss their research,” said Charles Bergan, Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “The high caliber of innovative proposals we received again this year for QInF Europe made the selection process quite difficult. In the end, we chose Elias, Jason, and Tim for their innovative work. We congratulate them and look forward to collaborating closely to bring their ideas to life.”
Charles participated for a fifth time in this year’s QInF Europe judging panel, along with the head of Qualcomm’s European research offices, Peter Rauber, and several Qualcomm Europeresearchers. The QInF Europe finalist event was hosted by
QUVA, the joint research lab, announced by Qualcomm Technologies. Inc. and the University of Amsterdam, focused on advancing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for computer vision. Prof. Arnold Smeulders, one of the three QUVA directors, provided an interesting keynote speech on the open challenges in tracking.”
For more information about QInF, please visit
https://www.qualcomm.com/invention/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship
Qualcomm Persdesk
Karin van Geelen
+31 (0)23 555 34 24
karin@yellow-communications.com
www.qualcomm.com