Vladlen Koltun — The Power of Simulation and Abstraction

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

From legged locomotion to autonomous driving, Vladlen explains how simulation and abstraction help us understand embodied intelligence. --- Vladlen Koltun is the Chief Scientist for Intelligent Systems at Intel, where he leads an international lab of researchers working in machine learning, robotics, computer vision, computational science, and related areas. Connect with Vladlen: Personal website: http://vladlen.info/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladlenkoltun/ --- 0:00 Sneak peek and intro 1:20 "Intelligent Systems" vs "AI" 3:02 Legged locomotion 9:26 The power of simulation 14:32 Privileged learning 18:19 Drone acrobatics 20:19 Using abstraction to transfer simulations to reality 25:35 Sample Factory for reinforcement learning 34:30 What inspired CARLA and what keeps it going 41:43 The challenges of and for robotics Links Discussed Learning quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain (Lee et al., 2020): https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/5/47/eabc5986.abstract Deep Drone Acrobatics (Kaufmann et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05768 Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning (Petrenko et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11751 CARLA: https://carla.org/ --- Check out the transcription and discover more awesome ML projects: http://wandb.me/vladlen-koltun​-podcast Get our podcast on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​ Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​ Google: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​ YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​ Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud​ --- Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack​​ Our gallery features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, and industry leaders sharing best practices: https://wandb.ai/gallery