Vladlen Koltun — The Power of Simulation and Abstraction

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 intro1:20 "Intelligent Systems" vs "AI"3:02 Legged locomotion9:26 The power of simulation14:32 Privileged learning18:19 Drone acrobatics20:19 Using abstraction to transfer simulations to reality25:35 Sample Factory for reinforcement learning34:30 What inspired CARLA and what keeps it going41:43 The challenges of and for roboticsLinks DiscussedLearning quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain (Lee et al., 2020): https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/5/47/eabc5986.abstractDeep Drone Acrobatics (Kaufmann et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05768Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning (Petrenko et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11751CARLA: https://carla.org/---Check out the transcription and discover more awesome ML projects:http://wandb.me/vladlen-koltun​-podcastGet 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