Information for students

We have several open topics for BSc/MSc topics, here: open topics. Download a flyer with MSc topics [ PDF ]. For those doing an MSc thesis, there are possibilities for doing summer internships abroad (e.g. at NASA Ames).

Open HiWi / research assistant jobs

Furthermore, we have several open HiWi / research assistant positions:

1. Interactive robot learning: The task is to collaborate with experiments where a robotic arm (Katana) or a Nao robot interacts with objects and predicts their behaviour. The acquired knowledge should then be used by the robot to plan manipulation tasks. Socially guided experiments with a human tutor can also be included in the learning loop.
2. Service robotics experiments:: The task is to help conducting long-term experiments with the Explorer robot, in an office assistant scenario. This involves maintaining the robot and its software so that it can run over multiple days, gathering data, and analyzing errors.
3. Outdoor navigation: The task is to take existing software for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), conceptual mapping (developed here at DFKI), and visual search, and help extending the approaches to enable a Pioneer P3-AT to navigate around DFKI ("outdoors"). This will require testing, and implementing (primarily) vision routines.
4. Comprehending spatial language: The task is to extend existing approaches and implementations (developed here at DFKI) to interpret references to spatial organization in a local scene. This involves 2D-topological relations like "near" and projective relations like "left of," as well as more complex 2D relations like "between" and 3D relations like "in." An important problem to be addressed is speaker-relative perspectives on spatial organization.
5. Modeling episodic events: The task is to extend an existing approach and implementation for an episodic memory with routines for establishing abstraction relations between low-level sensori-motoric and communicative events, and higher-level actions and plans. These relations should be bi-directional: bottom-up, recognizing actions which might be associated with low-level events, and top-down, recognizing that events are part of a larger plan.
6. Dialogue about route descriptions: The task is to extend the existing dialogue system with a continuous planner, and use the planner to (a) plan and monitor dialogue actions, (b) connect to a higher-level action planner to guide the planning of physical actions, and (c) construct and maintain structures on episodic memory which reflect this plans (in past, present, and future). As scenario we will use dialogue about route descriptions.
7. Algorithms for generating reports of sensorimotoric events: The task is to develop an algorithm for generating contextualized reports of what a robot has experienced while carrying out a plan. The information for these reports will come from episodic memory. A report is a conceptual structure, which utterance planning can subsequently turn into a dialogue for verbalizing the report.
8. Content planning for subdialogues: The task is to extend an existing approach and implementation for uttterance content planning, to enable planning of multiple utterances as part of a subdialogue. This involves extending both the algorithms underlying the planner, and the debugging tools for using the planner.

Students interested in any of these HiWi jobs should contact Geert-Jan Kruijff. Programming experience in either Java or C++ is assumed. For topics 6--8, students should have a background in computational linguistics.

Current MSc theses

Open thesis topics

Recent theses