Oliver Obst
Senior Research Scientist
Contact
CSIRO ICT Centre
Cn Vimiera and Pembroke Rds, Marsfield NSW 2122, Australia
PO Box 76, Epping NSW 1710, Australia
Tel: +61 2 9372 4710
Fax: +61 2 9372 4161
Email
Science Area
- Machine Learning
Biography
I am a Research Scientist and Project Leader at the Adaptive Systems Team in the ICT Centre. My research interests are machine learning and information processing. To optimise information processing in large networks, local learning methods can help to improve performance in a self-organised way. This self-organisation may be guided by, for example, information-theoretic principles. Applications of my research can be found, for example, in the area of time series prediction and novelty detection, for example to model sensor data or discover anomalies in data.
I am also interested in the representation of sensory information, and the emergence of coding for both technical and biological systems, and the application of bio-inspired approaches of coding to representation and communication.
Since Aug 2007, I am working at CSIRO, in projects that deal with event detection in Sensor Networks, Intrusion Detection, prediction and control in gas separator systems, and Smart electrical Grids. I have been acting Team Leader of the Adaptive Systems team, and acting project leader for the Energy Transformed Flagship project 'Smart Grids'.
I have been invited speaker at distinguished institutions including the University of Texas at Austin, and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (Leipzig). I am also a Honorary Associate of the School of IT, University of Sydney.
Previously, I have held full time positions at the University of Newcastle (Australia) as a research scientist / lecturer, as a Post-Doc at the University of Bremen (Germany), and as a (postgraduate) researcher and lecturer at the University of Koblenz (Germany).
In Koblenz, I have been the leader of a team of students and researchers working on RoboCup, and in Bremen, I was employed as a technical lead for a commercial spin-off project.
In the past, I have made contributions to RoboCup, an international research and education initiative with the goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research. In particular, I have been lead initiator of the 3D Soccer Simulation league, and one of the main developers of the simulation system. Other contributions include plan- and also behavior-based approaches to multi-agent control. One of these, Inverse Steering Behaviors, is being used in a commercial application for emergency egress simulation.
I am member of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and member of Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), the German Informatics Society.
Academic Qualifications
| 2006 | Dr. rer. nat, Universität Koblenz, Germany, Artificial Intelligence (Computer Science) |
| 2000 | Diplom (~ M.Sc.) Informatics |
| 1994 | Vordiplom (~ 2/3 B.Sc.) Informatics |
Achievements & Awards
| 2009 | CSIRO ICT Centre Inventors Award |
| 2008 | CSIRO ICT Centre "Go for Growth Award", as part of the AS Lab |
| 2007 | First prize in RoboCup, Development competition of Soccer Simulation League |
Student Supervision
| PhD | |
| 2010-present, | Astrid Zeman, PhD student, Computational Models of Biological Object Recognition, Macquarie University |
| MSc | |
| 2006 | (completed), Joschka Boedecker, Humanoid Robot Simulation and Walking Behavior Development in the Spark Simulator Framework, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2005 | (completed), Achim Rettinger, Opponent-Adaptive Online Multiagent Learning (Concept-Recall with Expert Ensembles for Simulated-Soccer-Agents), University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2005 | (completed), Heni Ben Amor, Intelligent Exploration for Genetic Algorithms (Using Self-Organizing Maps in Evolutionary Computation), University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2004 | (completed), Markus Rollmann, Spark — Generic Building Blocks for Physical Multi-agent Simulations, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2003 | (completed), Marco Kögler, Simulation and Visualization of Agents in 3D Environments, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2003 | (completed), Marco Dettori, Qualitatives räumliches Schließen im RoboCup, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| Undergraduate | |
| 2004 | (completed), Esther-Sabrina Platzer, Lernen durch menschliches Vorbild — Entwicklung eines interaktiven Kontrollmoduls für simuliertes Roboterfußball, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2004 | (completed), Johannes Grunenberg, Entwicklung eines auf Fuzzy Logik basierenden Entscheidungssystems für das RoboLog Team, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2004 | (completed), Christoph Gladisch, Robonalyzer, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2004 | (completed), Irene Markelic, Reinforcement Learning als Methode zur Entscheidungsfindung beim simulierten Roboterfußball, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2004 | (completed), Achim Rettinger, Learning from Recorded Games: A Scoring Policy for Simulated Soccer Agents, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2003 | (completed), Heni Ben Amor, Ein Dribble-Algorithus für simuliertes Roboterfussball, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2003 | (completed), Markus Rollmann, Online- und Offlinemonitor für das RoboLog Framework, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
| 2003 | (completed), Christoph Ringelstein, Visualisierung für den RoboCup Soccer Server, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany |
Science Citizenship
| 2011 | Organising Chair Symposium “Distributed Machine Learning and Sparse Representation with Massive Data Sets”, Sydney, Australia |
| 2011 | Reviewer Neural Networks Journal |
| 2009;2011 | Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing |
| 2011 | Review Committee, Special Issue on Complex Networks, Artificial Life Journal |
| 2011 | PC Member ACAL 2011 |
| 2009–2011 | PC Member RoboCup International Symposium 2009,2010,2011 |
| 2008-2011 | PC Member GSO 1-4 (International Workshop on Guided Self-Organisation) |
| 2010 | PC Member International Conference on Simulation, Modeling and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR2010) |
| 2010 | Reviewer IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2010) |
| 2010 | Reviewer IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2010) |
| 2010 | Reviewer IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Conference (IV 2010) |
| 2010 | Reviewer International Conference Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB 2010) |
| 2010 | Reviewer Paladyn. Journal of Behavioral Robotics |
| 2009 | Reviewer Journal on Robotics and Autonomous Systems |
| 2009 | Reviewer IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010) |
| 2009 | Reviewer Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'09) |
| 2009 | PC Member 4th Workshop on Humanoid Soccer Robots, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots |
| 2009 | PC Member 14th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2009), Special Track "Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Applications" |
| 2006-2009 | Appointed member Executive Committee of the RoboCup federation |
| 2008 | PC Member International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR 2008) |
| 2008 | PC Member International Workshop on Programming Multiagent Systems Languages and Tools (ProMAS) |
| 2008 | Reviewer for the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) |
| 2008 | Reviewer for the IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing (ISWPC) |
| 2008 | Reviewer for the Journal Connection Science |
| 2007/08 | Reviewer for IEEE Robotics and Automation |
| 2007 | Reviewer for J. Advances in Complex Systems |
| 2007 | PC Member 4th Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Applications (MASTA) |
| 2006-2007 | PC Member International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) |
| 2003-2006 | International Workshop on Programming Multiagent Systems Languages and Tools (ProMAS) |
| 2006 | Local Organising Chair, RoboCup Simulation League, Bremen, Germany |
| 2004 | Reviewer for a special issue of Engineering Intelligent Systems |
| 2004 | Organising Chair, RoboCup Simulation League, Lisbon, Portugal |
| 2002-2005 | Organising Chair RoboCup German Open Simulation League, Paderborn, Germany |
| 2006 | Co-Organiser of the workshop Artificial Intelligence and Humanoid Robotics as part of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (together with Dr. Ubbo Visser, Universität Bremen, and Prof. Alois Knoll, TU Munich). |
| 2003-2007 | Co-Organiser of the Simulated Soccer Internet League |
| 2005 | local organising committee member for the German Conference on AI (KI-2005), Koblenz, Germany |
| 2004 | Member German National Selection Committee for RoboCup-2006, Germany |
| 2003 | Member Organising Committee of RoboCup Simulation League, Padova, Italy |
| 2002 | Member Organising Committee of RoboCup Simulation League, Fukuoka, Japan |
| 2001 | Member RoboCup German Open Simulation League, Paderborn, Germany |
Top 10 Publications
| Publication details |
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| Mikhail Prokopenko, Nihat Ay, Oliver Obst, and Daniel Polani. Phase transitions in least-effort communications. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2010(11):P11025, 2010. |
| Oliver Obst, Joschka Boedecker, and Minoru Asada. Improving Recurrent Neural Network Performance using Transfer Entropy. In Wong, Kok Wai, Mendis, B. Sumudu U., and Bouzerdoum, Abdesselam , editors, Neural Information Processing. Models and Applications, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 193–200, Springer, 2010. |
| Joschka Boedecker, Oliver Obst, N. Michael Mayer, and Minoru Asada. Initialization and self-organized optimization of recurrent neural network connectivity. HFSP Journal. 2009. DOI:10.2976/1.3240502. http://link.aip.org/link/?HFSPJX/1/117/1 |
| Oliver Obst. Distributed fault detection in sensor networks using a recurrent neural network. 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2009); San Francisco, Calif. IEEE; 2009: 373-374. |
| Oliver Obst, X. Rosalind Wang, and Mikhail Prokopenko. Using Echo State Networks for Anomaly Detection in Underground Coal Mines. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2008), pp. 219–229, IEEE Computer Society, April 2008. |
| X. Rosalind Wang, Joseph T. Lizier, Oliver Obst, Mikhail Prokopenko, and Peter Wang. Anomaly Detection in Gas Monitoring Sensor Networks. In Roberto Verdone, editors, Wireless Sensor Networks, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 90–105, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, February 2008. |
| Frank Dylla, Alexander Ferrein, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Jan Murray, Oliver Obst, Thomas Röfer, Stefan Schiffer, Frieder Stolzenburg, Ubbo Visser, and Thomas Wagner. Chapter: Approaching a Formal Soccer Theory from the Behavior Specification in Robotic Soccer. In Peter Dabnicki and Arnold Baca, editors, Computers in Sport, Bioengineering, pp. 161–186, WIT Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84564-064-4. |
| Oliver Obst. Controlling Physical Multiagent Teams: Getting League-Independent Results from RoboCup Soccer. No. 304 in DISKI -- Dissertations in Artificial Intelligence, Aka / IOS Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58603-705-5. |
| Oliver Obst and Markus Rollmann. SPARK -- A Generic Simulator for Physical Multiagent Simulations. Computer Systems Science and Engineering, 20(5):347–356, September 2005. |
| Frieder Stolzenburg, Oliver Obst, and Jan Murray. Qualitative Velocity and Ball Interception. In KI-2002: Advances in Artificial Intelligence -- Proceedings of the 25th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 283–298, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 2002. |