Stefan Schiffer

I am a research and teaching assistant (and a Ph.D. candidate) at the Knowledge-based Systems Group which is headed by Professor G. Lakemeyer, PhD.. We are part of the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University. I held a scholarship from the graduate school Graduiertenkolleg "Software für mobile Kommunikationssysteme" for the last three years.

News

• I do not offer any internships. Please excuse if I do not respond to such email requests.

• My profile on the RWTH CAMPUS system.
• My curriculum in the RWTH CAMPUS system for SS2009.
• My profile at Academia.edu

Research

Interests

My research interests include but are not limited to

• Cognitive Robotics
• Domestic Service Robotics
• Human-Machine Interaction
• Embodied Artificial Intelligence

Projects

• I am head of the RoboCup@Home Division of the AllemaniACs RoboCup Team .
• I am involved in the League

Activities

• I was League Chair of the RoboCup@Home league competitions at RoboCup German Open 2008 held at Hannover Fair.
• I have served as a member of the Technical Committee of the RoboCup@Home League for 2006/2007, 2007/2008, and 2008/2009.
  Thus, I was/am actively involved in writing the rulebook.
• So far, I reviewed papers for the following conferences, symposia, and workshops:
  
  • International Symposium on Practical Cognitive Agents and Robots 2006 (PCAR'06)
  • RoboCup International Symposium 2006 (RC'06)
  • RoboCup International Symposium 2007 (RC'07)
  • RoboCup International Symposium 2008 (RC'08)
  • RoboCup International Symposium 2009 (RC'09)
  • International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2008 (ICRA'08)
  • International Conference on Spatial Cognition 2008 (SC'08)
  • 6th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop, July 21-22, Patras, Greece, 2008 (CogRob'08)
• I've been a Program Committee member of
  • The RoboCup 2008 Symposium
  • The RoboCup 2009 Symposium
  • The ERLARS Workshop
• I am involved in the working group "Mensch und Automatisierung" within the Forum Technik und Gesellschaft.
• I added the network connectivity part to the Referee-Box for the RoboCup Middle-Size League.
  See this announcement for more information.

Publications

See also:

• List of my publications at the KBSG website
• List of my publications at the AllemaniACs RoboCup Team website
• My DBLP listing
  The other Stefan Schiffer's DBLP listing
• My PubZone listing
• My listing at ScientificCommons (not all of the entries are mine here neither)
• Search for my name at CiteSeerX
• Search for my name at The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies (csbib)

2009

Thomas Wisspeintner, Tijn van der Zant, Luca Iocchi, Stefan Schiffer
RoboCup@Home: Scientific Competition and Benchmarking for Domestic Service Robots.
Interaction Studies. Special Issue Robots in the Wild, 10(3). 2009. to appear.
BibTeX entry  |  Article at John Benjamins  |  Special Issue at John Benjamins  |  IS at John Benjamins

Alexander Ferrein, Stefan Schiffer, Daniel Beck, Gerhard Lakemeyer.
Robust Collision Avoidance in Unknown Domestic Environments.
In Proc. of the International RoboCup Symposium 2009 (RoboCup 2009).
June 30 - July 3, Graz, Austria, 2009. to appear.
BibTeX entry

Thomas Wisspeintner, Tijn van der Zant, Luca Iocchi, Stefan Schiffer.
RoboCup@Home: Results in Benchmarking Domestic Serive Robots.
In Proc. of the International RoboCup Symposium 2009 (RoboCup 2009).
June 30 - July 3, Graz, Austria, 2009. to appear.
BibTeX entry

Alexander Ferrein, Stefan Schiffer, Gerhard Lakemeyer.
Embedding Fuzzy Controllers into Golog.
In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE'09).
ICC Jeju, Jeju Island, Korea, 20-24 August, 2009. to appear.
BibTeX entry

2008

Vaishak Belle, Thomas Deselaers, Stefan Schiffer.
Randomized Trees for Real-Time One-Step Face Detection and Recognition.
In Proc. of the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2008 (ICPR'08).
December 8-11, Tampa, Florida, USA.
BibTeX entry  |  DBLP bibtex  |  DBLP entry  |  IEEE Xplore  |  Download (pdf)

Alexander Ferrein, Stefan Schiffer, Gerhard Lakemeyer.
A Fuzzy Set Semantics for Qualitative Fluents in the Situation Calculus.
In Proc. of the International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications 2008 (ICIRA'08).
October 15-17, Wuhan, China.
BibTeX entry  |  DBLP bibtex  |  DBLP entry  |  Springerlink  |  ACM Portal entry  |  Google Books  |  Download (pdf)

Masrur Doostdar, Stefan Schiffer, Gerhard Lakemeyer.
Robust Speech Recognition for Service Robotics Applications.
In Proc. of the International RoboCup Symposium 2008 (RoboCup 2008).
July 14-18, Suzhou, China. Received Best Student Paper Award
BibTeX entry  |  DBLP bibtex  |  DBLP entry  |  Springerlink  |  ACM Portal entry  |  Download (pdf)

Frank Dylla, Alexander Ferrein, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Jan Murray, Oliver Obst, Thomas Röfer,
Stefan Schiffer, Frieder Stolzenburg, Ubbo Visser, and Thomas Wagner.
Approaching a formal soccer theory from behaviour specifications in robotic soccer.
In Peter Dabnicki and Arnold Baca, editors,
Computer Science and Sports. WIT Press, London, 2008.
BibTeX entry  |  Book website at WITpress  |  Download (pdf)

2007

Laurent Calmes, Hermann Wagner, Stefan Schiffer, and Gerhard Lakemeyer.
Combining Sound Localization and Laser based Object Recognition.
In Adriana Tapus, Marek Michalowski, and Selma Sabanovic, editors,
Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium, pages 1-6, AAAI Press, Stanford CA, 2007.
BibTeX entry  |  Download at AAAI  |  Download (pdf)

2006

Stefan Schiffer, Alexander Ferrein, and Gerhard Lakemeyer.
Football is coming Home.
In Proc. of International Symposium on Practical Cognitive Agents and Robots (PCAR'06).
University of Western Australia Press, 2006.
BibTeX entry  |  ACM Portal entry  |  Download

Stefan Schiffer, Alexander Ferrein, and Gerhard Lakemeyer.
Qualitative World Models for Soccer Robots.
In Stefan Wölfl and Till Mossakowski, editors,
Qualitative Constraint Calculi, Workshop at KI 2006, Bremen, pages 3-14, 2006.
BibTeX entry  |  Download (pdf)

2005

Stefan Schiffer.
ReadyWorld - A Qualitative Worldmodel for Autonomous Soccer Agents in the ReadyLog Framework.
Master's thesis, Knowledge-based Systems Group, RWTH Aachen University, 2005.
BibTeX entry  |  old ReadyWorld Website

2002

Frank Dylla, Alexander Ferrein, Stefan Jacobs, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Claus Richterich, Stefan Schiffer
Collision Avoidance in Real-Time with Look-Ahead (CARLA).
In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Environment and Motion Modelling. RWTH Aachen University, 2002.
BibTeX entry

Talks

2009

Stefan Schiffer Robust Service Robotics in RoboCup@Home - A Team's Perspective.
Talk at the EURON annual meeting 2009,
K.U.Leuven in Leuven, Belgium, 6^th of April 2009.

2008

Stefan Schiffer RoboCup@Home - Wettkampf der Service-Roboter.
Talk at Tagung "58/08: Der Mensch als Vorbild, Partner & Patient von Robotern - Bionik an der Schnittstelle Mensch-Maschine",
Ev. Akademie Loccum, 10/2008.
Website

2007

Stefan Schiffer RoboCup@Home: A Service Robotics Competition.
Talk at the Symposium "Die Automatisierung von Dienstleistungen - eine technische und gesellschaftliche Herausforderung",
RWTH Aachen University, 10/2007.
Fotos

2006

Stefan Schiffer Football is coming Home.
Talk at "Tag der Informatik",
RWTH Aachen University, 12/2006.
Fotos

Teaching

General

I am the study advisor for the Master Programme Software Systems Engineering.

Check out my event list in the CAMPUS System.

Courses

• SS 2010 - Selected Topics in Specifying Intelligent Agents (Seminar)
• WS 2009/2010 - Ringvorlesung Bionik (Lecture + Exercise on Robotics)
• WS 2009/2010 - Einführung in die Informatik (Lecture + Exercises)
• WS 2009/2010 - Intelligent Agents for Interactive Computer Games (Lab Course)
• SS 2009 - Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (Seminar)
• SS 2009 - Planning in Artificial Intelligence (ProSeminar)
• WS 2008/2009 - Einführung in die Informatik (Lecture) [partly]
• WS 2008/2009 - Behavior Programming for Soccer Robots (Lab Course)
• SS 2008 - Markovian Robotics (Seminar)
• WS 2007/2008 - Robot Control with Golog (Lab Course)
• SS 2007 - Interaction and Learning in Complex Domains (Seminar) [B-IT]
• SS 2007 - Artificial Intelligence (ProSeminar)
• WS 2006/2007 - Service Robotics (Lab Course)
• SS 2006 - Agent Communication (Seminar)

Bachelor-/Master-/Diploma-/Project-Theses

Current

• Master/Diploma/Bachelor Thesis, NN.
  Working Title: Visual People Tracking on a Mobile Robot
• Master/Diploma/Bachelor Thesis, NN.
  Working Title: Visual Gesture Recognition on a Mobile Robot
• Diploma Thesis, Paul Köhler.
  Title: TBA
• Diploma Thesis, Masrur Doostdar.
  Title: TBA
• Diploma Thesis, Andreas Wortmann.
  Title: Self-Maintaining and Self-Monitoring Autonomous Systems
  thesis info on KBSG website
• Project Thesis, David Peris.
  Topic: Flexible Trajectory Planning for Anthropomorphic Robotic Manipulation.

Finished

• External Diploma Thesis, Siavash Sefid-Rodi.
  Title: Bewegungsverhalten computergesteuerter Charaktere in modernen Computerspielen
  External thesis at artificial technology gmbh.
• Diploma Thesis, Dennis Pannhausen.
  Title: Inductive Policy Learning
  Supervision together with Daniel Beck.
• Diploma Thesis, Christian Gehrmann.
  Topic: Hierarchical Agent Communication in Interactive Computer Games
  Supervised together with Daniel Beck and Dr. Alexander Ferrein.
• Project Thesis, Borja Artamendi Aguirregomezcorta.
  Topic: PoMDP Dialog Management for a Mobile Robot.
• Master's Thesis, Vaishak Belle.
  Title: Detection and Recognition of Human Faces using Random Forests for a Mobile Robot
  Supervised together with Thomas Deselaers from Chair of Computer Science 6

Open

• Contact me for available Bachelor-/Diplom-/Master-theses topics.

Stuff

My Erdös Number

My Erdös Number is five (5).
Here's the link-chain:
I coauthored with Gerhard Lakemeyer
  coauthored with Joseph Y. Halpern
  coauthored with Ashok K. Chandra
  coauthored with Shmuel Zaks
  coauthored with Paul Erdös¹

You might be interested in a XKCD comic on this.

Contact

The easiest way to reach me is via eMail: schiffercsrwth-aachende .
You are strongly invited to use encrypted communication, just use my GPG key.

You can visit me in my office, too, but you need to schedule an appointment first!