Scholarpedia:Invitation to Robotics
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor of Scholarpedia, I would like to invite you to write a short entry "%TITLE%" to the Robotics chapter of Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. The encyclopedia is hosted by Scholarpedia - the free peer reviewed encyclopedia. This project, being a synthesis of philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, is ambitious and unique. You can read more about it at http://www.scholarpedia.org. Your article will be peer-reviewed, and upon acceptance, you will become the curator of the whole topic "%TITLE%" in Scholarpedia (see below).
While the robot section is still in its early stages, we already have published articles by prestigious roboticists such as Roy Featherstone and Gerd Hirzinger while many important researchers in this area such as Oussama Khatib, Jorge Angele, Steve LaValle, James Kuffner, Art Kuo, Auke Ijspeert, Jeff Krichmar, Aude Billard, Stefan Schaal, Manuela M. Veloso and Russ Tedrake are currently in the process of writing such articles.
Most articles in Scholarpedia are written by the original authors. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, writes "Fractals" and "Mandelbrot Set". Franz Halberg, who coined the word 'circadian', writes "Chronobiology" and "Circadian Rhythm". Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic, wrote "Fuzzy Logic". Edward Lorenz, the discoverer of phenomenon of chaos, writes "Butterfly Effect". Robert Galambos, the discoverer of sonar in bats, writes "Echolocation in Bats". Seiji Ogawa, the inventor of fMRI, writes "fMRI". H. Barlow, the discoverer of lateral inhibition and the inventor of the concept of a grandmother cell, writes "Lateral Inhibition" and "Grandmother Cell". Michel Jouvet, the discoverer of REM sleep, writes "REM (paradoxical) Sleep". Gerald Edelman writes "Neural Darwinism". John Conway writes "Game of Life".
Among authors of Scholarpedia are M. Abeles (Synfire Chains), J. Anderson (Brain-State-in-a-Box), M. Arbib (Modular Models of Brain Function), L. Chua (Chua Circuit), K. Fukushima (Neocognitron), S. Grossberg (ART), H. Haken (Synergetics), G. Hinton (Boltzmann Machine), r. Karp (NP Completeness), J. Holland (Genetic Algorithms), J. Hopfield (Hopfield Network), S. Kirkpatrick (Simulated Annealing), T. Kohonen (Kohonen Network), J.L. McClelland (PDP), R. Rescorla (Rescorla-Wagner Model), W. Singer (Binding by Synchrony), C. von der Malsburg (Binding Problem), C. Watkins (Q-Learning), B. Widrow (ADALINE, Widrow-Hoff Learning Rule), and many others (including 5 Nobel Laureates and 2 Fields Medalists).
Most articles in the Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience (a sister project in Scholarpedia) that have the name "XXX Model" are written by the original authors, XXX. (i.e., R. FitzHugh wrote "FitzHugh-Nagumo Model", J. Cowan writes "Wilson-Cowan Model", A. Huxley writes "Hodgkin-Huxley Model", J. Hindmarsh writes "Hindmarsh-Rose Model", B. Ermentrout wrote "Ermentrout-Kopell Canonical Model", H. Lecar writes "Morris-Lecar Model", etc.). Most articles in the Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems (another project in Scholarpedia) that have the name "XXX Theorem" or similar are written by the original authors, (i.e., M. Jakobson writes "Jakobson Theorem", S. Smale writes "Smale Horseshoe", Ya. Sinai writes "Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy", K. Ito writes "Ito Calculus", etc.).
Scholarpedia hosts multiple focused encyclopedias; most of them will be published in a printed form and all will be freely available online. Your article will be part of many of them. In addition, it will be automatically linked to from every other article in Scholarpedia that mentions your title anywhere in the text, resulting in potentially millions of readers during next few years.
Click "Random article" (left menu) to see sample peer-reviewed articles. %YOURNAMEWASSUGGESTED% You can write your article alone. However, I encourage you to take a co-author, e.g., a former student or postdoc, who will become your co-curator. If you want to change the title or have other preferences, please let me know.
I have created the following account for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD% To accept this invitation, please click %URL%
If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let us know as soon as possible by clicking %URL%&no=1 In this case, we would highly appreciate your suggesting the names of the best experts to invite to write this article.
The main idea of Scholarpedia is that articles should outlive their authors via the process of curatorship. Similarly to Wikipedia (a free non-reviewed encyclopedia), anybody can edit or revise articles in Scholarpedia, even after they are peer-reviewed and published. For example, other scientists may find and correct an error in your article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, and so on. In contrast to Wikipedia, each article in Scholarpedia has a Curator, whose name is at the top of the article and who accepts or rejects each such revision. For example, if you read an article in Wikipedia on "Mandelbrot Set", you do not know who wrote it and whether or not you could trust it. If you read Scholarpedia article "Mandelbrot Set", which is authored and curated by Benoit Mandelbrot, then you know that everything there is either written by or was later approved by Dr. Mandelbrot. In this sense, Scholarpedia is unlike anything else that has ever been done with scientific publications. Just think of what your article would look like 20 years from now!
The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica had the feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor to be curators of these articles. The goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generation of experts would be willing to maintain these articles via the process of curatorship.
Another unique feature of Scholarpedia is that its authors are either invited by the editor-in-chief (this letter) or elected by the public. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the corresponding experts in each field. Soon Scholarpedia will be transferred to election-only regime. Among first elected experts were Gyorgy Buzsaki (Hippocampus) and Rodolfo Llinas (Neurons). There is still an ongoing election of authors for such articles as "Associative Memory", "Error Back-Propagation", "Cellular Neural Network", "Neurocomputer", "Robotics", and many others, since it is not clear who would be the best expert to write such articles (click on these articles in Scholarpedia to see who were nominated; you are welcome to participate in the election; some of the nominated experts already agreed to write the articles, if elected).
The Library of Congress just assigned ISSN 1941-6016 to Scholarpedia, confirming that articles in Scholarpedia can be cited as articles in any other journal. Scholarpedia is about to be listed in PubMed and ISI (web of knowledge).
I hope your schedule would allow you to contribute to the Encyclopedia. If you cannot write this article within a reasonable period of time, please let me know ASAP (by clicking one of the two links above) so that I can invite another expert or initiate election of authors for the article. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely Yours, Jan Peters,
PhD, Editor of category "Robotics" in Scholarpedia.
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany
University of South California, Los Angeles, CA
