The 17th Students' Forum visited the ZalaZONE proving ground

Over the summer, the 17th Students' Forum, or the regular scientific gathering organised by the research group of Zsolt János Viharos and his partners, took place. As part of the programme, the ZalaZONE proving ground hosted the researchers. The first forum was organised more than five years ago, on 30 April 2019, by Zsolt János Viharos, Senior Research Fellow of the Research Laboratory of Engineering and Management Intelligence at HUN-REN SZTAKI. He and his students have been holding regular scientific meetings since then.

The invited speaker of the forum was Csilla Tóth, who was present when the idea of ZalaZONE was born, and she presented the ZalaZONE system, which has now developed into a comprehensive ecosystem, as well as her Ph.D. research and latest results on related international ecosystem models.

An interesting feature of the 17th Forum's professional demo was self-driving drifting. One of the research team members, Hunor Szilárd Tóth Szilárd Ph.D., is working on the implementation of reinforcement learning-based self-driving drifting to extend and control vehicle safety beyond the limit of vehicle skidding. Thanks to the research team led by the other leader of the Ph.D. topic, Dr. Ádám Bárdos (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), the participants of the 17th Student Forum were all able to experience what it feels like to drive a self-driving drift in a sports BMW. It should be pointed out that two young members of the research team do not yet have a driving licence: they experienced the driving experience in a sports BMW drifting in self-driving mode, behind a steering wheel they did not turn, with the accelerator pedal missing and the tyres squealing, on the dynamic platform of the ZalaZONE test track.

The 17th Students' Forum, which took up a full day, covered the following topics:

• Dr. Zsolt János Viharos (on behalf of László Hoang): MICS-EFS: Model input-output structure search with embedded feature selection for solving classification problems
• Hunor Szilárd Tóth: Implementing self-driving vehicle drifting with reinforcement learning
• Tour of the ZalaZONE test track (thanks to our hosts!)
• Self-driving vehicle drifting on the ZalaZONE Dynamic Platform
• Dr. Zsolt János Viharos: Strategic context and actualities of our research
• Dr. Balázs Hangya: Identification of brain gene expression patterns for the classification of cholinergic neurons
• Csilla Tóth: Past, present and future of ZalaZONE - ecosystem building
• Hamdi Fatma: Task-dependent detection of outliers with a neural network capable of learning on incomplete data.
• Bence Gercuj: Adaptive hybrid feature selection algorithm and further research on it
• Bence Pálvölgyi: Research and application of reinforcement learning in manufacturing systems
• Forrai Simon: Non-linear experiment design

The 18th Students' Forum will be held on 31.01.2025 at the HUN-REN SZTAKI. The research team welcomes interested students who are willing to join the research, details can be found in the document here. At the moment we are mainly looking for students interested in joining us and working as researchers in the field of neuro-fuzzy and acceleration of teaching, and later on also aiming for a Ph.D.