[eas_cs_seminars] 16th February 2018

[Luca Rossi]

Hi all,

Next Friday (16/02) Dr. João Filipe Ferreira (
http://home.isr.uc.pt/~jfilipe/) will give a talk titled "Human-Robot
Interaction - The Need for Skills". The talk will take place in MB404A from
2pm to 3pm.

Please note the unusual day of the week. Next week we will have two talks,
one on Tuesday and one on Friday.

Abstract:
In this talk, I will present my personal outlook on HRI for the near future.

Service and assistive robots are still far from being capable of
maintaining long-term relationships with humans – in current roadmaps for
robotic research in the future, the keywords “long-term” or synonyms are
constantly repeated concerning cognition, and “slow, enduring change and
development” in artificial cognitive systems is preferred over “one-shot,
fast learning and adaptation” and “static, repetitive or limited
flexibility”, which are recognised as the common traits of current
technologies. In recent years, a considerable effort has been devoted to
researching perception and decision processes for artificial cognitive
systems. As a consequence, HRI technologies and corresponding cognitive
capabilities of robotic systems have seen many developments in the last few
decades, enabling service and assistive robots to exhibit sufficient social
skills to maintain basic short-term interactions with humans. Nevertheless,
HRI technologies are still far from providing the degree of social
capabilities to rival a human. This restricts most of the current socially
interactive robots to controlled environments and highly specialised tasks.
First of all, an integrated approach encapsulating, interconnecting and
consolidating the basic skills mentioned above to tackle generic and
unconstrained settings is clearly missing. On the other hand, research
efforts that have led to current artificial cognitive systems driving
socially interactive robots have not yet produced a convincing overall
approach to crucial aspects to deal in the long haul with information
gathered through experience, context awareness and deduction. Therefore, I
would like to propose to my audience that there is a need for (1) exploring
what current - hot! - techniques and computational tools such as deep
learning or probabilistic methods, and also advances in technologies such
as SoCs, GPUs and programmable logic have to offer in this respect (2) use
these to take a step back and jumpstart an additional wave of fundamental
research in modelling and implementing basic perceptual and low-level
(“involuntary”) cognitive skills. The resulting frameworks would serve as
middleware for higher-level cognition in robotics, providing a standardised
way of accessing pre-processed and prioritised sensory information for
decision-making and complex planning and action. They would be inspired by
the human brain at a functional level, taking cross-disciplinary advantage
of recent advances in psychology and neuroscience, and as such would
naturally endow the robot with the capability to instil a sense of
intentionality and reciprocity in HRI.

Best,
Luca
-- 
Luca Rossi

Lecturer in Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Aston University
Web: http://www.cs.aston.ac.uk/~rossil/ <http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rossil/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aston.ac.uk/pipermail/eas_cs_seminars/attachments/20180206/1f0f9c3f/attachment.html