[eas_cs_seminars] 16th February 2018

[Luca Rossi]

Hi all,

Just a quick reminder of today's seminar. 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.

Best,
Luca

On 6 February 2018 at 14:55, Luca Rossi <l.rossi at aston.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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/>
>



-- 
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/>
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