<div dir="ltr">Hi all,<div><br></div><div>Next Friday (16/02) Dr. João Filipe Ferreira (<a href="http://home.isr.uc.pt/~jfilipe/">http://home.isr.uc.pt/~jfilipe/</a>) will give a talk titled "Human-Robot Interaction - The Need for Skills". The talk will take place in MB404A from 2pm to 3pm.</div><div><br></div><div>Please note the unusual day of the week. Next week we will have two talks, one on Tuesday and one on Friday.</div><div><br></div><div>Abstract:</div><div>In this talk, I will present my personal outlook on HRI for the near future.<br><br>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Luca<br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Luca Rossi</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Lecturer in Computer Science</div><div dir="ltr">School of Engineering and Applied Science</div><div dir="ltr">Aston University</div><div dir="ltr">Web: <a href="http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rossil/" target="_blank">http://www.cs.aston.ac.uk/~rossil/</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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