[Colloquium] Talks at TTIC: Matthew Walter, MIT

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Wednesday, February 19th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room #526

Speaker:  Matthew Walter, MIT

Title:       Learning Cognitive Models from Machine Vision and Natural
Language

Abstract:

Whether they are exploring the deepest depths of the ocean or the
surface of Mars, or responding to a disaster, robots have proven
tremendously effective as our surrogates, performing tasks that are
either too difficult, dangerous, or dull for humans. The next
generation of intelligent systems will cooperate with people in our
homes and workplaces, providing personalized care, assisting the
disabled, and carrying out advanced manufacturing. To be effective
partners, robots must reason about their environment and their actions
in the same way that humans do. However, robots currently use
representations that are either hard-coded or require significant
supervision by a domain expert. I seek to enable robots to efficiently
learn shared cognitive models of their surroundings and available
actions from their interaction with humans.

This talk highlights my recent advances in semantic perception that
enable robots to acquire shared cognitive models of objects and of
their environment from limited supervision provided by human
partners. First, I will describe a visual appearance-based algorithm
that efficiently learns a robust representation of objects from a
single, user-provided segmentation cue. Second, I will provide a
probabilistic framework that allows robots to formulate human-centric
models of their environment from natural language descriptions. I will
then demonstrate how these learned representations allow people to
command and interact with robots using free-form speech. Finally, I
will end with my vision for how robots will formulate hierarchical
cognitive models of their environments, the objects they contain, and
the rich space of actions available to the robot.

Host:  Gregory Shakhnarovich,  greg at ttic.edu

-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20140212/a44ac9cc/attachment-0001.htm