Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Brian Scassellati (Yale University) - Building Models of Self and Task

Speaker: Brian Scassellati, Yale University

Talk Title: Building Models of Self and Task

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: This talk is an amalgamation of two topics that came out of research on building socially collaborative systems that focus on building richer representations of both robots and the tasks that they engage in. First, I will discuss methods for building self-trained models of a robot's own kinematic structure and sensory systems. Second, I will describe on-going efforts to automatically learn hierarchical representations of task structure from observations. These two topics, taken together, present a novel viewpoint of how we can restructure the way in which we view the division between built-in representations and learned methods.

Biography: Brian Scassellati is a Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University and Director of the NSF Expedition on Socially Assistive Robotics. His research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Using computational modeling and socially interactive robots, his research evaluates models of how infants acquire social skills and assists in the diagnosis and quantification of disorders of social development (such as autism).

Host: Maja Mataric

Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair