CS Colloquia: Social Robots

Title: Social RobotsSpeaker: Prof. Reid Simmons (CMU)ABSTRACT:
As robots become more ubiquitous in society, they will have to learn to
interact with people in socially acceptable ways. For the past six years,we
have been developing techniques that enable robots to behave according to
social conventions, both conversationally and spatially. The techniquesinvolve
explicit modeling of human behavior and social conventions,probabilistic
reasoning about situations and the intentions of people, and explicit
representation of affect and mutual interaction. We have developed several
robots that embody these ideas, including GRACE, a robot that attended the
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the roboceptionist, a joint
project with the School of Drama, and a robot that dances rhythmically with
children. This talk will describe our efforts in this area, focusing on the
techniques that we have developed and highlighting the gap that still remains
between the behavior of our robotsand true social interaction.BIO:
Reid Simmons is a Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his B.A. degree in 1979 in
ComputerScience from SUNY at Buffalo, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT
in 1983 and 1988, respectively, in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Since
coming to Carnegie Mellon in 1988, Dr. Simmons' research has focusedon
developing self-reliant robots that can autonomously operate over extended
periods of time in unknown, unstructured environments. This work involves
issues of robot control architectures, probabilistic planning and reasoning,
monitoring and fault detection, and robust indoor and outdoornavigation. More
recently, Dr. Simmons has focused on the areas of human-robot social
interaction, coordination of multiple heterogeneous robots, and formal
verification of autonomous systems. Over the years, he has been involved in the
development of over a dozen autonomous robots.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia