Date and time:
October 8 at 7:00am-8:30am (PDT) 4:00pm (CEST)
Live Stream: Zoom Webinar (https://zoom.us/j/94153855008)
Live questions and discussion: Slido (https://app.sli.do/event/oo3bmlfu)
Moderator: Giulio Sandini
Panelists: Ruzena Bajcsy, Yiannis Aloimonos, David Vernon, Minoru Asada

Title: Cognitive Robotics

Video on Bilibili: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Dr4y1c7sH/
Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VKB9m4hOjlc

There is growing need for robots that can interact safely with people in everyday situations.  This means they need to be able to understand what a person is doing, anticipate what they are going to do, and act accordingly. This is the field of cognitive robotics. Cognitive robots exhibit flexible context-sensitive behaviour and they achieve this by building on the core cognitive abilities encapsulated in a cognitive architecture. These core abilities include perception, attention mechanisms, action selection and control, memory, learning, reasoning,  meta-reasoning, and prospection.

The field of cognitive robotics is a multi-disciplinary science that draws on research in adaptive robotics as well as cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and often exploits models based on biological cognition.

Researchers active in the field will participate in this Colloquium to present their points of view and to answer questions posed beforehand and live by the audience. You are all invited to take part in the live Colloquium and to interact directly with the panelists. The Colloquium will be also recorded and will be accessible at the IFRR website.

The panelists will address specifically some of the following topics:

  1. Which are the key aspects of cognition missing in today’s robots?
  2. Can cognitive abilities be pre-programmed or faked?
  3. Is there an incremental way to develop cognitive robots?
  4. Which academic communities can contribute to advance the field?
  5. What role does prospection play in cognition and how can it be realized in a cognitive robot?
  6. Is cognition essential for robots to handle everyday activities?
  7. Which applications are doomed to fail without an approach based on cognitive robotics?

 


Giulio Sandini (Moderator)

Ruzena Bajcsy

Yiannis Aloimonos

David Vernon

Minoru Asada


Giulio Sandini (Moderator)

Giulio Sandini

Giulio Sandini is founding director of the Italian Institute of Technology and full professor of bioengineering at the University of Genoa. He was research fellow and assistant professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and Visiting Research Associate at the Department of Neurology of the Harvard Medical School. In 1990 he founded the LIRA-Lab (Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics, www.liralab.it) and in 1996 he was Visiting Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of MIT. Giulio Sandini research activities are in the fields of Biological and Artificial Vision, Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience and Robotics with the objective of understanding the neural mechanisms of human sensory-motor coordination and cognitive development from a biological and an artificial perspective. Giulio Sandini joined IIT in 2006 where he established the department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (www.iit.it/rbcs) www.iit.it/giulio-sandini.

 


Ruzena Bajcsy

Ruzena Bajcsy

Ruzena Bajcsy is the NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining UC Berkeley, she headed the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation (1999–2001). From 1972 to 2001 she was a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she established in 1978 the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab. As director of the GRASP lab she fostered interdisciplinary research activities and attracted faculty from electrical and mechanical engineering as well as psychology/cognitive science and of course computer science. Throughout her 28 years at UPenn she worked on robotics research, including computer vision, tactile perception, and in general the problem of system identification. Her current research is in the use of robotic technology, namely measuring and extracting noninvasively kinematic and dynamic parameters of individual in order to assess their physical movement capabilities or limitations. Among many awards she is the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences (2009) and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award (2013) for her contributions in the field of robotics and automation.

 


Yiannis Aloimonos

Yiannis Aloimonos

Yiannis Aloimonos is Professor of Computational Vision and Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, and the Director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He is also affiliated with the Institute for Systems Research and the Neural and Cognitive Science Program. He was born in Sparta, Greece and studied Mathematics in Athens and Computer Science at the University of Rochester, NY (PhD 1990). He is interested in Active Perception and the modeling of vision as an active, dynamic process for real time robotic systems. For the past five years he has been working on bridging signals and symbols, specifically on the relationship of vision to reasoning, action and language.

 


David Vernon

David Vernon

David Vernon is a senior researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI), University of Bremen. Prior to this, he spent over three years at Carnegie Mellon University Africa in Rwanda.  His research area is cognitive robotics, focusing on cognitive architectures,  prospective cognition, and constitutive autonomy. Over the past 40 years, he has worked for Westinghouse Electric in Ireland and the USA, for the European Commission and Science Foundation Ireland, and for leading universities in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, and a past Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.  He is co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Committee for Cognitive Robotics (www.ieee-coro.org), an associate editor of Cognitive Systems Research, and a series editor of Springer’s Cognitive Systems Monographs (COSMOS). His website is at www.vernon.eu.

 


Minoru Asada

Minoru Asada

Minoru Asada received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in control engineering from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1977, 1979, and 1982, respectively. In April 1995, he became a professor at Osaka University. He was a professor in the Department of Adaptive Machine Systems at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University from April 1997 to March 2019. Since then, he has been a specially-appointed professor, Symbiotic Intelligent System Research Center, Open and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives, Osaka University. Dr. Asada has received many awards, such as the Best Paper award at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS92) and a Commendation by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japanese Government, as a Person of Distinguished Services to Enlightening People on Science and Technology. He is one of the founders of the RoboCup, and the former president of the International RoboCup Federation (2002-2008). He is now a president for the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ). IEEE Fellow since 2005. He was the Research Director of the ASADA Synergistic Intelligence Project at Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (ERATO, 2005-2011), and was a principal investigator of the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Research Project Numbers:24000012, 2012-2016) titled Constructive Developmental Science based on Understanding the Process from Neuro-Dynamics to Social Interaction. He is currently a principal investigator of the JST RISTEX R&D Project titled Legal Beings: Electric personhoods of artificial intelligence and robots in NAJIMI society, based on a reconsideration of the concept of autonomy.