Friday November 27 2020: CUSO Human-Robot Interaction Seminar

Human-Robot Interaction: from visual perception to cognitive architecture (past and future)

Social Robots need to be able to understand what a person is doing, anticipate what they are going to do, and act accordingly. This ability to predict the effects of own and other’s actions is the core of human cognition and the main obstacle to effective interactions of robots with humans. Starting from a brief overview of the evolution of scientific advancements on visual perception the goal of the seminar is to present the central role of embodiment in the study of social cognition and discuss the main challenges to be addressed to design robots able to establish a mutual communication channel with a human partner (the distinctive mark of human social interaction).

Giulio Sandini is Director of Research at 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 is a founding Director of the Italian Institute of Technology where in 2006 he established the department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Human-Robot Interaction Approaches and Assistive Applications

The seminar will first introduce important concepts and research approaches in HRI. I will then discuss different application areas where robots assist people in therapeutic, educational, or other assistive contexts. The focus will be on companion robots that serve certain functions but need to operate in a socially acceptable manner with its users. Topics covered include issues of trust and overtrust in robots and ethical implications of those.

Kerstin Dautenhahn, IEEE Fellow, is Canada’s 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She has a joint appointment with the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Systems Design Engineering and is cross-appointed with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at University of Waterloo. She is the director of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory. She has widely published in her main research areas of Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Assistive Technology and Artificial Life (H-Index 81).