talk: Grounded Language Acquisition: A Physical Agent Approach, Fri 10/9

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 10:53:04 -0400
ai, computer-science, news, research, robotics, talks

The UMBC CSEE Seminar Series Presents

Grounded Language Acquisition: A Physical Agent Approach

Dr. Cynthia Matuszek

Interactive Robotics and Language Lab
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC

12:00-1:00pm Friday, 9 Oct. 2015, ITE 325b

A critical component of understanding human language is the ability to map words and ideas in that language to aspects of the external world. This mapping, called the symbol grounding problem, has been studied since the early days of artificial intelligence; however, advances in language processing, sensory, and motor systems have only recently made it possible to directly interact with tangibly grounded concepts. In this talk, I describe how we combine robotics and natural language processing to acquire and use physically grounded language specifically, how robots can learn to follow instructions, understand descriptions of objects, and build models of language and the physical world from interactions with users. I will describe our work on building a learning system that can ground English commands and descriptions from examples, making it possible for robots to learn from untrained end-users in an intuitive, natural way, and describe applications of our work in following directions and learning about objects. Finally, I will discuss how robots with these learning capabilities address a number of near-term challenges.

Cynthia Matuszek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2014, where she was a member of both the Robotics and State Estimation lab and the Language, Interaction, and Learning group. She is published in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, ubiquitous computing, and human-robot interaction. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, natural language processing, and machine learning.

Hosts: Professors Fow-Sen Choa (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) and Alan T. Sherman (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. )

· directions and more information ·