The seminar is scheduled on Fridays at 11am-12pm eastern time (unless otherwise noted). The location is Computer Science Building, Room 105.
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Upcoming Seminars
Dec 1, 2023 - Sonia Chernova, Georgia Tech

Title: Autonomy in the Human World: Developing Robots that Handle the Diversity of Human Lives
Abstract: Reliable operation in everyday human environments – homes, offices, and businesses – remains elusive for today’s robotic systems. A key challenge is diversity, as no two homes or businesses are exactly alike. However, despite the innumerable unique aspects of any home, there are many commonalities as well, particularly about how objects are placed and used. These commonalities can be captured in semantic representations, and then used to improve the autonomy of robotic systems by, for example, enabling robots to infer missing information in human instructions, efficiently search for objects, or manipulate objects more effectively. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in semantic reasoning, particularly focusing on semantics of everyday objects, household environments, and the development of robotic systems that intelligently interact with their world.
Bio: Sonia Chernova is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning lab, where her research focuses on the development of intelligent and interactive autonomous systems. Chernova’s contributions span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adaptive autonomy, human-robot interaction, and explainable AI. She also leads the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), whose mission is to develop collaborative AI partners-in-care that help support a growing population of older adults, helping them sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across their care network.
Upcoming:
Feb 9, 2024 - Elad Hazan, Princeton
Feb 23, 2024 - Caitlin Mueller, MIT
Mar 8, 2024 - Marin Kobilarov, JHU
Mar 22, 2024 - Ye Zhao, GA Tech
Apr 5, 2024 - Changliu Liu, CMU
Apr 19, 2024 - Jeannette Bohg, Stanford
Past Seminars
Nov 17, 2023 - Stephanie Gil, Harvard - Resilient Coordination in Networked Multi-Robot Teams
Nov 10, 2023 - Baffour Osei, Princeton
Nov 3, 2023 - Russ Tedrake, MIT - Dexterous Manipulation with Diffusion Policies
Nov 3, 2023 - Monroe Kennedy, Stanford - Collaborative Robotics: From Dexterity to Teammate Prediction
Oct 20, 2023 - Henny Admoni, CMU - Robots that Learn From and Collaborate with People
Oct 06, 2023 - Lerrel Pinto, NYU - Three Lessons for Building General-Purpose Robots
Sep 22, 2023 - Pulkit Agrawal, MIT - Physical Intelligence as API
June 9, 2023 - Vikas Sindhwani, Google Deepmind - Large Language Models with Eyes, Arms and Legs
May 12, 2023, David Fridovich-Keil - Dynamic Game Models for Multi-Agent Interactions: The Role of Information in Designing Efficient Algorithms
April 21, 2023, Renee Zhao - Multifunctional Origami Robots
April 7, 2023, Scott Kuindersma - Task Agility: Making Useful Dynamic Behavior Easier to Create
Mar 24, 2023 - Dorsa Sadigh - Learning Representations for Interactive Robotics
Mar 10, 2023 - Greg Chirikjian - Robot Imagination: Affordance-Based Reasoning about Unknown Objects
Feb 28, 2023 - Danica Kragic - Learning perception, action and interaction
Feb 10, 2023 - Ken Goldberg - The New Wave in Robot Grasping
Dec 2, 2022 - Nadia Figueroa - Collaborative Robots in the Wild: Challenges and Future Directions from a Human-Centric Perspective
Nov 11, 2002 - Andy Zeng - Language as Robot Middleware
Oct 28, 2022 - Tomas Lozano-Perez - Generalization in Planning and Learning for Robotic Manipulation
Oct 14, 2022 - Sarah Tang - Data-Centric ML for Autonomous Driving
Sep 30, 2022 - Radhika Nagpal - Towards Collective A.I.
Sep 16, 2022 - Katie Skinner - Learning from Limited Data for Robot Vision in the Wild
April 22, 2022 - Mac Schwager - Reimagining Robot Autonomy with Neural Environment Representations
April 8, 2022 - Stephen Tu - Learning from many trajectories
March 25, 2022 - Karen Leung - Towards the Unification of Autonomous Vehicle Safety Concepts: A Reachability Perspective
March 11, 2022 - Reza Moini - Bio-inspired Design and Additive Manufacturing of Architected Cement-based Materials
Feb 25, 2022 - Aimy Wissa - Bio-Inspired Locomotion Strategies across Mediums: From Feather-Inspired Flow Control to Beetle-Inspired Jumping
Feb 11, 2022 - Jordan Taylor - The steep part of the learning curve: how cognitive strategies shape motor skill acquisition
Dec 3, 2021 - Naomi Leonard - Collective Intelligence and Multi-Robot System
Nov 19, 2021 - Aaron Ames - Safety-Critical Control of Dynamic Robots
Nov 5, 2021 - Chuchu Fan - Building Dependable Autonomous Systems through Learning Certified Decisions and Control
Oct 8, 2021 - Karthik Narasimhan - Language-guided policy learning for better generalization and safety
Sep 24, 2021 - Daniel Cohen - Living microrobots: controlling cellular swarms and the waterbear as a potential microrobot chassis
Sep 17, 2021 - Michael Posa - Contact-Rich Robotics: Learning, Impact-Invariant Control, and Tactile Feedback
Feb 11, 2021 - Jia Deng - Optimization Inspired Deep Architectures for Multiview 3D
Feb 25, 2021 - Stefana Parascho - Rethinking Architectural Robotics
Mar 11, 2021 - Naveen Verma - AI Meets Large-scale Sensing: preserving and exploiting structure of the real world to enhance machine perception
April 8, 2021 - Jaime Fernandez Fisac - Safe Robots in the Wild: maintaining safety by planning through uncertainty and interaction
April 22, 2021 - Olga Russakovsky, Zhiwei Deng - Evolving Graphical Planner: Contextual Global Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation
May 6, 2021 - Bartolomeo Stellato - Data-Driven Embedded Optimization for Control