The series continues in Spring 2023. It is scheduled on Fridays at 11am-12pm eastern time. The location is Computer Science Building, Room 105 (unless noted virtual).
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Upcoming Seminars
Feb 10, 2023 - Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
Title: The New Wave in Robot Grasping
Abstract: Despite 50 years of research, robots remain remarkably clumsy, limiting their reliability for warehouse order fulfillment, robot-assisted surgery, and home decluttering. The First Wave of grasping research is purely analytical, applying variations of screw theory to exact knowledge of pose, shape, and contact mechanics. The Second Wave is purely empirical: end-to-end hyperparametric function approximation (aka Deep Learning) based on human demonstrations or time-consuming self-exploration. A "New Wave" of research considers hybrid methods that combine analytic models with stochastic sampling and Deep Learning models. I'll present this history with new results from our lab on grasping diverse and previously-unknown objects.
Biography: Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley and an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist and popular public speaker on AI and robotics. Ken trains the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs in his research lab at UC Berkeley; he has published over 300 papers, 3 books, and holds 9 US Patents. Ken’s artwork has been featured in 70 art exhibits including the 2000 Whitney Biennial. He is a pioneer in technology and artistic visual expression, bridging the “two cultures” of art and science. With unique skills in communication and creative problem solving, invention, and thinking on the edge, Ken has presented over 600 invited lectures at events around the world. Ken has been interested in robots, rockets, and rebels since he was a kid. He’s skeptical about claims that humans are on the verge of being replaced by Superintelligent machines yet optimistic about the potential of technology to improve the human condition. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithm for part feeding and the first robot on the Internet. In 1995 he was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship and in 2005 was elected IEEE Fellow: "For contributions to networked telerobotics and geometric algorithms for automation." Ken founded UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture public lecture series in 1997 serves on the Advisory Board of the RoboGlobal Exchange Traded Fund. Ken is Chief Scientist at Ambidextrous Robotics and on the Editorial Board of the journal Science Robotics. He served as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department and co-founded the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Short documentary films he co-wrote were selected for Sundance and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters.
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Feb 24, 2023 - George Pappas, University of Pennsylvania
March 10, 2023 (virtual) - Greg Chirikjian, National University of Singapore
March 24, 2023 - Dorsa Sadigh, Stanford University
April 7, 2023 - Scott Kuindersma, Boston Dynamics
April 21, 2023 - Renee Zhao, Stanford University
Past Seminars
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
Organizers
Allen Ren, Alexandra Bodrova, Nate Simon, Anirudha Majumdar