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Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium/A

I

Speaker/Affiliation: Cynthia Breazeal/MIT

Date/Time: Thu

rsday, April 29, 2010, 11:00 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host:
Peter Stone

Talk Title: Robots as Social Learners

Talk Abstrac

t:

As personal robots enter our workplaces and homes, it will
b

e important for them to learn new tasks and abilities from a
wide demo

graphic of people. Ideally, people will be able to
teach robots as na

turally as one another. Consequently,
robots should be socially compe

tent enough to take advantage
of the same sorts of interpersonal cues

and skills that
humans readily use to teach and learn. Our research se

eks to
identify simple, natural, and prevalent teaching cues and
then program robots with social-affective mechanisms to
enable them

to learn efficiently and effectively from natural
interactions. In thi

s talk, I present several social skills
implemented on our robots and
discuss how they address the
challenge of building robots that learn

from people. These
skills include the ability to direct attention, to
understand
affect and intent, to express its learning process to the

human instructor, and to regulate its interaction with the
inst

ructor. Through these examples, we show how social,
emotional, and

expressive factors can be used in interesting
ways to build robots tha

t learn from people in a manner that
is natural for people to teach.
Speaker Bio:

Dr. Cynthia Breazeal is an Associate Professor
of Media Arts
and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolo

gy
where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at
the
Media Lab and is director of the Center for Future
Storytelling. She

is a pioneer of Social Robotics and Human
Robot Interaction (HRI). Her
research program focuses on
developing personal robots and interactiv

e characters that
engage humans in human-centric terms, work with hum

ans as
partners, and learn from people via tutelage. More recent
work investigates the impact of long term HRI applied to
entertainmen

t, communication, quality of life, health, and
educational goals.

She has authored the book "Designing
Sociable Robots" and

has published over 100 peer-reviewed
articles in journals and conferen

ces in autonomous robotics,
artificial intelligence, human robot int

eraction, and robot
learning. She has been awarded an ONR Young Inves

tigator
Award, honored as finalist in the National Design Awards inCommunication, and recognized as a prominent young innovator
by t

n 2000.