There is a sign-up schedule for this event that can be found at

http://apps.cs.utexas.edu/talkschedules/cgi/list_events.cgi

Type o

f Talk: UTCS Colloquia/AI

Speaker/Affiliation: Andrea Thomaz/Georgia T

ech

Talk Audience: UTCS Faculty, Graduate Students, Undergraduate St

udents and Outside Interested Parties

Date/Time: Friday, April 13, 2

012, 11:00 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host: Peter Stone

Talk
Title: Designing Learning Interactions for Robots

Talk Abstract:
In
this talk I present recent work from the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab
at Georgia Tech. One of the focuses of our lab is on Socially Guided Machi

ne Learning, building robot systems that can learn from everyday human tea

chers. We look at standard Machine Learning interactions and redesign inter

faces and algorithms to support the collection of learning input from naive
humans. This talk covers results on high-level task goal learning, low-le

vel skill learning, and active learning interactions using several humanoi

d robot platforms.

Speaker Bio:
Andrea L. Thomaz is an Assistant Pro

fessor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She
directs the Socially Intelligent Machines lab, which is affiliated with t

he Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) Center and with the Graphics Vis

ualization and Usability (GVU) Center. She earned a B.S. in Electrical and

Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and S

c.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 2002 and 2006. Dr. Thomaz is published i

n the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction

, and Human-Computer Interaction. She received an ONR Young Investigator A

ward in 2008, and an NSF CAREER award in 2010. Her work has been featured

on the front page of the New York Times, and in 2009 she was named one of

MIT Technology Review''s Top 35 under 35.