Distinguished Lecture Series: Dr. Manuela Veloso

As part of the CS @ ILLINOIS Distinguished Lecture Series, Dr. Manuela Veloso will present her research on autonomous service robots. The lecture will take place at 4 pm on November 13, in 2405 Siebel Center. 

Human-AI Interaction: Autonomous Service Robots

We research on autonomous mobile robots that attend to task requests from humans, such as transporting an item between locations, and guiding people to a destination. Concretely, in this talk, I will present our CoBot mobile service robots and their symbiotic autonomy, which enables the robots to ask for help to overcome their perceptual, cognitive, and actuation limitations. I will then introduce the challenges of a broad human-AI interaction. The talk will introduce how humans and AI can collaborate, in a variety of ways, in particular in terms of robot learning from human sources, and robot explanation generation to respond to language-based requests about their autonomous experience. I will address the opportunities for transparency and trust in AI systems.

Bio: Manuela M. Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the Head of the Machine Learning Department, with joint appointments in the Computer Science Department, in the Robotics Institute, and in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She researches in Artificial Intelligence with focus in robotics, machine learning, and multiagent systems.  She founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of autonomous agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Professor Veloso is ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, AAAI Fellow, Einstein Chair Professor, the co-founder and past President of RoboCup, and past President of AAAI. Professor Veloso and her students research with a variety of autonomous robots, including mobile service robots and soccer robots. See www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv for further information, including publications.