Wednesday, 4 December 2024, 11:00, N101, Level 1, CSIT Building
For those not in Canberra, please use this zoom link
Abstract
Intelligence is the ability to do the right thing in myriad unfamiliar situations. Robots today can do very well in complex, but narrow tasks, e.g., in-hand manipulation. However, home service robots (if any) are far from their human counterparts in abilities. What is the nature of the underlying technical gap? How would the latest advances in AI – learning, planning, foundation models – help to overcome this gap? In this talk, I will start with the classic model-based robot decision making under uncertainty and argue that integrating model-based planning and data-driven learning will lead to a data-driven, compositional learning architecture for scalable robot intelligence. The key issue here is the interplay, rather than the conflict, between structure and data. I will illustrate the general thinking with our work on robots navigating anywhere on our university campus, robots folding a variety of clothes, and robots aiming to operate in the open world.
Biography
David Hsu is Provost’s Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore and the founding director of NUS Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (NUSAiL). He received BSc in computer science & mathematics from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and PhD in computer science from Stanford University, USA. He is an IEEE Fellow.
His research interests lie in the intersection of robotics and AI. In recent years, he has been working on robot planning and learning under uncertainty and human-robot collaboration. His work won several international awards, including, most recently, Test of Time Award at Robotics: Science & Systems (RSS) in 2021 and IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize in 2022. He has chaired or co-chaired several major international robotics conferences, including WAFR 2010, RSS 2015, ICRA 2016, and CoRL 2021. He served on the editorial boards of International Journal of Robotics Research and Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is currently an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics.