[Intelligence Seminar] March 20, 3:30pm:, Presentation by Gal Kaminka

[Dana Houston]

> INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
> MARCH 20 AT 3:30PM, IN GHC 4303
>
> SPEAKER: GAL KAMINKA (Bar Ilan University)
> Host: Manuela Veloso
> For meetings, contact Dana Houston (dhouston at cs.cmu.edu)
>
> REUSABLE TEAMWORK FOR MULTI-ROBOT TEAMS
>
> For many years, multi-robot researchers have focused on specific
> application-inspired basic tasks (e.g., coverage, moving in formation,
> foraging, patrolling) as a way of studying cooperation between robots.
> But users want to see increasingly complex missions being tackled,
> which challenge this methodology: first, some missions cannot be
> easily decomposed into the familiar basic tasks, making previous
> knowledge non-reusable; second, the target operating environments
> challenge the typically sterile settings assumed in many previous
> works (such challenges include adversaries, multiple concurrent goals,
> human operators and users, and more).
>
> In this talk, I will argue that the reusable components in complex
> missions are often found not in the tasks, but in the interactions
> between robots; that is, while taskwork varies significantly, teamwork
> is largely generic. And while many multi-robot researchers have begun
> exploring generic task-allocation methods, I will report on my group's
> work over the last decade, identifying and developing other general
> mechanisms for teamwork, and integrating them at the architecture
> level to facilitate development of robust teams at reduced programming
> effort. I will sample some of our results in developing robots for
> missions ranging from robust formation maintenance, through
> patrolling, to soccer and urban search-and-rescue.
>
> BIO
>
> Gal A. Kaminka is an associate professor in the Computer Science
> Department, and the Brain Sciences Research Center, at Bar Ilan
> University (Israel). His research expertise includes multi-agent and
> multi-robot systems, teamwork and coordination, behavior and plan
> recognition, and modeling social behavior. He received his Ph.D. from
> the University of Southern California (2000), and spent two years as a
> post-doctorate fellow at Carnegie Mellon. Today, Prof. Kaminka leads
> the MAVERICK research group at Bar Ilan University, supervising over a
> dozen M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. He was awarded an IBM faculty award
> and top places at international robotics competitions. He served as
> the program chair of the 2008 Israeli Conference on Robotics, and the
> program co-chair of the 2010 International Joint Conference on
> Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). He has served on
> the international executive bodies of the International Foundation of
> Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) and the
> Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
> Currently, he is spending his sabbatical as a Radcliffe Fellow at
> Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
>

-- 
Dana M. Houston
Language Technologies Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5405 Gates Hillman Complex
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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