[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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