Graduate Traineeships: Visual Navigation in Humans and Robots

[Bill Warren]

Graduate Traineeships
Visual Navigation in Humans and Robots
Brown University

The Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and the Department of
Computer Science at Brown University are seeking graduate applicants
interested in visual navigation.  The project investigates situated
learning of spatial knowledge used to guide navigation in humans and
robots.  Human experiments study active navigation and landmark recognition
in virtual envrionments, whose structure is manipulated during learning and
transfer.  In conjunction, biologically-inspired navigation strategies are
tested on mobile robot platform.  Computational modeling pursues (a) a
neural net model of the hippocampus and (b) reinforcement learning and
hidden Markov models for spatial navigation.  Underlying questions include
the geometric structure of the spatial knowledge that is used in active
navigation, and how it interacts with the structure of the environment and
the navigational task during learning.  The project is under the direction
of Leslie Kaelbling (Computer Science, www.cs.brown.edu), Michael Tarr and
William Warren (Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, www.cog.brown.edu).  Three
graduate traineeships are available, beginning in the Fall of 1998.
Applicants should apply to either of these home departments.  Application
materials can be obtained from:  The Graduate School, Brown University, Box
1867, Providence, RI 02912,  phone (401) 863-2600, www.brown.edu.  The
application deadline is Jan. 1, 1998.

                        -- Bill

                        William H. Warren, Professor
                        Dept. of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
                        Box 1978
                        Brown University
                        Providence, RI  02912
                        (401) 863-3980 ofc, 863-2255 FAX
                        Bill_Warren at brown.edu