[auton-users] Artur's talk on Tuesday

[Artur Dubrawski]

Dear Autonomous People,
 
A few colleagues asked me to give them details of the talk
time and place, and I thought I could share the info with
everyone else as well.
 
June 8th, 10am, NSH 3305
 
Artur
 
================================
Title: 
Marketing Autonomous Systems
 
Abstract:
How can we make systems that have the kind of useful autonomy acceptable
to real world non technical users? This talk will begin with two
examples of systems that try to achieve this: the first a successfully
deployed autonomous hospital robot and the second a highly automated
data analyzer.
I will describe a project to build an automated delivery system called
the Tug, which makes a good and not very common example of a success in
developing an autonomous mobile robot to satisfy tangible needs of its
users: the US hospitals. That was possible due to a diligent market
analysis and a rapid adaptation to continually identified customer
needs. I will discuss design and technical components that were involved
in making an intrinsically complex product simple and intuitive to use
by its target audience. 
Similar issues are often faced by scientists conducting applied research
in other fields. In statistical data mining, we sometimes try to keep
the users away from the intimidating complexity by equipping our
solutions with a certain level of autonomy. I will discuss the theory
and practice of Gaussian Mixture Trees, a combination of Dependency
Trees and Gaussian Mixture Models, used to decompose complex, highly
dimensional problems in a way that makes them generally more tractable
and their solutions more intuitive and easier to comprehend by the end
users.  
The talk will conclude with a higher level discuss of the issues of
practical autonomy in systems used by non experts: this is a topic that
I intend to research in the mid to long term.
 
Bio:
Artur Dubrawski received a Ph.D. in robotics and automation from the
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of
Sciences, and a M.Sc. in aircraft engineering from Warsaw University of
Technology. Artur considers himself a scientist and a practitioner; he
has been tainted with some real world entrepreneurial experiences. He
had started up a small company which ended up being quite successful in
integration and deployment of advanced computerized control systems and
novel technological devices. He had also been affiliated with startups
incorporated by others: Schenley Park Research, a data mining
consultancy and a CMU off-spring, where he was a scientist; and (more
recently) with Aethon, a company building robots to automate
transportation in hospitals, where he served as a Chief Technical
Officer. Artur returned to CMU last Summer to join the Robotics
Institute's Auton Lab as a Project Scientist. He works on a range of
applied data mining endeavors and teaches data mining to graduate
students enrolled in the CMU MISM program (in fact, he has been doing
that since 2000 as an adjunct). In his previous academic life, he worked
mainly on machine learning approaches to mobile robot navigation and
control, as well as on other applications of adaptive autonomous
systems. In 1995/96 Artur spent a year at CMU as a visiting Fulbright
scholar. He actively published scientific papers until his departure to
the industrial world in 1999, and he certainly hopes to resume
publishing any time now.
 
 
 
 
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