Seminar 2018-05-25

Date: 2018-05-25
Time: 11:00-12:00
Speaker: Iolanda Leite, Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH
Title: Autonomous Social Robots in the Real World: Current Challenges and Future Directions 

Abstract

As social robots move out of controlled laboratory environments to be deployed in the real world, a long-standing barrier is the need to respond and adapt to both users and to the dynamics of the environment over long periods of time. In this talk, I will present my past and current research towards enabling robots with the social capabilities that will enable them to engage people over repeated interactions. I will also discuss limitations of the current state of the art in robotic technology suitable for realistic social environments, arguing that an improved understanding of how robots perceive, reason and act depending on their surrounding social context can lead to more natural, enjoyable and useful human-robot interactions in the long-term.

Bio Iolanda Leite is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She holds a PhD in Information Systems and Computer Engineering from IST, University of Lisbon. Prior to joining KTH, she was a Research Assistant at the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group at INESC-ID Lisbon, a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Social Robotics Lab and an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh. Iolanda’s research interests are in the areas of Human-Robot Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. She aims to develop socially intelligent autonomous robots that can assist and cooperate with people over long periods of time.