Robotics Today: Doing for Our Robots What Nature Did for Us

Join Robotics Today for a virtual talk and panel discussion on Friday, May 22nd with guest speaker Professor Leslie Pack Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.  This technical talk will be live-streamed and captioned at https://roboticstoday.github.io/ and Twitter (@RoboticsSeminar). The talk will be followed by a discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students.

Audience members are encouraged to engage! Ask questions in advance or during the event on the Robotics Today website. 

Abstract: We, as robot engineers, have to think hard about our role in the design of robots and how it interacts with learning, both in "the factory" (that is, at engineering time) and in "the wild" (that is, when the robot is delivered to a customer). I will share some general thoughts about the strategies for robot design and then talk in detail about some work I have been involved in, both in the design of an overall architecture for an intelligent robot and in strategies for learning to integrate new skills into the repertoire of an already competent robot.

Biography: Leslie is a Professor at MIT. She has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford and was previously on the faculty at Brown University. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Her research agenda is to make intelligent robots using methods including estimation, learning, planning, and reasoning. She is not a robot.