The Flowing of the Dao

Robotics Seminar Series Fall 2008
Speaker: Andrew Y. Ng
Speaker Affiliation: Stanford University
Host: Nick Roy
Host Affiliation: CSAIL

Date: 11-18-2008
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Refreshments: 3:45 PM
Location: Stata - Sem Rm G449 (Patil/ Kiva)

This talk will describe the STAIR home assistant robot project, and the satellite projects that led to key STAIR components such as (i) robotic grasping of previously unknown objects, (ii) depth perception from a single still image, and (iii) multi-modal robotic perception.

Since its birth in 1956, the AI dream has been to build systems that exhibit broad-spectrum competence and intelligence. STAIR revisits this dream, and seeks to integrate onto a single robot platform tools drawn from all areas of AI including learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, and speech/NLP. This is in distinct contrast to, and also represents an attempt to reverse, the 30 year old trend of working on fragmented AI sub-fields. STAIR’s goal is a useful home assistant robot, and over the long term, we envision a single robot that can perform tasks such as tidying up a room, using a dishwasher, fetching and delivering items, and preparing meals.

In this talk, I’ll describe our progress on having the STAIR robot fetch items from around the office, and on having STAIR take inventory of office items. Specifically, I’ll describe: (i) learning to grasp previously unseen objects (including unloading items from a dishwasher); (ii) probabilistic multi-resolution maps, which enable the robot to open/use doors; (iii) a robotic foveal+peripheral vision system for object recognition and tracking. I’ll also outline some of the main technical ideas—such as learning 3-d reconstructions from a single still image, and reinforcement learning algorithms for robotic control—that played key roles in enabling these STAIR components.

Thanks, Mac.

There is increasing talk about the disappearance of technical knowledge from the public domain, both because it is a security danger and because it is economically valuable. I argue that this development is not anomalous at all but a great historic trend tied to our transition to the information age. We are in the process of losing a human right that all of us thought we had but actually didn’t - the right to learn things as we can and better ourselves economically from what we learn. Increasingly, figuring out important things (as opposed to unimportant ones) for yourself will become theft and terrorism. Increasingly, reason itself will become a crime.

http://www.parc.com/cms/get_article.php?id=792

Temurah is one of the three ancient methods, the other two are Gematria and Notarikon, used by the Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible, in the belief that by this method they can derive the esoteric substratum and deeper spiritual meaning of the words.

Temurah has a second meaning also when pertaining to Judaism, particularly Hebrew mysticism, which is in association with the art of word-changing. This entails the changing of letters in certain words to create a new meaning for a Biblical statement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temurah_(Kabbalah)

“Nothing in life comes close to the breathtaking joy that is the potential in marriage.” -Patch Adams

http://www.necsi.edu/education/aguiarseminar.html

Date: October 31, 2008
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: NECSI, 24 Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge

Abstract:
Networks are mathematical structures that can model a large number of systems in biology, physics, engineering and the social sciences. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to the theory of networks and review some of the work I have done in collaboration with NECSI fellows. Next, I will show how we can use these tools to construct a simple dynamical model of an excitable medium. The response of the medium to an external source will be calculated analytically for the simple case where the medium is represented by a fully connected network.

Speaker:
Marcus de Aguiar is a professor of physics at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil. He earned his Doctorate in Physics at the University of São Paulo in 1987. His research interests are complex networks, population dynamics in space and time, and the semiclassical limit of chaotic systems.

Attendence:
The Local Seminar Series is free and open to the public.