Plenary Speakers

Keynote Speakers:

• Prof. Shuji Hashimoto (Waseda University, Japan):
  "KANSEI Robotics to Open a New Epoch of Human-Machine Relationship - Machine with a Heart"
  

  » As pdf
  » As webstream

  Short biography: Shuji Hashimoto received his B.S., M.S. and Dr. Eng. degrees in Applied Physics from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 1970, 1973 and 1977, respectively.From 1979 to 1991, he was with the Faculty of Science, Toho University, Chiba, Japan. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Applied Physics, School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University. Since 2000, he has been the director of the Humanoid Robotics Institute, Waseda University. He has worked as board members of variety of academic societies including the International Computer Music Association, IEEE Tokyo Chapter, IEICE Human Communication Group and IIEEJ. He is now a vice-president of the Japan Academy of Facial Science and the chair of the AS-i Association Japan. His research interests are in human communication and KANSEI information processing, including image processing, music systems, neural computing and humanoid robotics.

• Prof. R. Illah Nourbakhsh (Carnegie Mellon University, USA):
  "A Roadmap for Technology Literacy and a Vehicle for Getting There: Educational Robotics and the TeRK Project "
  

  » As pdf
  » As webstream

  Abstract of talk: Designing human-robot collaboration systems is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor aimed at providing humans with rich, effective and satisfying interactions. Over the past eight years, my laboratory has focused on educational collaboration, wherein the purpose of the interaction is to provide measurable learning for humans through exploration and discovery. We propose that the creation of a successful human-robot collaboration system requires innovation in several areas: robot morphology; robot behavior; social perception; interaction design; human cognitive models and evaluation of educational effectiveness. Our iterative process for collaboration design extends evaluation techniques from the informal learning field together with underlying technical advances in robotics. This talk describes our research approach, technical contributions and experimental outcomes for three fielded robot systems that push on developing a generalizable approach to human-robot collaboration. For the past several months, our group has been laying the groundwork for our new five-year plan. I will conclude by describing the robot community we wish to help spawn and the robot ingredients that may make this possible, dubbed theTelepresence Robot Kit," and the visualization medium of the Global Connection project, powered by Google Earth. For more information see www.cs.cmu.edu/~globalconn and www.cs.cmu.edu/~terk .
  
  Short biography: Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Associate Professor of Robotics in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was on leave for the 2004 calendar year and was at NASA/Ames Research Center serving as Robotics Group lead. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, electric wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion. His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution and planning and scheduling algorithms. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millenium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is a founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc., which was recently acquired by Witness Systems, Inc. Illah recently co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.

• Prof. Lucy Suchman (Lancaster University, UK):
  "Reconfiguring Human-Robot Relations"
  

  » As pdf
  » As webstream

  Short biography: Lucy Suchman holds the post of Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, and is Co-Director of Lancaster’s Centre for Science Studies. Prior to her arrival at Lancaster in 2000, she spent 20 years as a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where her last position was as a Principal Scientist and Manager of the Work Practice & Technology research area. The latter was an interdisciplinary research group combining anthropology and computer science. The group's research at PARC focused on the social and material practices that make up technical systems, which were explored through critical studies and through experimental and participatory projects in new technology design. Lucy Suchman is known for her 1987 book Plans and Situated Actions: The problem of human-machine communication, and has just completed a 2nd expanded edition of the book titled Human-Machine Reconfigurations, currently in production with Cambridge University Press.