Hi All, As previously announced, we'll be kicking off the winter term of the Robotics Seminar with a talk from Sandhya Saisubramanian, who recently joined the EECS faculty at Oregon State and works in the area of autonomous systems. The seminar will be from 10-11am, followed by an 11-11:30 student-only Q&A session. This first seminar will be conducted via Zoom. The seminar Zoom room can be reached at https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/92183247338?pwd=MENOWHgvSFVGYzNjZExDT2hWRUNxdz... I also have a Gather space (with a direct link to the Zoom session) set up at https://gather.town/app/HeC6WAB1zL6cKWp5/OSU%20Robotics%20Seminar for pre- and post-seminar socialization. -Ross =========== Ross L. Hatton Associate Professor, Robotics and Mechanical Engineering Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute Oregon State University coris.oregonstate.edu research.engr.oregonstate.edu/lram/ rosslhatton.com ross.hatton@oregonstate.edu =========== Title: Avoiding Negative Side Effects of Autonomous Systems in the Open World Abstract: Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open-world environments. These systems have broad societal impacts and it is critical to ensure that they operate safely when deployed. Due to the practical challenges in data collection and precise model specification, AI systems often operate based on imperfect models which may lead to undesirable behaviors. A particular form of unexpected, undesirable consequence is the negative side effects. In this talk, I will (1) discuss the challenges in identifying and mitigating the impacts of negative side effects; (2) examine the efficiency of different forms of feedback to learn the penalty associated with negative side effects; and (3) discuss a multi-objective approach to mitigate the side effects. Bio: Sandhya Saisubramanian is an Assistant Professor in the School of EECS at Oregon State University. She recently completed her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests are in developing general techniques for reliable decision-making in autonomous systems that operate in fully and partially observable open-world environments. She is a recipient of Distinguished Paper Award at IJCAI 2020 and was selected as a Rising Star in EECS by UC Berkeley in 2020.