November 2023 - Robotics-seminar - Engineering Mailing Lists

Fw: AI Seminar : Dec 1
by Smart, William 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

A robot-themed AI seminar talk this Friday -- Bill ________________________________ From: Ai <ai-bounces(a)engr.oregonstate.edu> on behalf of Mangannavar, Rajesh Devaraddi <mangannr(a)oregonstate.edu> Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2023 12:55 To: eecs-grads(a)engr.orst.edu <eecs-grads(a)engr.oregonstate.edu>; 'eecs-faculty(a)engr.oregonstate.edu' <eecs-faculty(a)engr.oregonstate.edu>; ai(a)engr.orst.edu <ai(a)engr.oregonstate.edu>; ai-seminar(a)engr.orst.edu <ai-seminar(a)engr.oregonstate.edu> Cc: Tadepalli, Prasad <prasad.tadepalli(a)oregonstate.edu> Subject: [Ai] AI Seminar : Dec 1 Dear all, Our next AI seminar is scheduled to be on December 1stth, 1-2 PM. It will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A session with the graduate students. Location: KEC 1001 Zoom link: https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/98684050301?pwd=ZzhianQxUFBPUmdYVWJKOFhaVURCQ…<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Foregonsta…> Best Practices for Robot Death Heather Knight Assistant Professor Computer Science Oregon State University Abstract: Have you ever been sad after losing a pet, lost all data on your phone, or spilled coffee on your laptop? Imagine how a robot owner might feel after losing their companion robot, or seeing its memory and capability erased. We often replace phones after mere years of use, robot software goes out of date much faster than a dog or cat's lifespan, yet there are few social considerations for the grief a human might feel in losing software support for a robot system, or over robot hardwares for which no new parts are constructed. Yet, just like living systems, impermanence in technological systems is a given. This talk considers ways in which perspectives from Social Robotics — a field that leverages anthropomorphism, i.e., the ways in which humans automatically imbue humanlike characteristics to non-human things — can inform future social considerations and best practices for Robot Death. For example, social structures and legal mechanisms that take human-robot bonding into account by compassionately delivering news, and/or validating naturally existing sadness post-machine decline. Drawing from my personal experience having a Nao robot stolen out of my car in Corvallis, OR, from analyses of robot funerals after Starship Robots are hit by cars or trains, and international examples of ceremonies conducted for lost machines, this talk acknowledges that digital lives can also experience existential 1's and 0's. What can Social Robotics as a field teach us about compassionately handling robot and machine death? Moreover, how might robots and machines help us to compassionately navigate impermanence and suffering in our own lives? We finish with a discussion of opportunities for robot-facilitated mindfulness practices, including "maranasati," which means mindfulness of death and has surprising benefits to one's mental health. Speaker Bio: Dr. Heather Knight is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University, and directs the CHARISMA Robotics Lab, advising students in Robotics, EECS, AI, and MIME. Her students investigate multi-robot expressive motion, human-robot interactive communication, interfaces for human-in-the-loop robot control, and frequently use entertainment methods to bootstrap the development of everyday social robots. Past projects include Cyberflora, a robot flower garden installation at the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, Silicon Comedy, an online learning system for interactive robot comedy featured on TED.com, and This Too Shall Pass, a music video featuring a two-floor Rube Goldberg Machine that won a British Video Music Award. Her academic background included a postdoc at Stanford University exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces, a Robotics Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University on Expressive Motion for Low Degree-of-Freedom Robots, and M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed a sensate skin for a robot teddy bear at the MIT Media Lab. Outside of academia, she has developed robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and sensor and field applications as an early employee of Aldebaran Robotics, the developers of the Nao and Pepper robots (since acquired by Softbank). Please watch this space for future AI Seminars : https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/EECS/research/AI<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fengineeri…> Rajesh Mangannavar, Graduate Student Oregon State University ---- AI Seminar Important Reminders: -> For graduate students in the AI program, attendance is strongly encouraged

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No Robotics Seminar this week
by Smart, William 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

Roboticists, Sorry for the late notice, but we've had a bit of a change of schedule. There will be no robotics seminar this week. Prof. Grimm will be speaking next week about her work with a bunch of Canadian lawyers to help the Canadian government draft better laws around robotics. And, the following week, we'll have a rescheduled talk by Peter Asaro. Announcements to follow. If you're craving a robot-focused talk on Friday, Prof Knight is giving a talk about Best Practices for Robot Death for the AI seminar in KEC at 1pm. cheers -- Bill

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Robotics Seminar 11/17: Brian Flynn (Mass Lowell)
by Smart, William 16 Nov '23

16 Nov '23

Roboticists, A reminder to join us tomorrow for another Robotics Seminar, complete with coffee and cake. KEC 1001, 10am, as usual -- Bill Evaluating Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Performance and Generalizability Brian Flynn, Universiry of Massachusetts – Lowell Abstract: This talk will review research efforts of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for developing evaluation methodologies to measure the performance of robotic grasping and manipulation. We utilize an approach towards modularizing the problem space in both software and hardware, swapping out components to measure their impact. This methodology allows for streamlined experimentation into higher-level capabilities such as the generalizability of components (i.e., their robustness in the face of variation) and better enables reproducibility and replicability. Bio: Brian Flynn is the Robotics Engineer at the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He graduated from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Science in Robotics Engineering. Brian's interests include the development and programming of robotic systems and their associated tools and infrastructure.

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Robotics Seminar 11/17: Brian Flynn (UMass Lowell)
by Smart, William 16 Nov '23

16 Nov '23

Roboticists, Join us this Friday for another Robotics Seminar, this time about grasping, testing, and benchmarking, with Brian Flynn who’s visiting from UMass Lowell. Come grasp some coffee, taste test the cake, but try not to mark the benches at 10am in KEC 1001. cheers -- Bill Evaluating Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Performance and Generalizability Brian Flynn, Universiry of Massachusetts – Lowell Abstract: This talk will review research efforts of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for developing evaluation methodologies to measure the performance of robotic grasping and manipulation. We utilize an approach towards modularizing the problem space in both software and hardware, swapping out components to measure their impact. This methodology allows for streamlined experimentation into higher-level capabilities such as the generalizability of components (i.e., their robustness in the face of variation) and better enables reproducibility and replicability. Bio: Brian Flynn is the Robotics Engineer at the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He graduated from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Science in Robotics Engineering. Brian's interests include the development and programming of robotic systems and their associated tools and infrastructure.

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Robotics Seminar 11/17: Brian Flynn (UMass Lowell)
by Smart, William 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

Roboticists, Sorry for the late email this week, but we have a seminar this Friday with Brian Flynn from UMass Lowell. Still waiting on some of the details, which I’ll send out as soon as I have, but I can confirm the appearance of coffee and cake, in the usual place, at the usual time. KEC 1001, 10am, 11/17. No seminar next week, because of the Thanksgiving holiday. cheers -- Bill

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Robotics Seminar 11/3: Benji Brash (Oregon State University)
by Smart, William 02 Nov '23

02 Nov '23

Roboticists, Just a reminder to join us tomorrow for a talk about how to extract the most from robotics data and what it’s like to be in a robotics startup in 2023. Coffee and cake, you ask? Come to KEC 1001 at 10am and find out. Grad student Q&A in the robotics conference room directly after the talk. cheers -- Bill Surviving the Flood (of Rosbags) Benji Barash, Roboto AI Abstract: Today, robotics engineers have to contend with a flood of log data that robots generate. With little warning, you can end up with thousands of rosbags and other log files. There isn’t much tooling available to manage all of this data, which causes significant friction during research and development. In this talk, we'll cover key lessons learned from productizing robots at Amazon over the last decade, and introduce a framework for processing and searching large volumes of robotics data at scale. We'll also discuss opportunities to host and share robotics datasets and algorithms for community use. Bio: Benji Barash is the co-founder and CEO at Roboto AI, a new startup based in Seattle and Zurich focused on accelerating the search and analysis of robotics data. Prior to founding Roboto, Benji worked as an engineering leader at Amazon Robotics, and as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). Benji was a founding engineer on Amazon's drone delivery program in Cambridge, UK, where he led the development of large-scale simulation platforms and safety-critical autonomy algorithms. Originally from London, Benji holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Bristol.

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