 Prof. Jun Ho Oh (KAIST, Korea) |
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Prof. Jun Ho Oh(52) received his B.S. and M.S. degree from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea in 1977 and 1979, respectively. After short working at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute as a researcher from 1979 to 1981, he went to United States to continue further study and received Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering in the field of automatic control at U.C., Berkeley in 1985. He is now working at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) as a professor of mechanical engineering since 1985. He performed many industry and government research projects in motion control, sensors, microprocessor applications, and robotics, etc. He is especially interested in mechatronics and system integration. Base upon his experiences and academic background in such areas, he recently completed unique humanoid robot series KHR-1, KHR-2 and Hubo. And he also developed Albert Hubo and Hubo FX-1. He is currently studying to improve the performance of humanoid robot for faster and more stable walking, robust robot system integration and light weight design, etc. He is a member of ASME and IEEE. |
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It was considered that the humanoid robot development required long period of research time and big size of manpower with huge amount of budget. The announcement of Hubo fascinated not only Korean people but also many researchers in the world. It proved that such kind complicated project could be accomplished by a single laboratory in the university in a relatively short period of time with very limited fund. This presentation will deliver how Hubo was developed and what was the design strategy and will get a perspective of the possible future applications of humanoid. It will also cover the very common questions: "why do we study about the humanoid and why should we do?" and "How would the biped walking be made and what kind of tantalizing problems do we have to face for it?" |
 Dr. Takayuki Kanda (ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Japan) |
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Takayuki Kanda is a Senior Research Scientist at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. He received his B. Eng, M. Eng, and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. He is one of the starting members of Communication Robots project at ATR. He has developed a communication robot, Robovie, and applied it in daily situations, such as peer-tutor at elementary school and a museum exhibit guide. His research interests include human-robot interaction, interactive humanoid robots, and field trials. |
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Over the past several years, many humanoid robots have been developed, and they can typically make sophisticated human-like expressions with their head and arms. We believe that humanoid robots will be suitable for communicating with people. The human-like bodies of humanoid robots enable humans to intuitively understand their gestures and cause people to unconsciously behave as if they were communicating with humans. In the future, we believe that these robots will behave as peer-partners to support daily human activities based on advanced communication capabilities. We are developing such a "communication robot". We studied bodily interaction between humans and the robot in a laboratory environment, where we found the importance of cooperative behaviors. Moreover, the developed robots were applied in daily situations, such as elementary schools, a science museum, and a train station. Through these field trials, we have revealed possible applications and current problems. This talk describes the lessons learned from these previous studies and an approach for communication robots that work in such a daily situation. |
 Luc Steels (University of Brussels (VUB) and Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris.) |
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Luc Steels is professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Brussels and director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His work has spanned many areas of robotics and AI, from problem solving and sensori-motor intelligence to language. The past decade Steels has focused on studying how language and meaning could originate in situated embodied language games with physical robots and he achieved with his team several breakthroughs in the areas of convention spreading, self-organisation of speech, the co-evolution of language and meaning, and the emergence of grammar. His publications include hundreds of articles (in IEEE Intelligent Systems, Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Trends in Cognitive Science, AI journal, Transactions of the Royal Society, etc.) as well as a dozen edited books. His work has also been shown in the context of art exhibitions and theatre plays. |
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Language and natural dialogue are not fixed static things. They evolve, because human users constantly invent, adapt, and mold their communication systems and? conceptualisations of the world in order to have a maximum chance of communicative success with minimal amount of effort. It follows that in order to achieve a natural open-ended dialogue between humans and robots (or other types of machines), we need to understand the creative side of language and concept formation. That is why we have been engaged in experiments how robots could develop their own communication systems, with the goal of understanding progressively the enormously complex processes that support open-ended dialogue with humans. My presentation will report how far we are in these experiments. In fact, today we can already achieve the spontaneous self-organisation of lexicons and even grammatically structured languages in (humanoid) robot populations that play language games about the world. |
 Prof. Mandayam A. Srinivasan (MIT, USA) |
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Dr. Srinivasan's research on the science and technology underlying information acquisition and object manipulation through touch has fundamentally contributed to the emergence of the new and exciting field of Haptics. He has been recognized worldwide as an authority on haptic computation, cognition, and communication in humans and machines, particularly to enhance human-machine interactions in virtual environment systems. He has conducted pioneering investigations in skin biomechanics, tactile neuroscience, sensorimotor psychophysics, haptic device design and multimodal rendering algorithms, and has demonstrated novel applications of this multidisciplinary research in areas such as the development of multi-user haptics in shared virtual environments, medical simulations involving force feedback for training, and direct control of machines from brain neural signals. |
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