Abstract: A cognitive robot is a physically situated intelligent agent, therefore the tools and techniques for designing perception, action, and purposive, intelligent, and adaptive robot capabilities significantly overlap with AI’s methodologies and approaches. These range from symbolic mechanisms of knowledge representations, reasoning, and planning to reinforcement learning, and Language-Vision Foundational Models. In this talk I will present our recent work on novel neurosymbolic approaches for robot cognition, challenges and open problems.
Bio: Katia Sycara holds the Edward Fredkin Research Chair in Robotics at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and is Associate Director for Faculty at the Robotics Institute. She is affiliated faculty of the departments of Computer Science, Machine Learning, Human Computer Interaction and Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon. For the past 5 years she was the Director of the AFOSR Center of Excellence for Trustworthy Autonomy. She holds a B.S in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She held the Sixth Century Chair in Computing at the University of Aberdeen UK. She was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of the Aegean. Her research interests are in AI/ML, multi-agent and multi-robot systems, human robot teaming.. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the AAAI, the recipient of the ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award and the recipient of the Lifetime Research Award of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), Group Decision and Negotiation division. She has received 2 Influential 10-year paper awards and multiple best paper awards. She has given numerous invited talks, chaired and participated on the program committees of a large number of conferences.