Dear All,
Just a reminder for the BCS-SGES lecture tomorrow at 6.00pm (details
below). Please circulate to colleagues as appropriate. Apologies for
cross-postings. All welcome.
Chris Christodoulou
............................................................................
SGES: The British Computer Society Specialist Group on Knowledge Based
Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence
SGES Evening Lectures at Birkbeck College, University of London
The Evening Lectures are free to both members and non-members of SGES.
Further information is available on the SGES website:
http://www.bcs-sges.org or from Dr. Chris Christodoulou, Department of
Computer Science, Birkbeck College ([log in to unmask])
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Wednesday April 25th 2001 (6 p.m.)
Dr Guido Bugmann (University of Plymouth)
"Programming Robots with Natural Language"
ABSTRACT
Future domestic robots will need to adapt to the special needs of
their users and to their environment. Programming by natural language
will be a key method enabling computer language-naive users to
instruct their robots. Its main advantages over other learning methods
are speed of acquisition and ability to build high level symbolic
rules into the robot.
The presentation describes initial steps and considerations towards
the design of a practical system in which users teach a vision-based
robot how to navigate in a miniature town. Users will use
unconstrained speech within a restricted domain-specific lexicon
determined by analysing a corpus of route instructions. This is
expected to maximise speech recognition performance. The robot knows
a set of primitive navigation procedures that the user can refer to
when giving route instructions. The presentation reports on the
analysis of the corpus in terms of lexicon and primitive actions
procedures. It then elaborates on the system-wide constraints imposed
by the use of Instruction-Based Learning (IBL) and describes proposed
solutions.
Biography
Dr Guido Bugmann was born in 1953 and has two children. He studied
Physics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In 1986 he
completed a PhD on "Fabrication of photovoltaic solar cells with
a-Si:H produced by anodic deposition in a DC plasma". He has then
worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne on the
development of a measurement system using an ultra-sound beam and
neural networks to measure the size of air bubbles in bacterial
cultures.
In 1989 he joined the Fundamental Research Laboratories of NEC in
Japan and modelled the function of biological neurons in the visual
system. In 1992 he joined Prof. John G. Taylor at King's College
London to develop applications of the pRAM neuron model and develop a
theory of visual latencies. In 1993 he joined the group of Prof. Mike
Denham at the University of Plymouth (UK) where he develops
vision-based navigation systems for robots, and investigates
biological planning and spatial memory. He supervises PhD students and
teaches neural computation at B.Sc. and M.Sc. level. Dr Bugmann has 3
patents and over 90 publications. He is member of the Swiss Physical
Society, The Neuroscience Society and The British Machine Vision
Association.
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Max Bramer
Chairman, SGES
http://www.bcs-sges.org
* * *
Dr Chris Christodoulou [log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
School of Computer Science and Information Systems
Birkbeck College, University of London
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK
Tel. (+44) 20-7631 6718, Fax (+44) 20-7631 6727
