Abstract:

Teams of agents and robots, swarms of robots or animals, crowds of people, and collectives (of everything) permeate our technological, biological, and sociological worlds. They have inspired generations of researchers in multi-agent and multi-robot systems. However, much of the research has split along technological and philosophical
fault-lines: emergent or planned? communicating or just sensing? globally coordinated, or locally-reactive? rational or procedural?
This talk will briefly explore three fronts, which bridge over such fault lines: Cognitive psychology connecting with human crowds,reinforcement learning in swarms connecting with game theory, and Asimov’s laws implemented in molecular robots (nanobots). These fronts hint at a broader and deeper science of social intelligence
that is still waiting to be discovered.

Bio

Gal A. Kaminka is a professor at the computer science
department and the brain sciences research center, at Bar Ilan
University (Israel), where he chairs the Bar Ilan University
Robotics Consortium, and his MAVERICK research group.
His research expertise includes multi-agent and
multi-robot systems, teamwork and coordination, behavior and plan
recognition, and modeling social behavior. He received his PhD
from the University of Southern California (2000), spent time
as a post-doctorate fellow at Carnegie Mellon University (until 2002),
and a year as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study (2012). Prof. Kaminka was awarded an
IBM faculty award and top places at international robotics competitions.
He is the 2013 recipient of the Israeli national Landau Prize in exact sciences.

Date: 2016-Sep-05     Time: 15:00:00     Room: IST Tagusparque, room 1.38

For more information:

• http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~galk/