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University of Tsukuba

Abstract:

Robotics for Children: From Exploratory Studies to Practical Applications.
The talk will start from the early studies of Sony’s entertainment robots in 2000s, a three-year exploratory field study conducted in a nursery school in University of California (2004-2007), and then some recent topics in educational robotics including a commercial application released from SoftBank (2014).

Bio

Dr. Fumihide Tanaka received a Ph.D. from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2003. His dissertation was about multitask (lifelong) reinforcement learning. Then, he joined Sony Corporation as a research engineer for entertainment robots, AIBO/QRIO. In 2004, he started a collaborative research project with the Machine Perception Laboratory in the University of California, San Diego where he and his colleagues conducted a long-term field study of robots interacting with young children in a nursery school. Since then he has been actively working in the area of educational robots and child-robot interaction, and now is recognized as one of the pioneers in this research area. He moved to academia in 2008, the University of Tokyo (ISI Lab directed by Prof. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, -2014), and the University of Tsukuba (current).

 

Date: 2016-Nov-07     Time: 11:30:00     Room: IST TAGUSPARK room 0.65 Ground floor


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