Fifth year PhD student, Brad Hayes, is traveling to Mallorca, Spain to attend the Xperience Summer School October 2-5, 2013. Brad will be presenting his research on social hierarchical learning as supported by the Office of Naval Research grant received by Professor Scassellati and the lab. The Xperience program brings together scholars from Robotics and Cognitive Science, allowing summer school students the opportunity to learn about the cross-links between these fields and discuss topics with leading scientists. This program is organized in conjunction with the Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology in Goettingen, Germany.
The Xperience Project addresses the problem of generative knowledge construction in robotics to rapidly create new concepts and react to unanticipated situations using experience. This problem is addressed by structural bootstrapping, an idea taken from language acquisition research: knowledge about grammar allows a child to infer the meaning of an unknown word from its grammatical role together with understood remainder of the sentence. Structural bootstrapping generalizes this idea for general cognitive learning: if you know the structure of a process the role of unknown actions and entities can be inferred from their location and use in the process. This approach enables rapid generalization and allow agents to communicate effectively.
Xperience aims at the implementation of complete robot systems for automating introspective, predictive, and interactive understanding of actions and dynamic situations based on structural bootstrapping. Xperience evaluates this on state-of-the-art humanoid robots (ARMAR and iCub) demonstrating rich interactions with humans.
This is a highly-competitive program with limited participant spaces. Participants present their work in an interactive poster Session on October 4. Selected student papers are presented orally.
For more information on this program, please visit xperience.org.