WPI Computer Science - Colloquium Announcement

Towards Cooperative Conversational Robots and Assistants:

Grounded Situation Models - Where words and percepts meet

Nikolaos Mavridis
PhD, MIT Media Laboratory

Friday 23rd March 2007
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract:

Towards the long-term objective of truly cooperative conversational robots and assistants, an extensible computational model of embodied, situated language agents and and an implementation of the model in the form of an interactive, conversational robot are presented. The central idea is to endow agents with a sensor-updated "structured blackboard" representational structure called a Grounded Situation Model (GSM), which is closely related to the cognitive psychology notion of situation models. The GSM serves as a workspace with contents similar to a "theatrical stage" in the agent's "mind." The GSM may be filled either with the contents of the agent's present here-and-now physical situation, or a past situation that is being recalled, or an imaginary situation that is being described or planned. Furthermore, the GSM contains descriptions of both physical (such as objects) as well as mental aspects of situations (such as beliefs of others). Most importantly, the proposed GSM design enables bidirectional translation between linguistic descriptions and perceptual data/expectations. An instance of the model was implemented on "Ripley", a manipulator robot with touch, vision, and speech synthesis/recognition, which is able to service manipulation commands, answer questions about the present or past, and even "imagine" parts of situations through descriptions. Thus, the effectiveness of the GSM proposal is demonstrated through a real-world implementation whose abilities are comparable to those implied by a standard and widely used test of language comprehension for three-year old children (the Token Test for Children), and in some directions even surpass those abilities.

______

Nikolaos Mavridis, PhD, from Thessaloniki, Greece, is a Research Assistant at the MIT Media Laboratory. His five-year Engineering Diploma (M.Eng.) focussing on Electrical and Computer Engineering was from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has a BSc in Mathematics from the UK Open University. He also received an MS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA focused on control theory and signal processing. His research is concerned with Cooperative Situated Conversational Assistants that can communicate fluidly with humans using natural language.

Host: Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.

Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu
Last modified: Mon Mar 19 19:10:20 EDT 2007