Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems

21^st August 2012, 15:00 Ashton Lecture Theatre
Prof. Elizabeth Sklar
Department of Computer and Information Science
Brooklyn College
City University of New York
USA

Abstract

This talk discusses my work with autonomous systems, and the ways in which
humans can interact with such systems. In particular, I focus on two research
challenges: (1) human as collaborator and (2) human as trainer. In the first
case, I look at human/multi-robot teams, where a human operator and a number
of robots work together to address exploration problems. The robots function
as autonomous agents, and together with the operator, they share decision-making
about what to do in order to achieve system-level goals. Here, the robot team
helps the human explore regions that s/he cannot visit. In the second case, I
look at human-robot and, more generally, human-agent environments (e.g., games)
where a human provides training examples for an agent to learn from. These can
be provided either directly, using on-line techniques such as Learning from
Demonstration, or indirectly, using off-line techniques such as statistical
modeling of clickstream data. Here, the human helps the robot or agent learn
how to behave by showing the learner what to do. Results and current activities
related to each challenge will be presented.

BIO:
Elizabeth Sklar is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York
(CUNY), where she holds joint appointments in the Dept of Computer Science at
The Graduate Center and the Dept of Computer and Information Science at
Brooklyn College. She is Co-director of the CUNY Agents Lab and Director of the
Multimedia Computing program at Brooklyn College. Dr Sklar received her PhD in
Computer Science from Brandeis University in 2000. Her research interests
include human-robot interaction, behavior modeling, and multi-agent simulation.
She has received funding from the US National Science Foundation and other
sources to support projects that center around learning and interaction, in
humans and/or multi-agent systems, and for efforts to broaden the participation
of female and under-represented minority students in computing disciplines. Dr
Sklar has published over 100 papers in refereed conferences, workshops and
journals and has edited two books. She is a founding chair of RoboCupJunior and
is currently on the Board of Directors for the International Foundation for
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).