Events
OTTRS Speaker Series: Robots that Teach
Event Start Date: Friday, September 20, 2024 - 12:00 pm
Event End Date: Friday, September 20, 2024 - 1:00 pm
Location: Virtual/Zoom, Registration TBD
UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the OTTRS Speaker Series! (Registration required)
Abstract:
Robots have long been used to provide assistance to individual users through physical interaction, typically by supporting direct physical rehabilitation or by providing a service such as retrieving items or cleaning floors. Socially assistive robotics (SAR) is a comparatively new field of robotics that focuses on developing robots capable of assisting users through social rather than physical interaction. Just as a good coach or teacher can provide motivation, guidance, and support without making physical contact with a student, socially assistive robots attempt to provide the appropriate emotional, cognitive, and social cues to encourage development, learning, or therapy for an individual. In this talk, I will review some of the reasons why physical robots rather than virtual agents are essential to this effort, highlight some of the major research issues within this area, and describe some of our recent results building supportive robots for teaching social skills to children with autism spectrum disorder.
Brian Scassellati
Bio: Brian Scassellati is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University. His research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Using computational modeling and socially interactive robots, his research evaluates models of how infants acquire social skills and assists in the diagnosis and quantification of disorders of social development (such as autism).
Virtual/Zoom, Registration TBDUMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the OTTRS Speaker Series! (Registration required)
Abstract:
Robots have long been used to provide assistance to individual users through physical interaction, typically by supporting direct physical rehabilitation or by providing a service such as retrieving items or cleaning floors. Socially assistive robotics (SAR) is a comparatively new field of robotics that focuses on developing robots capable of assisting users through social rather than physical interaction. Just as a good coach or teacher can provide motivation, guidance, and support without making physical contact with a student, socially assistive robots attempt to provide the appropriate emotional, cognitive, and social cues to encourage development, learning, or therapy for an individual. In this talk, I will review some of the reasons why physical robots rather than virtual agents are essential to this effort, highlight some of the major research issues within this area, and describe some of our recent results building supportive robots for teaching social skills to children with autism spectrum disorder.
Brian Scassellati
Bio: Brian Scassellati is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University. His research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Using computational modeling and socially interactive robots, his research evaluates models of how infants acquire social skills and assists in the diagnosis and quantification of disorders of social development (such as autism).
Speaker(s): Brian Scassellati, Professor, Computer Science, Yale University