Dr. Heriberto Cuayáhuitl, who will be joining the Lincoln School of Computer Science soon as a Senior Lecturer in L-CAS, will be presenting in our research seminar series on Fri 22/1/16, at 1pm. His talk titled “Autonomous Learning for Interactive Agents” will be held in room MB1020. This is a great opportunity for staff and students alike, to meet their colleague and lecturer to-be.
Title: Autonomous Learning for Interactive Agents
Abstract:
Robots that interact with humans are still confined to controlled spaces, such as lab environments, where they conduct highly pre-specified tasks in interaction with recruited and cooperative users. Some of the obstacles that restrict real world applicability (amongst others) are their heavy reliance on domain-specific pre-programming and learning tasks that arise from the real world rather than being contrived for the purpose of robot training. In this talk, I will present a research direction on autonomous learning that aims to alleviate the above problems in order to push interactive robots over the edge of wider usability. The core of my research lies in multi-task reinforcement learning that helps agents to understand and optimise their behaviour by interacting with humans and learning from feedback and examples. I will briefly present three applications of this autonomous learning framework: (1) a situated agent that learns to guide people in indoor environments using a divide-and-conquer approach, (2) a conversational robot that learns to play educational games from interacting with children, and (3) a strategic agent that learns trading negotiations using deep reinforcement learning. I will conclude by discussing directions for future research that further increase the level of autonomy of interactive agents for their application in real world scenarios.
Bio:
Dr Heriberto Cuayáhuitl is a Research Fellow in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Campus. He received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2009, and has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). His research interest is in machine learning for interactive systems and robots, and he has published 60 research papers in this area. He is lead organiser of the international workshop series on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems (MLIS), and has been guest editor of the journals ACM Transactions on Interactive Interactive Systems and Elsevier Computer Speech and Language.