Seminars and Events

Artificial Intelligence Seminar

Neurorobotic Design Principles: Connecting the Brain, Body and Environment

Event Details

In their book “How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence,” Pfeifer and Bongard put forth an embodied approach to cognition. Because of this position, many of their robot examples demonstrated “intelligent” behavior despite limited neural processing. It is our belief that neurorobots, that is autonomous systems modeled after some aspect of the brain, should attempt to follow many of these principles. In this talk, I discuss several principles to consider when designing neurorobots and experiments using robots to test brain theories. These principles are strongly inspired by Pfeifer and Bongard but build on their design principles by grounding them in neuroscience and by adding principles based on neuroscience research. Our design principles fall into three categories. First, organisms must react quickly and appropriately to events. Second, organisms must have the ability to learn and build memories over their lifetimes. Third, organisms must weigh options that are crucial for survival. We believe that by following these design principles a robot’s behavior will be more naturalistic and more successful.

 

Speaker Bio

Jeffrey L. Krichmar received a B.S. in Computer Science in 1983 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University in 1997. He spent 15 years as a software engineer on projects ranging from the PATRIOT Missile System at the Raytheon Corporation to Air Traffic Control for the Federal Systems Division of IBM. In 1997, he became an assistant professor at The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. From 1999 to 2007, he was a Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute. He currently is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include neurorobotics, embodied cognition, biologically plausible models of learning and memory, and the effect of neural architecture on neural function.

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The Speaker approved to be recorded for this AI Seminar talk, it will be posted on our USC/ISI YouTube page afterwards within 1-2 business days: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCISI.

Host: Mohammad Rostami, POC: Alma Nava