AASS Seminar - Frugal Robots: introducing sustainability in multiple time-scales of robotic behaviour and interaction with humans

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Katerina Pastra, Athena Research Center, Greece.

Remote attendance: https://oru-se.zoom.us/j/65096623293

Abstract

Times of crisis call for a frugal lifestyle, i.e., regulation of our available resources for achieving sustainability at all aspects of life, for both individual and social good. While there is a trend in science, technology, and innovation to align with this requirement for frugality, the main focus has been on ways to minimize resources, cost, and complexity at a system level. In this paper, we draw on frugality as an attitude/quality of individuals and social groups and on research that provides ground to the hypothesis that frugality is an evolutionary encoded goal in biological systems, inherently learned through interaction and communication with co-specifics, and argue that frugality should be ingrained in Human-Robot Interaction too. This requires the development of Frugal Robots (FRUBOTS), i.e., robots that engage in frugal decision-making, act and interact with humans frugally and help them become frugal as well. Such robots need to exhibit frugality by design, namely, they need - among others - a frugal value system at the core of their architecture and the ability for frugal action/behaviour learning, so that they act in a frugal manner in multiple timescales, i.e., at the motion or action level and at the individual or collaborative task level. The development of such systems and associated metrics requires human elicitation of frugal values, experimental exploration of hidden to human eye frugality in joint/coordinated human-human and human-robot interaction and of the ways humans learn frugality, as well as the challenging computational development of modules for frugal action planning, motion encoding, and action generation that serve frugality. This talk aims to introduce the concept of frugality in Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction, discuss the new questions posed and the computational challenges introduced when employing the Frugal Robots concept, and indicate the two-fold contribution of such technology to a more sustainable world.

Bio

Katerina Pastra is a Principle Researcher and Head of the Language & Robots Lab at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center, Greece., in which she employs neuroscientific findings on how the human brain works to develop software that enables intelligent systems to understand and integrate words, actions and perceptions for effective interaction with humans and enhancement of their quality of life. Her research comprises theoretical contributions, experimental findings and technology development in semantics and multimodal cognition for embodied AI applications. Katerina has also founded and directed for a decade-long (2010-2020) the Cognitive Systems Research Institute (CSRI), one of the first independent research institutes internationally focusing specifically on Cognitive Systems. Katerina has worked as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence since 2000, originally in the U.K. and then in Greece. Since a post-doc, she designed and coordinated her own basic research and development projects, such as the European-funded POETICON Projects series (2008-2016), with an international & highly interdisciplinary consortium and has contributed as a PI and/or Coordinator to more than 11 European and Nationally-funded Research and Development Projects. Among others, she is the recipient of a distinguishing John Latsis Foundation Award for research in Cross-media Semantics in Newspaper Caricatures, a Google Award for AAAI-event organization on vision-language Integration technologies, and a Best Paper Award by the British Computer Society on applied multimodal technology for Crime Scene Investigation. Her teaching experience involves teaching in the U.K and Greece at a post-graduate level. She has published several papers in international journals, she has delivered several scientific talks to highly diverse audiences and she is very active in publishing open access datasets and software and proposal and project reviewing for international research funding organsations. Among others, she has the honour to serve as the Vice-President of the Hellenic Association for Artificial Intelligence and as the President of GEARNET, the Greek Network of Gender Equity and Antidiscrimination Committees in Research Centers & Independent Research Institutes contributing thus to an unprecedented initiative for transforming the national research ecosystem with regards to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.