Program: Lecture at CMU with Henny Admoni,Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

WHO: Members, Scholars and Friends

WHY: Human-robot collaboration has the potential to transform the way people work and live. Researchers are currently developing robots that assist people in public spaces, on the job, and in their homes. To be effective assistants, these robots must be able to recognize their human partners' goals, needs, and future actions. Thus, developing effective human-robot collaborations requires a multidisciplinary approach that involves fundamental robotics algorithms, insights from human psychology, and techniques from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. In this talk, I will describe my work on robots that collaborate with and assist humans on complex tasks, such as eating a meal. I will show how robots can use natural, intuitive human behaviors to predict human mental states, and how we can integrate mental states into robot action algorithms to achieve more successful human-robot collaborations.

WHEN: Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Program 6:00 PM -08:00 PM. 

WHERE: Tepper Quad, 4765 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Kedia Tayur Room #4242

Signs will be in place directing members to the 4th floor.

COST: Free

PARKING: Free. East Campus Parking Garage on Forbes and Beller Streets

RSVP: by Tuesday, January 7, 2020. Max attendance 50 people.

See Who’s Coming

About Henny Admoni, PhD

Henny Admoni is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab. Henny studies how to develop intelligent robots that can assist and collaborate with humans on complex tasks like preparing a meal. She is most interested in how natural human communication, like where someone is looking, can reveal underlying human intentions and can be used to improve human-robot interactions. Henny's research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Office of Naval Research, the Paralyzed Veterans of America Foundation, and Sony Corporation. Her work has been featured by the media such as NPR's Science Friday, Voice of America News, and WESA radio.

Previously, Henny was a postdoctoral fellow at CMU with Siddhartha Srinivasa in the Personal Robotics Lab. Henny completed her PhD in Computer Science at Yale University with Professor Brian Scassellati. Her PhD dissertation was about modeling the complex dynamics of nonverbal behavior for socially assistive human-robot interaction. Henny holds an MS in Computer Science from Yale University, and a BA/MA joint degree in Computer Science from Wesleyan University