Title: Robotics and AI: the early divorce and remarriage shades
Abstract: Recently, the number of papers dealing with learning and AI has substantially increased in major robotics conferences and journals. This evidence shows the renew of the interest of the robotics community to recent developments and trends in AI at large. Nevertheless, this interest is not new. Early developments of AI formerly attempted to solve planning, perception understanding and even control in robotics, without significant breakthroughs. Meanwhile, robotics spread from the automation fields to applications more centered toward human and services where the need of the level of cognition in terms of interactions is high. Recent trends of AI and its application in robotics exhibit the same buzz as twenty years ago. Then, it is legitimate to ask what are the robotic problems we expect to see solved and how? Or, what make recent trends in AI different in essence from years ago. The answer to this question seems to be roughly “data” and “computational power”. Whereas the latter seem to be a plausible perspective, the availability of data in robotics is neither granted nor easy to obtain. We probably need to be able to build a science of “data with robotic motions”. My talk will focus on some ideas and headlines together with experience from settling joint laboratories and collaborations with different foreign institutions and persons from different fields, because this is a critical issue for a tangible success.
Bio: Dr Abderrahmane Kheddar received the BS in Computer Science degree from the Institut National d’Informatique (ESI), Algiers, the MSc and PhD degree in robotics, both from the University of Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is presently Directeur de Recherche at CNRS and the Codirector of the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotic Laboratory (JRL), UMI3218/RL, Tsukuba, Japan. He is also leading the Interactive Digital Humans (IDH) team at CNRS-University of Montpellier LIRMM, France. His research interests include haptics, humanoids and recently thought-based control using brain machine interfaces. He is a founding member of the IEEE/RAS chapter on haptics, the co-chair and founding member of the IEEE/RAS Technical committee on model-based optimization, he is a member of the steering committee of the IEEE Brain Initiative, Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and within the editorial board of other robotics journals; he is a founding member of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics and served in its editorial board during three years (2007-2010). He is an IEEE senior member and titular full member of the National Academy of Technology of France and recently knight of the national order of merits of France.
