PI Stories by Xavier Alameda-Pineda

PI Stories is a series of seminars organized by the IECS (former ICT) Doctoral School, aimed at providing the opportunity to the PhD students to learn the success stories of some of the most talented researchers in the world. Details at: iecs.unitn.it/...
Robots with autonomous communication capabilities interacting with multiple persons at the same time in the wild are both a societal mirage and a scientific Ithaca.
Indeed, despite the presence of various companion robots on the market, their social skills are derived from machine learning techniques functioning mostly under laboratory conditions.
Moreover, current robotic platforms operate in confined environments, where on one side, qualified personnel received detailed instructions on how to interact with the robot as part of their technical training, and on the other side, external sensors and actuators may be available to ease the interaction between the robot and the environment
Trespassing these two constraints would allow a robotic platform to freely interact with multiple humans in a wide variety of every-day situations, e.g. as an office assistant, a health-care helper, a janitor or a waiter/waitress, that is to be socially intelligent.
In the H2020 SPRING and ANR ML3RI projects, we investigate new machine learning methods for audio, visual and audio-visual perception, as well as for multi-modal robot control, that would allow the robot the better perceive its environment and to take actions that are socially acceptable.
In this seminar, the preliminary results of both projects will be presented and discussed, showcasing the limitations of current methodologies, and drawing interesting future research lines.