Seminar - Bilge Mutlu Feb. 15

Robots are unique in their ability to afford interaction using the wider range of human communicative capabilities. When used effectively in human interactions, these capabilities promise significant positive social, cognitive, and task outcomes, such as improved learning, motivation, persuasion, and collaboration. How might robots take full advantage of this promise to improve our lives? What methods will enable us to capture, computationally represent, and design these capabilities into robots? Do these capabilities help us achieve improvements in learning, collaboration, and wellbeing? In this talk, I will describe a research program aimed at building a computational understanding of these human communicative capabilities and using this understanding to design effective social robots with the goal of achieving such improvements in human-robot interaction.