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Pre-registration is FREE! Registration on the day of the event is $25
Robots and autonomous systems are increasingly becoming a part of our everyday life. In particular co-Robots, in which robots have a symbiotic relationship with people, have the potential to increase social well-being and open up new socioeconomic opportunities. For example, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), co-Robotics, and Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) are increasingly being used for entertainment, education, telepresence, rehabilitation and therapy. SARs have the potential to help children with developmental disorders, such as autism or attention deficit disorders, because robots fall somewhere between toys, which do not elicit novel social behaviors, and people or animals, which can be a source of confusion and distress to children with developmental disorders. In the classroom, social robots can act as digital ethnographers by: automatically detecting what robot-generated activities children enjoy most, monitoring development of social structure within the classroom, keeping track of and improving vocabulary development, and provide useful information to parents, teachers, clinicians & researchers.
To date, most of these co-robots focus on eye contact (e.g., shared attention, shared gaze, etc.) and auditory cues (e.g., catch phrases and music), but tend to neglect other sensory systems important for social behavior, such as tactile interaction.
The purpose of this workshop is to explore the use of tactile sensing in HRI and SARs. While haptics is a well developed research domain, we intend to focus on the kind of touch that occurs between humans and with their environment in social learning and collaborative settings. We will examine the observed and potential role for touch in human-to- robot and robot-to-robot interactions. We will explore application domains, as well as different materials (i.e., artificial skin and soft robotics) for exploring the sense of touch in robots.
Our goal is: 1) Educate the community on making tactile sensing and interaction a main focus of their co-robots. 2) Explore the possibilities of using touch and new methods of interaction in HRI and SAR systems. The workshop will be a one-day open-forum with talks given by the organizers and an interactive session with demonstrations and posters given by students and other interested participants.
Organizers
Andrea Chiba
achiba@ucsd.edu
http://healthsciences.ucsd.edu/education/neurograd/faculty/Pages/andrea-chiba.aspx
Andrea Chiba is a Professor in the Department of
Cognitive Science and in the Program for Neuroscience at the University of
California, San Diego. She is Co-Director and the Science Director of the
Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, an NSF Science of Learning Center. The
Center research is focused on the importance of time and timing in various
aspects of learning, from the level of the synapse to social interactions. The
goal of the Center is not only to understand learning, but also to translate
this understanding to the practice of educating. Chiba is involved in many
Center projects that allow cross-species comparisons of learning and memory,
bridging from rodent to human. The Chiba Laboratory is focused on gaining an
understanding of the neural systems and principles underlying aspects of
learning, memory, affect, and attention, with an emphasis on neural plasticity.
Her group’s work is highly interdisciplinary, using a variety of
neurobiological, neurochemical, neurophysiology, computational, and behavioral
techniques.
Ting-Shuo Chou
tingshuc@uci.edu
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ting-shuo-chou-a05b1955
Ting-Shuo Chou received the Ph.D. degree in computer sciences from University of California, Irvine in 2015 and the M.S. degree in computer science from National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan in 2006. He is currently an Assistant Project Scientist in the department of cognitive sciences, UCI School of Social Sciences. His research interests include socially assistive robotics (SARs), neurorobotics, neuromorphic engineering, and simulations on large-scale neural networks. His recent research focuses on a SAR that communicates with people through tactile interactions. Based on the robot, he explores opportunities of helping children with ASD or ADHD.
Deborah Forster
dforster@ucsd.edu
http://www.calit2.net/people/detail.php?id=948
Deborah
Forster received BSc in biology and PhD in cognitive science from UC San Diego.
She is an Assistant Project Scientist at the Qualcomm Institute, where she
currently leads the Machine Perception Lab and is a researcher in the Temporal
Dynamics of Learning Center, at the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San
Diego. Her research program on Technology Enhanced Learning is informed by her
field studies of social complexity and distributed cognition in wildranging baboons, and of humans in technologyrich
environments such as driving, and the use of social robots in early childhood
education.
Jeff
Krichmar
jkrichma@uci.edu
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkrichma/
Jeff Krichmar received a
B.S. in Computer Science in 1983 from the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, a M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University in
1991, and a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason
University in 1997. He currently is a professor in the Department of Cognitive
Sciences and the Department of Computer Science at the University of
California, Irvine. He has been promoting the field of Neurorobots
and Brain-Based Robotics for over 15 years. One of his more recent robots
senses the environment through tactile interaction. It can sense touch on its
“shell” and gives feedback through auditory cues, movement, and coloration of
its shell. The robot’s control is guided by neurobiologically
plausible model of learning and somatosensory processing in the brain. It has
potential applications as a SAR and in entertainment.
Michael T. Tolley
tolley@ucsd.edu
http://bioinspired.eng.ucsd.edu/
Mike Tolley received BEng from McGill University, Montreal,
Canada, and PhD in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, New
York. He is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering at UC San Diego, where he leads the Bioinspired Robotics and Design
Lab. His research program aim
to borrow
ideas from nature to
inspire engineered systems with new capabilities. In particular, he has ongoing
projects in soft robotics, fabrication by folding, and selfassembly.
Participants
William Harwin
w.s.harwin@reading.ac.uk
https://www.reading.ac.uk/sse/about/staff/w-s-harwin.aspx
Professor
William Harwin Director of Research for the School of
Systems Engineering at the University of Reading, where his research interests
encompass cybernetics and the interfaces between humans and smart machines as
typified by haptic devices, and medical and rehabilitation robots.
Guy Hoffman
hoffman@cornell.edu
http://guyhoffman.com/
Guy Hoffman holds a PhD from MIT in the field of human robot interaction. He is an Assistant Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. He heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC2) group, studying the algorithms, interaction schema, and designs enabling close interactions between people and personal robots in the workplace and at home.
Francis McGlone
F.P.McGlone@ljmu.ac.uk
https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/staff-profiles/faculty-of-science/natural-sciences-and-psychology/francis-mcglone
Professor
Francis McGlone is the head of the Somatosensory
& Affective Neuroscience Group at the School of Natural Sciences &
Psychology, Liverpool JM University, and Professor in Neuroscience at LJMU. He
is also Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. His primary area of
academic research is characterising the role of
afferent c-fibres in humans, investigating their role
in pain, itch, and more concertedly the functional and affective properties of
a novel class of c-fibres - C-tactile afferents – hypothesised to code for the pleasure of intimate touch.
Techniques used in this research span single unit recordings with microneurography, psychophysical measurements, functional
neuroimaging, behavioural measures, and
psychopharmacological approaches to investigate the role of the brain transmitter
serotonin in affiliative and social touch.
David Reinkensmeyer
dreinken@uci.edu
http://biorobotics.eng.uci.edu/people/djr
Professor
Reinkensmeyer's research interests are in
neuromuscular control, motor learning, robotics, and rehabilitation. A major
goal is to develop physically interacting, robotic and mechatronic devices to
help the nervous system recover arm, hand, and leg movement ability after neurologic
injuries such as stroke and spinal cord injury. Another goal is to understand
the computational mechanisms of human motor learning, in order to provide a
rational basis for designing movement training devices. Prof. Reinkensmeyer's laboratory has developed a variety of
robotic devices for manipulating and measuring movement in humans and rodents.
These devices are being used to investigate the role of mechanical assistance
in retraining arm movement following stroke, the feasibility of providing movement
training remotely using the Internet, and the role of sensory information in
locomotor plasticity after spinal cord injury. Dr. Reinkensmeyer's
laboratory helped develop the T-WREX arm exoskeleton for neurologic
rehabilitation, commercialized by Hocoma as ArmeoSpring and now in use in over 700 facilities
worldwide, and the MusicGlove, a glove that senses
touch for hand rehabilitation, commercialized by Flint Rehabilitation Devices.
Veronica Santos
vjsantos@ucla.edu
,
http://BiomechatronicsLab.ucla.edu
Professor
Veronica Santos is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Lab. She received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering with a music minor from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. From 2000 to 2001, she was a Quality Engineer and Research and Development Engineer at Guidant Corporation in Santa Clara, CA, specializing in life-saving cardiovascular technology. Dr. Santos received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering with a biometry minor from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2004 and 2007, respectively. From 2007 to 2008, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California where she worked on a team to develop a novel biomimetic tactile sensor for prosthetic hands. From 2008 to 2014, Dr. Santos was an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program at Arizona State University, where she directed the ASU Biomechatronics Lab. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics.
Consultants
Carissa
Cascio
carissa.cascio@vanderbilt.edu
http://www.casciolab.com/
Dr. Cascio’s graduate
training was in neuroscience at Emory University. My work was centered on
sensory neuroscience applied to human and nonhuman primates, with an emphasis
on tactile perception and functional imaging. Having developed an interest in
the neuroscience of autism, I pursued postdoctoral studies at the
Neurodevelopmental Disorders Research Center at the University of North
Carolina. There she focused dually on somatosensory processing in individuals
with autism, and diffusion tensor imaging in young children with autism and
other developmental disabilities. In 2007, she joined the Psychiatric
Neuroimaging Program in Vanderbilt’s Department of Psychiatry. Her lab focuses
on the neural basis of sensory and repetitive behaviors in individuals with
autism spectrum disorders.
Javier
Movellan
javier@emotient.com
www.emotient.com
Javier Movellan
received his PhD at UC Berkeley where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He was a
research associate at Carnegie Mellon University before coming to UCSD. At UCSD
he
founded the Machine Perception Laboratory (MPLab), whose mission was to learn about intelligent
behavior by developing systems that operate in uncertain, time constrained, and
sensory rich conditions of daily life. His research spans machine learning,
machine perception (including vision and speech), automatic analysis of human
behavior, and social robots. He pioneered the development of social robots and
their use for early childhood education.
Javier was president/CEO of Machine Perception Technologies from 2008 to
2012, and is the founder and lead researcher at Emotient
.
Janet
Wiles
j.wiles@uq.edu.au
http://staff.itee.uq.edu.au/janetw/
Janet
Wiles received BSc and the PhD degrees in computer science from The University
of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. She is a Professor of Complex and Intelligent
Systems in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, and UQ-node Director of the
ARC Centre of Excellence in the Dynamics of Language. Her research program
involves using computational modeling, and social robots, to understand complex
systems with particular applications in biology, neuroscience, and cognition.
Robots developed by her group include the iRat, a
rat-sized robot for studies in cognitive and social robotics, and a child-sized
robot for education and social interactions with children.
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