UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

     "DeeChee: A Humanoid Robot that Acquires Words through Interaction"

                       Dr. Joe Saunders

                    (Adaptive Systems Research Group,
         Centre for Computer Science and Informatics Research,
                    University of Hertfordshire)

                    23 October 2013 (Wednesday)
                          1 pm -2 pm

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                       Seminar Room C152       

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

In this talk I will report on experiments and results from the EU FP7
I-TALK project of which the University of Hertfordshire Adaptive 
Systems Group was a partner. The project was concerned primarily with
how a humanoid robot could acquire language and manipulation skills. The
UH part focused on the acquisition of lexical meaning.  The research was
based on the principle that language acquisition in humans is
fundamentally linked to social interaction and that children acquire
language through interaction with others, typically their mothers, fa-
thers, siblings or carers. Central to this idea is that processes
in social interaction in early language acquisition provide a
sufficient bias for learning to occur and that meaning is derived
from the association of salient words with embodied sensorimotor
feedback as used in the context of embodied interaction. In the
presentation I will describe three key areas that we investigated,
the selection of salient words based on prosodic clues, expression of
words by the robot at a two-word stage to reflect learning and
grammatically correct presentation, and an in-depth analysis of the
relationship between words and the robots sensorimotor perceptions.
The results show that it is possible, via interaction, for a robot to
acquire and express words grounded in its own experience. 

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk