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CATEGORIES:Academics,College of Engineering,Community,Lectures and Programs
DESCRIPTION:Inaugural Lecture: Gregory Chirikjian\, Willis F. Harrington Pr
 ofessor of Mechanical Engineering\n\n"From State Estimation to Affordance L
 earning and Robot Imagination"\n\nReception to Follow in Du Pont Hall Lobby
 \n\n \n\nABSTRACT\nToday’s robots are very brittle in their intelligence. T
 his follows from a legacy of industrial robotics where robots pick and plac
 e known parts repetitively. For humanoid robots to function as servants in 
 the home and in hospitals they will need to demonstrate higher intelligence
 \, and must be able to function in ways that go beyond the stiff prescribed
  programming of their industrial counterparts. A new approach to service ro
 botics is discussed here. The affordances of broad classes of common object
 s such as chairs\, cups\, etc.\, are defined. When a new object is encounte
 red\, it is scanned and a virtual version is put into a simulation wherein 
 the robot “imagines’’ how the object can be used. In this way\, robots can 
 reason about objects that they have not encountered before. After affordanc
 es are assessed\, the robot then takes action in the real world\, resulting
  in real2sim2real transfer. As part of this broad framework\, probabilistic
  methods on Lie-groups are used. These mathematical methods were developed 
 originally by the presenter for mobile robot state estimation\, and have be
 en adapted recently to one-shot learning of affordances from demonstration.
  Videos of physical demonstrations will illustrate the effectiveness of thi
 s paradigm. Future plans will be discussed\, including the integration of l
 arge language models. \n \n\nBIOGRAPHY\nA native of Maryland\, Gregory S. C
 hirikjian received undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University in 1
 988\, and a Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology\, Pasa
 dena\, in 1992. From 1992 until 2021\, he served on the faculty of the Depa
 rtment of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University\, attaining th
 e rank of full professor in 2001. Additionally\, from 2004-2007\, he served
  as department chair. Starting in January 2019\, he moved to the National U
 niversity of Singapore\, where he served as Head of the Mechanical Engineer
 ing Department\, where he hired 14 new professors. Since January 2024 he ha
 s served as the mechanical engineering chair at the University of Delaware\
 , where he has hired two new professors so far.\nChirikjian’s research inte
 rests include robotics\, applications of group theory in state estimation\,
  information-theoretic inequalities\, and applied mathematics more broadly.
  He is a 1993 National Science Foundation Young Investigator and a 1994 Pre
 sidential Faculty Fellow. In 2010 he became a fellow of the IEEE. From 2014
 -15\, he served as a program director for the US National Robotics Initiati
 ve\, which included responsibilities in the Robust Intelligence cluster in 
 the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of CISE at NSF. Chirikjian
  is the author of more than 250 journal and conference papers and the prima
 ry author of three books\, including “Engineering Applications of Noncommut
 ative Harmonic Analysis” (2001) and “Stochastic Models\, Information Theory
 \, and Lie Groups\, Vols. 1+2” (2009\, 2011). In 2016\, an expanded edition
  of his 2001 book was published as a Dover book under a new title\, “Harmon
 ic Analysis for Engineers and Applied Scientists.”
DTEND:20240924T220000Z
DTSTAMP:20260315T083029Z
DTSTART:20240924T200000Z
GEO:39.680012;-75.753181
LOCATION:Mitchell Hall
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY:Inaugural Lecture: Gregory Chirikjian
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_47172067588433
URL:https://events.udel.edu/event/inaugural-lecture-gregory-chirikjian-will
 is-f-harrington-professor-of-mechanical-engineering
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