Recently, new applications of intelligent systems like service robots and cognitive automobiles have been emerging. The success of these new applications will mainly lie in their ability to incrementally learn through multimodal interaction with their environment and with humans. Advances have been made both in interacting with the environment through the development of elementary sensorimotor skills as well as in human-machine interaction via improved social skills. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the hierarchy of robot skills and the important human-machine interaction modalities. Then I will introduce the incremental-learning approaches to developing self-valued, multisensor-based robot skills. Interactive assembly and service experiments in which a robot is instructed using natural language, gesture and gaze information will also be discussed. Finally, I will summarize the future research topics such as context-awareness, ambient sensing, autonomous credit-assignment, cognitive architecture and cross-modal integration.
Dr. Jianwei Zhang is professor and director of the Institute of Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Germany. He received both his Bachelor of Engineering (1986, with distinction) and Master of Engineering (1989) from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and his PhD (1994) at the Institute of Real-Time Computer Systems and Robotics, Department of Computer Science, University of Karlsruhe, Germany. His research interests are multimodal information systems, machine learning, service robots and human-computer communication. In these areas he has published over 100 papers in journals and on conferences, various technical reports, five book chapters and two research monographs. Dr. Zhang leads numerous basic research and application projects, among others the EU basic research programs and the Collaborative Research Centre supported by the German Research Council. He is the coordinator of the German-Chinese International Research Training Program CINACS carried out by the University of Hamburg and Tsinghua University. He has received several awards including the IEEE ROMAN Best Paper Award.
