Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
Robot learning is a research field at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. It studies techniques allowing a robot to acquire novel skills or adapt to its environment through learning algorithms. The embodiment of the robot, situated in a physical embedding, provides at the same time specific difficulties and opportunities for guiding the learning process.
John Yen is Professor of Data Science and Professor-in-Charge of Data Science in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He currently leads the Laboratory of AI for Cyber Security at Penn State. He was the founder and a former Director of the Cancer Informatics Initiative there.
Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara is a Greek computer scientist. She is an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She also serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.
Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision process from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics. Kaelbling received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1997 for applying reinforcement learning to embedded control systems and developing programming tools for robot navigation. In 2000, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Henrik Iskov Christensen is a Danish roboticist and Professor of Computer Science at Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also the Director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego.
Yann André LeCun is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Sven Koenig is a full professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. He received an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, advised by Reid Simmons.
Ingemar J. Cox is Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he is Head of the Future Media Group, and he is Professor in the Machine Learning department at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2003 and 2008, he was Director of UCL's Adastral Park Campus.
François Fages is a French computer scientist known for contributions in the areas of unification theory, rule-based modelling, logic programming, concurrent constraint logic programming, computational biology and systems biology.
Jean-Christophe Baillie is a French scientist and entrepreneur. He founded the ENSTA ParisTech Robotics Lab where he worked on developmental robotics and computational evolutionary linguistics. While at ENSTA, he designed the urbiscript programming language to control robots, which became the base technology of Gostai, a robotics startup he created in 2006, which was acquired by Aldebaran Robotics in 2012.
Shrikanth Narayanan is an Indian-American Professor at the University of Southern California. He is an interdisciplinary engineer-scientist with a focus on human-centered signal processing and machine intelligence with speech and spoken language processing at its core. A prolific award-winning researcher, educator, and inventor, with hundreds of publications and a number of acclaimed patents to his credit, he has pioneered several research areas including in computational speech science, speech and human language technologies, audio, music and multimedia engineering, human sensing and imaging technologies, emotions research and affective computing, behavioral signal processing, and computational media intelligence. His technical contributions cover a range of applications including in defense, security, health, education, media, and the arts. His contributions continue to impact numerous domains including in human health, national defense/intelligence, and the media arts including in using technologies that facilitate awareness and support of diversity and inclusion. His award-winning patents have contributed to the proliferation of speech technologies on the cloud and on mobile devices and in enabling novel emotion-aware artificial intelligence technologies.
Catherine Plaisant is a French/American Research Scientist Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and assistant director of research of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab.
Stephen E. Levinson is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), leader of the Language Acquisition and Robotics Lab at UIUC, and a full-time faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC. He works on speech synthesis, acquisition and recognition and the development of anthropomorphic robots.
Nicholas Ayache, born on 1 November 1958 in Paris, is a French computer scientist and Research Director at INRIA, Sophia Antipolis-Mediterranean Centre. Previously, he was Scientific Director of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire de Strasbourg (2012–2015) and Visiting Professor at the Collège de France (2014). He is also a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Intrinsic motivation in the study of artificial intelligence and robotics is a mechanism for enabling artificial agents to exhibit inherently rewarding behaviours such as exploration and curiosity, grouped under the same term in the study of psychology. Psychologists consider intrinsic motivation in humans to be the drive to perform an activity for inherent satisfaction – just for the fun or challenge of it.
Chan-Jin Chung (정찬진) or popularly known as "CJ" Chung is a full professor of Computer Science at Lawrence Technological University(LTU) in Michigan, USA. He founded an international autonomous robotics competition called Robofest in the 1999–2000 academic year as well as numerous educational programs for youth by integrating STEM, arts, autonomous robotics, and computer science. He also served as the founding USA National Organizer of World Robot Olympiad (WRO) in 2014 and 2015. He also started the WISER conference in 2014. His research areas include evolutionary computation, cultural algorithms, intelligent systems & autonomous mobile robotics, software engineering, machine learning & deep learning, computer science education, and educational robotics.
Alois Christian Knoll is German computer scientist and professor at the TUM Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is head of the Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Real-Time Systems and known for seminal contributions to Human–Robot-Interaction, Neurorobotics and Autonomous Systems.
Diane Joyce Cook is an American computer scientist whose research interests include artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, home automation, and smart environments. She is Regents Professor and Huie-Rogers Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.
