Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

CCC Council Member Maria Gini Featured in University of Minnesota Article: Designing the Next Generation of Robots

January 12th, 2021 / in Announcements, CCC, CS education, Research News, robotics / by Maddy Hunter

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council member Maria Gini.

Maria Gini

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished Professor of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Maria Gini was recently featured in an article highlighting the work of U of M’s Minnesota Robotics Institute (MnRI).  

The Minnesota Robotics Institute is a unit of U of M’s College of Science and Engineering Department that brings together students and researchers from all over the world to pursue an education in robotics. The article highlighted a couple of ongoing and past projects that have come out of the institute including a robot used to detect autism in young children, underwater autonomous vehicles to identify and locate invasive weeds affecting Minnesota wildlife, and a prototype bot that can be used during the pandemic to assist healthcare workers by taking patients’ temperatures with a thermal camera.

One question in particular that Gini seeks to answer is whether or not robots can achieve human-level skills in comprehending and producing language. The key to answering this question will be understanding robots’ learning processes through studying their organization and memory structures in the context of speech. Although this project is still in the early stages, Gini already produced a prototype ‘chatbot’ for radio stations, that will answer listeners’ questions such as identifying the song that just played. In addition, she just finished a two-year project designing a robot that will store information from its conversations and respond or remind speakers of tasks they’ve previously mentioned.

Gini is a member of the newly created CCC Technology for a Distributed, Connected Life Task Force, which has many of the similar goals of improving human life through technology. This is an exciting time for research in robotics, with tons of opportunities and resources for implementation. We look forward to seeing what the people of MnRI will come up with next. See the full article here.

 

Disclaimer: Posts on this blog report on happenings, opportunities, and issues that arise in the broad computing research community, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the CCC or the National Science Foundation.


Related posts:

  1. CCC Council Member Chad Jenkins in NYT Article: Can We Make Our Robots Less Biased Than We Are?
  2. CCC Council Member Manuela Veloso Joins JPMorgan Chase & Co. as Head of AI Research
  3. CCC Council Member Featured in Big Data Discussion in New York Times
  4. CCC Council Member Mark Hill featured in NSF video
  5. NY Times Article “How to Make America’s Robots Great Again”
CCC Council Member Maria Gini Featured in University of Minnesota Article: Designing the Next Generation of Robots

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