Events & Talks

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr. Maren Bennewitz Upcoming 05-05-2025 Active Perception, Manipulation, and Personalized Navigation for Advanced Service Robots Service robots acting in human environments must actively perceive their environment, act foresightedly, and adapt to individual user preferences. In this talk, I will first present methods to enable robots to efficiently perceive the environment and carefully manipulate objects in cluttered scenes. In particular, I will introduce an active mapping approach for confined spaces such as household shelves or horticultural crop rows, where significant occlusions pose challenges for service robots. In these scenarios, robots need to manipulate objects to reduce occlusions and improve visibility.... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr. Adam Spiers 26-03-2025 Dexterity and Haptics at the Manipulation and Touch Lab The Manipulation and Touch Lab (MTL) at Imperial College London conducts research on topics related to human and robotic manipulation, tactile sensing, haptic interfaces and applied machine learning. In this talk the PI of the lab, Dr Ad Spiers, (formerly of MPI-IS) will discuss several of the MTL’s novel mechatronic approaches to these topics, focusing particularly on dexterous robotic manipulation and tactile sensors. Ad will also give an overview of his startup’s work on a novel haptic interface to aid navigation for vision-impaired pedestrians. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr. Hannah Stuart 18-03-2024 Designing Mobile Robots for Physical Interaction with Sandy Terrains One day, robots will widely support exploration and development of unstructured natural environments. Much of the work I will present in this lecture is supported by NASA and is focused on robot design research relevant to accessing the surfaces of the Moon or Mars. Tensile elements appear repeatedly across the wide array of missions envisioned to support human or robotic exploration and habitation of the Moon. With a single secured tether either rovers or astronauts, or both, could belay down into steep lunar craters for the exploration of permanently shadowed regions; the tether prevents ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Prof. Dangxiao Wang 07-07-2023 Wearable Haptics for Virtual Reality Current virtual reality systems mainly rely on hand-held controllers, which can only provide six-dimensional motion tracking and vibrotactile feedback to users. One promising solution for improving immersion is to develop wearable systems that can capture over 20-DoF hand motion and provide distributed kinesthetic and tactile feedback to the skin. In this talk, I will discuss the technical challenges for developing high-fidelity wearable haptic systems, and then introduce our work on haptic gloves, hand-based haptic rendering algorithms, and the applications of wearable haptic systems in me... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Jun.-Prof. Dr. rer.nat. Maria Wirzberger 08-12-2022 Interdisciplinary Pathways to Responsible Human-Technology Partnership How can we design technology in a way that optimally supports human demands in everyday life? And how can we mitigate system-generated biases to facilitate a trustworthy human-technology partnership? At the intersection of cognitive psychology, human-machine interaction, education, and artificial intelligence, my team and I apply a broad portfolio of experimental lab, field, and online studies, user-centered software development, and modeling and simulation techniques. Together with collaborators from academia, industry, and education, our ultimate goal is to design and evaluate responsible... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Nicolas Gerig 11-11-2022 Bio-inspired Robotics for Minimal-Invasive Surgery At the BIROMED-Lab, we work on developing novel technology to advance robot-assisted medical interventions. I will provide a short overview on our current research challenges with a focus on robot-assisted, minimally-invasive surgery. Minimal-invasive surgery results in faster patient recovery and using robotic tools allows to further enhance surgery outcome. Such robot-assisted minimal-invasive surgery is typically realized by replacing the direct manual guidance of instruments with telemanipulated or robot-guided instruments. For example, hand tremor can be filtered or the surgeons’ mo... Nataliya Rokhmanova Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Prof. Dr. Annegret Mündermann 11-11-2022 Digital Biomarkers and Functional Biomechanics in Orthopaedics Developments in assessing joint loading during locomotion and human movement are influenced by fast-pace technological advances. Simple technical solutions for capturing human movement using wearables and cloud-based solutions lead to applications in fields less related to biomechanics. Our group generates clinical evidence for using these technical solutions for assessing relevant parameters in large cohorts, collecting data outside of the laboratory and as digital biomarkers. Moreover, we investigate the functional biomechanics of orthopaedic conditions, evaluate established and novel tre... Nataliya Rokhmanova Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr. Anna-Maria Liphardt 11-11-2022 Musculoskeletal Function in Immobilization and Rheumatic Disease Immobilization and disease both affect musculoskeletal function. At the same time, functional parameters may be an indicator of disease activity in rheumatic disease and changes in the mechanical environment cause acute and long term adaptation of tissue morphology and function. This presentation will summarize effects of immobilization using bed rest or microgravity on cartilage metabolism as well es introduce experimental setups to assess musculoskeletal function in rheumatic disease. Nataliya Rokhmanova Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Prof. dr. J. B. J. (Jeroen) Smeets 18-08-2022 Grasping like Humans Do Humans and robots frequently pick up objects. Neuroscientists try to understand how humans control the non-linear musculoskeletal system to do so, and roboticists try to design control to mimic human dexterity. Both groups of scientists tend to decompose grasping based on the characteristics of the hardware, which is clearly separated in a part for positioning the hand/gripper in space and a part for the actual griping. It is therefore generally assumed that mastering these two parts constitutes efficient control of the reach-to-grasp movement. I will argue that human motor control is not f... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Ilona Jacobi

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Wenzhen Yuan 09-11-2021 Simulating the GelSight Sensors: From Physics to Data In recent years, vision-based high-resolution tactile sensors such as GelSight have been widely used because the rich signal provides useful information regarding the state of the robot and the environment. However, a major barrier for applying tactile sensors like GelSight is the cost. To make the tactile sensors more accessible to a broader community, we propose to build a simulation model for vision-based tactile sensors like GelSight. We explore two modeling methods for making the model: a physically-based method that uses rendering technologies to simulate the sensor's optical design a... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

IS Colloquium Prof. Margarita Chli 28-06-2021 Teaching Robots to See – Challenges and Developments in Robotic Vision As vision plays a key role in how we interpret a situation, developing vision-based perception for robots promises to be a big step towards robotic intelligence. This talk will briefly discuss some of the biggest challenges we are faced with all the way from robust localization and mapping, to dense scene representation for path planning, and collaborative perception. With effective robot collaboration featuring as a key scientific challenge in the field, the talk will focus on this topic describing our recent progress in this area at the Vision for Robotics Lab of ETH Zurich (http://www.v4... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Oliwia Gust

IS Colloquium Moritz Hardt 09-01-2020 Dynamics of Decisions Machine learning increasingly supports consequential decisions in domains including health, employment, and criminal justice. Consequential decision making is inherently dynamic: Individuals, their outcomes, and entire populations can change and adapt in response to classification. Traditional machine learning, however, fails to account for such dynamic effects. In this talk, I will highlight three different vignettes of dynamic decision making. The first is about how classification changes populations and how this perspective is essential to questions of fairness in machine learning. The ... Metin Sitti

Physical Intelligence IS Colloquium Katia Bertoldi 09-01-2020 Kirigami-Inspired Metamaterials - from Morphable Structures to Soft Robots In the search for materials with new properties, there have been great advances in recent years aimed at the construction of mechanical systems whose behaviour is governed by structure, rather than composition. Through careful design of the material’s architecture, new material properties have been demonstrated, including negative Poisson’s ratio, high stiffness-to-weight ratio and mechanical cloaking. While originally the field focused on achieving unusual (zero or negative) values for familiar mechanical parameters, more recently it has been shown that non-linearities can be exploited to ... Metin Sitti

IS Colloquium Dr. Ksenia Keplinger 19-12-2019 Helping leaders and organizations unleash the true potential of diversity and inclusion in our radically transforming world of work Recent economic, technological, and societal changes (e.g., the shift from large organizations to decentralized networks of individuals/small businesses, #metoo movement) require organizations to adapt to the transforming nature of work by altering the way work is performed and the roles that workers play. Due to globalization and advanced communication technologies, modern organizations are also characterized by a diverse workforce that needs to be carefully managed. Therefore organizational leaders must take on the challenge of unleashing the true potential of diversity and inclusion by c... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker 13-12-2019 Haptic Intelligence (colloquium organized by the MPI for Biological Cybernetics) Our scientific understanding of haptic interaction is still evolving, both because what you feel greatly depends on how you move, and because engineered sensors, actuators, and algorithms typically struggle to match human capabilities. Consequently, few computer and machine interfaces provide the human operator with high-fidelity touch feedback or carefully analyze the physical signals generated during haptic interactions, limiting their usability. The crucial role of the sense of touch is also deeply appreciated by researchers working to create autonomous robots that can competently manipu...

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Seungmoon Choi, Ph.D. 06-12-2019 Automatic Authoring of Haptic Content Providing rich and immersive physical experiences to users has become an essential component in many computer-interactive applications, where haptics plays a central role. However, as with other sensory modalities, modeling and rendering good haptic experiences with plausible physicality is a very demanding task in terms of the cost associated with modeling and authoring, not to mention the cost for development. No general and widely-used solutions exist yet for that; most designers and developers rely on their in-house programs, or even worse, manual coding. This talk will introduce the re... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Jean-Louis Thonnard 25-09-2019 From Fingertip Skin Mechanics to Dexterous Object Manipulation Fingertip skin friction plays a critical role during object manipulation. We will describe a simple and reliable method to estimate the fingertip static coefficient of friction (CF) continuously and quickly during object manipulation, and we will describe a global expression of the CF as a function of the normal force and fingertip moisture. Then we will show how skin hydration modifies the skin deformation dynamics during grip-like contacts. Certain motor behaviours observed during object manipulation could be explained by the effects of skin hydration. Then the biomechanics of the partial... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker David Gueorguiev

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Ernest (Ted) Gomez, MD, MTR 11-09-2019 Haptic Intelligence in Surgical Learning - Lessons from Laparoscopy and Robotics Surgery is a demanding activity that places a human life in the hands of others. However, innovations in minimally invasive surgery have physically separated surgeons' hands from their patients, creating the need for surgeons and their tools to develop both natural and artificial haptic intelligence. This lecture examines the essential role of haptic intelligence in skill development for laparoscopic and robotic surgery. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Zhaoping Li 03-09-2019 A New Framework to Understanding Biological Vision Visual attention selects a tiny amount of information that can be deeply processed by the brain, and gaze shifts bring the selected visual object to fovea, the center of the visual field, for better visual decoding or recognition of the selected objects. Therefore, central and peripheral vision should differ qualitatively in visual decoding, rather than just quantitatively in visual acuity. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Gunhyuk Park 09-08-2019 Illusive and Realistic Vibrotactile Feedback: 2D Phantom Sensation and Vibrotactile Dimensional Reduction Many hapticians have designed and implemented haptic effects to various user interactions. For several decades, hapticians have proved that the haptic feedback can improve multiple facets of user experience including task performance, analyzing and utilizing user perception, and substituting other sensory modalities. Among them, this talk introduces two representative rendering methods to provide vibrotactile effects to users: 2D phantom sensation that makes a user perceive illusive tactile perception by using multiple real vibrotactile actuators and vibrotactile dimensional reduction that ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

IS Colloquium Christoph Keplinger 17-07-2019 Robotic materials for the intelligent systems of the future: From soft robotics to energy capture Robots today rely on rigid components and electric motors based on metal and magnets, making them heavy, unsafe near humans, expensive and ill-suited for unpredictable environments. Nature, in contrast, makes extensive use of soft materials and has produced organisms that drastically outperform robots in terms of agility, dexterity, and adaptability. The Keplinger Lab aims to fundamentally challenge current limitations of robotic hardware, using an interdisciplinary approach that synergizes concepts from soft matter physics and chemistry with advanced engineering technologies to introduce r...

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr Antonia Tzemanaki 03-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Caroline G. L. Cao, Ph.D. 23-05-2019 Human Factors Research in Minimally Invasive Surgery Health care is probably the last remaining unsafe critical system. A large proportion of reported medical errors occur in the hospital operating room (OR), a highly complex sociotechnical environment. As technology is being introduced into the OR faster than surgeons can learn to use them, surgical errors result from the unfamiliar instrumentation, increased motoric, perceptual and cognitive demands on the surgeons, as well as the lack of adequate training. Effective technology design for minimally invasive surgery requires an understanding of the system constraints of remote surgery, and t... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Benjamin Bloem-Reddy 25-03-2019 Probabilistic symmetry and invariant neural networks In an effort to improve the performance of deep neural networks in data-scarce, non-i.i.d., or unsupervised settings, much recent research has been devoted to encoding invariance under symmetry transformations into neural network architectures. We treat the neural network input and output as random variables, and consider group invariance from the perspective of probabilistic symmetry. Drawing on tools from probability and statistics, we establish a link between functional and probabilistic symmetry, and obtain functional representations of probability distributions that are invariant or eq... Isabel Valera

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Peter Dayan 21-12-2018 Mind Games Much existing work in reinforcement learning involves environments that are either intentionally neutral, lacking a role for cooperation and competition, or intentionally simple, when agents need imagine nothing more than that they are playing versions of themselves. Richer game theoretic notions become important as these constraints are relaxed. For humans, this encompasses issues that concern utility, such as envy and guilt, and that concern inference, such as recursive modeling of other players, I will discuss studies treating a paradigmatic game of trust as an interactive partia...

IS Colloquium Prof. Eric Tytell 12-11-2018 Muscle as active matter: How fish tune their body mechanics for effective swimming Many fishes swim efficiently over long distances to find food or during migrations. They also have to accelerate rapidly to escape predators. These two behaviors require different body mechanics: for efficient swimming, fish should be very flexible, but for rapid acceleration, they should be stiffer. Here, I will discuss recent experiments that show that they can use their muscles to tune their effective body mechanics. Control strategies inspired by the muscle activity in fishes may help design better soft robotic devices. Ardian Jusufi

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Veronica J. Santos 25-10-2018 Artificial Haptic Intelligence for Human-Machine Systems The functionality of artificial manipulators could be enhanced by artificial “haptic intelligence” that enables the identification of object features via touch for semi-autonomous decision-making and/or display to a human operator. This could be especially useful when complementary sensory modalities, such as vision, are unavailable. I will highlight past and present work to enhance the functionality of artificial hands in human-machine systems. I will describe efforts to develop multimodal tactile sensor skins, and to teach robots how to haptically perceive salient geometric features such ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Adam Spiers

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Veronica J. Santos 24-10-2018 Artificial Haptic Intelligence for Human-Machine Systems The functionality of artificial manipulators could be enhanced by artificial “haptic intelligence” that enables the identification of object features via touch for semi-autonomous decision-making and/or display to a human operator. This could be especially useful when complementary sensory modalities, such as vision, are unavailable. I will highlight past and present work to enhance the functionality of artificial hands in human-machine systems. I will describe efforts to develop multimodal tactile sensor skins, and to teach robots how to haptically perceive salient geometric features such ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Chris Macnab 23-10-2018 Control Systems for a Surgical Robot on the Space Station As part of a proposed design for a surgical robot on the space station, my research group has been asked to look at controls that can provide literally surgical precision. Due to excessive time delay, we envision a system with a local model being controlled by a surgeon while the remote system on the space station follows along in a safe manner. Two of the major design considerations that come into play for the low-level feedback loops on the remote side are 1) the harmonic drives in a robot will cause excessive vibrations in a micro-gravity environment unless active damping strategies ar... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Prof. Peter Pott 04-10-2018 Medical Robots with a Haptic Touch – First Experiences with the FLEXMIN System The FLEXMIN haptic robotic system is a single-port tele-manipulator for robotic surgery in the small pelvis. Using a transanal approach it allows bi-manual tasks such as grasping, monopolar cutting, and suturing with a footprint of Ø 160 x 240 mm³. Forces up to 5 N in all direction can be applied easily. In addition to provide low latency and highly dynamic control over its movements, high-fidelity haptic feedback was realised using built-in force sensors, lightweight and friction-optimized kinematics as well as dedicated parallel kinematics input devices. After a brief description of the s... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

IS Colloquium Prof. Koh Hosoda 04-10-2018 - 04-09-2018 Soft Feel by Soft Robotic Hand: New way of robotic sensing This lecture will show some interesting examples how soft body/skin will change your idea of robotic sensing. Soft Robotics does not only discuss about compliance and safety; soft structure will change the way to categorize objects by dynamic exploration and enables the robot to learn sense of slip. Soft Robotics will entirely change your idea how to design sensing and open up a new way to understand human sensing. Ardian Jusufi

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Prof. Dr. Cornelius Schwarz 02-07-2018 The Computational Skin. Tactile Perception based on Slip Movements. Touch requires mechanical contact and is governed by the physics of friction. Frictional movements may convert the continuous 3D profile of textural objects into discrete and probabilistic movement events of the viscoelastic integument (skin/hair) called stick-slip movements (slips). This complex transformation may further be determined by the microanatomy and the active movements of the sensing organ. Thus, the integument may realize a computation, transforming the tactile world in a context dependent way - long before it even activates neurons. The possibility that the tactile world is pe... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Yon Visell, PhD 20-06-2018 Haptic Engineering and Science at Multiple Scales I will describe recent research in my lab on haptics and robotics. It has been a longstanding challenge to realize engineering systems that can match the amazing perceptual and motor feats of biological systems for touch, including the human hand. Some of the difficulties of meeting this objective can be traced to our limited understanding of the mechanics, and to the high dimensionality of the signals, and to the multiple length and time scales - physical regimes - involved. An additional source of richness and complication arises from the sensitive dependence of what we feel on what ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Cédric Archambeau 11-06-2018 Learning Representations for Hyperparameter Transfer Learning Bayesian optimization (BO) is a model-based approach for gradient-free black-box function optimization, such as hyperparameter optimization. Typically, BO relies on conventional Gaussian process regression, whose algorithmic complexity is cubic in the number of evaluations. As a result, Gaussian process-based BO cannot leverage large numbers of past function evaluations, for example, to warm-start related BO runs. After a brief intro to BO and an overview of several use cases at Amazon, I will discuss a multi-task adaptive Bayesian linear regression model, whose computational complexity is ... Isabel Valera

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Prof. Javier Cudeiro 08-06-2018 Lessons from the visual system to understand (and help) the brain Visual perception involves a complex interaction between feedforward and feedback processes. A mechanistic understanding of these processing, and its limitations, is a necessary first step towards elucidating key aspects of perceptual functions and dysfunctions. In this talk, I will review our ongoing effort towards the understanding of how feedback visual processing operates at the level of the thalamus, a dynamic relay station halfway between the retina and the cortex. I will present experimental evidence from several recent electrophysiology studies performed on subjects engaged in ... Daniel Cudeiro

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Karon MacLean 28-05-2018 Making Haptics and its Design Accessible Today’s advances in tactile sensing and wearable, IOT and context-aware computing are spurring new ideas about how to configure touch-centered interactions in terms of roles and utility, which in turn expose new technical and social design questions. But while haptic actuation, sensing and control are improving, incorporating them into a real-world design process is challenging and poses a major obstacle to adoption into everyday technology. Some classes of haptic devices, e.g., grounded force feedback, remain expensive and limited in range. I’ll describe some recent highlights of an o... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Thabo Beeler 25-05-2018 Digital Humans At Disney Research Disney Research has been actively pushing the state-of-the-art in digitizing humans over the past decade, impacting both academia and industry. In this talk I will give an overview of a selected few projects in this area, from research into production. I will be talking about photogrammetric shape acquisition and dense performance capture for faces, eye and teeth scanning and parameterization, as well as physically based capture and modelling for hair and volumetric tissues. Timo Bolkart

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Jan Peters 13-04-2018 Machine Learning for Tactile Manipulation Today’s robots have motor abilities and sensors that exceed those of humans in many ways: They move more accurately and faster; their sensors see more and at a higher precision and in contrast to humans they can accurately measure even the smallest forces and torques. Robot hands with three, four, or five fingers are commercially available, and, so are advanced dexterous arms. Indeed, modern motion-planning methods have rendered grasp trajectory generation a largely solved problem. Still, no robot to date matches the manipulation skills of industrial assembly workers despite that manipulati... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Patrick Bajari 23-03-2018 The Impact of Big Data on Firm Performance: an Empirical Investigation In academic and policy circles, there has been considerable interest in the impact of “big data” on firm performance. We examine the question of how the amount of data impacts the accuracy of Machine Learned models of weekly retail product forecasts using a proprietary data set obtained from Amazon. We examine the accuracy of forecasts in two relevant dimensions: the number of products (N), and the number of time periods for which a product is available for sale (T). Theory suggests diminishing returns to larger N and T, with relative forecast errors diminishing at rate 1/sqrt(N) + 1/sqrt(... Michel Besserve Michael Hirsch

IS Colloquium Simon Hegelich 12-03-2018 Political Science and Data Science: What we can learn from each other Political science is integrating computational methods like machine learning into its own toolbox. At the same time the awareness rises that the utilization of machine learning algorithms in our daily life is a highly political issue. These two trends - the integration of computational methods into political science and the political analysis of the digital revolution - form the ground for a new transdisciplinary approach: political data science. Interestingly, there is a rich tradition of crossing the borders of the disciplines, as can be seen in the works of Paul Werbos and Herbert Simon ... Philipp Geiger

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Bin Yu 05-03-2018 Three principles of data science: predictability, stability, and computability In this talk, I'd like to discuss the intertwining importance and connections of three principles of data science in the title. They will be demonstrated in the context of two collaborative projects in neuroscience and genomics, respectively. The first project in neuroscience uses transfer learning to integrate fitted convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on ImageNet with regression methods to provide predictive and stable characterizations of neurons from the challenging primary visual cortex V4. The second project proposes iterative random forests (iRF) as a stablized RF to seek predictab... Michel Besserve

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Prof. Christian Wallraven 13-02-2018 Vision and Haptics: a Cognitive and Computational Investigation About How We Perceive the World Already starting at birth, humans integrate information from several sensory modalities in order to form a representation of the environment - such as when a baby explores, manipulates, and interacts with objects. The combination of visual and touch information is one of the most fundamental sensory integration processes, as touch information (such as body-relative size, shape, texture, material, temperature, and weight) can easily be linked to the visual image, thereby providing a grounding for later visual-only recognition. Previous research on such integration processes has so far mainly... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Professor Brent Gillespie 20-11-2017 Extending the Reafference and Internal Model Principles to Support Physical Human-Robot Interaction Relative to most robots and other machines, the human body is soft, its actuators compliant, and its control quite forgiving. But having a body that bends under load seems like a bad set-up for motor dexterity: the brain is faced with controlling more rather than fewer degrees of freedom. Undeniably, though, the soft body approach leads to superior solutions. Robots are putzes by comparison! While de-putzifying robots (perhaps by making them softer) is an endeavor I will discuss to some degree, in this talk I will focus on the design of robots intended to work cooperatively with humans, usi... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Simon Lacoste-Julien 23-10-2017 Modern Optimization for Structured Machine Learning Machine learning has become a popular application domain for modern optimization techniques, pushing its algorithmic frontier. The need for large scale optimization algorithms which can handle millions of dimensions or data points, typical for the big data era, have brought a resurgence of interest for first order algorithms, making us revisit the venerable stochastic gradient method [Robbins-Monro 1951] as well as the Frank-Wolfe algorithm [Frank-Wolfe 1956]. In this talk, I will review recent improvements on these algorithms which can exploit the structure of modern machine learning appro... Philipp Hennig

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Dominik Bach 02-10-2017 Algorithms for survival: a decision-theoretic perspective on adaptive action under threat Under acute threat, biological agents need to choose adaptive actions to survive. In my talk, I will provide a decision-theoretic view on this problem and ask, what are potential computational algorithms for this choice, and how are they implemented in neural circuits. Rational design principles and non-human animal data tentatively suggest a specific architecture that heavily relies on tailored algorithms for specific threat scenarios. Virtual reality computer games provide an opportunity to translate non-human animal tasks to humans and investigate these algorithms across species. I will ... Michel Besserve

Probabilistic Numerics IS Colloquium Amos Storkey 25-09-2017 Meta-learning statistics and augmentations for few shot learning In this talk I introduce the neural statistician as an approach for meta learning. The neural statistician learns to appropriately summarise datasets through a learnt statistic vector. This can be used for few shot learning, by computing the statistic vectors for the presented data, and using these statistics as context variables for one-shot classification and generation. I will show how we can generalise the neural statistician to a context aware learner that learns to characterise and combine independently learnt contexts. I will also demonstrate an approach for meta-learning data augmen... Philipp Hennig

IS Colloquium Prof. Amnon Shashua 18-09-2017 The Three Pillars of Fully Autonomous Driving The field of transportation is undergoing a seismic change with the coming introduction of autonomous driving. The technologies required to enable computer driven cars involves the latest cutting edge artificial intelligence algorithms along three major thrusts: Sensing, Planning and Mapping. Prof. Amnon Shashua, Co-founder and Chairman of Mobileye, will describe the challenges and the kind of machine learning algorithms involved, but will do that through the perspective of Mobileye’s activity in this domain. Michael Black

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Frederick Eberhardt 03-07-2017 Causal Macro Variables Standard methods of causal discovery take as input a statistical data set of measurements of well-defined causal variables. The goal is then to determine the causal relations among these variables. But how are these causal variables identified or constructed in the first place? Often we have sensor level data but assume that the relevant causal interactions occur at a higher scale of aggregation. Sometimes we only have aggregate measurements of causal interactions at a finer scale. I will motivate the general problem of causal discovery and present recent work on a framework and meth... Sebastian Weichwald

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Sebastian Nowozin 29-05-2017 Probabilistic Deep Learning: From Density Estimation to Representation Learning Probabilistic deep learning methods have recently made great progress for generative and discriminative modeling. I will give a brief overview of recent developments and then present two contributions. The first is on a generalization of generative adversarial networks (GAN), extending their use considerably. GANs can be shown to approximately minimize the Jensen-Shannon divergence between two distributions, the true sampling distribution and the model distribution. We extend GANs to the class of f-divergences which include popular divergences such as the Kullback-Leibler diver... Lars Mescheder

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium John Cunningham 06-03-2017 Statistical testing of epiphenomena for multi-index data As large tensor-variate data increasingly become the norm in applied machine learning and statistics, complex analysis methods similarly increase in prevalence. Such a trend offers the opportunity to understand more intricate features of the data that, ostensibly, could not be studied with simpler datasets or simpler methodologies. While promising, these advances are also perilous: these novel analysis techniques do not always consider the possibility that their results are in fact an expected consequence of some simpler, already-known feature of simpler data (for example, treating the te... Philipp Hennig

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