Research projects show creative ways MIT students are connecting computing to other fields.
Kim Martineau | MIT Quest for Intelligence
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Robots that understand language
The more that robots can engage with humans, the more useful they become. That means asking for feedback when they get confused and seamlessly absorbing new information as they interact with us and their environment. Ideally, this means moving to a world in which we talk to robots instead of programming them.
In a project led by Boris Katz, a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Nicholas Roy, a professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, graduate student Yen-Ling Kuo has designed a set of experiments to understand how humans and robots can cooperate and what robots must learn to follow commands.
In one video game experiment, volunteers are asked to drive a car full of bunnies through an obstacle course of walls and pits of flames. It sounds like “absurdist comedy,” Kuo admits, but the goal is straightforward: to understand how humans plot a course through hazardous conditions while interpreting the actions of others around them. Data from the experiments will be used to design algorithms that help robots to plan and explain their understanding of what others are doing...
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