AASS Seminar - Action Semantics for Robot Perception and Imitation

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Eren Erdal Aksoy, Halmstad University, Sweden.

Abstract

Robots require a generic action representation in order to recognize, learn, and imitate observed tasks without any human intervention. Defining such a representation is a challenging problem due to the high inter-individual variability that emerges during the execution of actions. Conventional methods approach this problem by either considering continuous trajectory profiles or employing predefined symbolic action knowledge. The main challenge, however, still remains in linking perceived continuous sensory signals to discrete symbolic object or action concepts.

In this talk, I will introduce a fundamentally new framework, so-called "Semantic Event Chain" (SEC), for creating a generic representation of visual sensory experiences while linking continuous signal streams (e.g. image sequences) to their symbolic descriptions (e.g. action primitives). The SEC concept is an implicit spatiotemporal formulation that encodes actions by coupling the observed effect with the exhibited roles of manipulated objects. I will explain how such a semantic action encoding can allow robots not only to ground high-level symbolic plans into the low-level sensory-motor data but also to have seamless data processing in a bottom-up and top-down manner. I will also mention that SEC-based semantic representation can help robots understand problems of object affordances as well as object anchoring (symbol grounding). To highlight the scalability of SECs, I will finally introduce various applications on coupling language and vision, perceiving time, and memorizing episodic experiences.

Speakers's bio

Eren E. Aksoy received his M.Sc. degree in Mechatronics from the University of Siegen, Germany, in 2008 and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Göttingen, Germany, in 2012.

From 2012 to 2015, he was employed as a post-doctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. Florentin Worgotter at the University of Gottingen. Between 2015 and end of 2017, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Tamim Asfour at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Since January 2018, he has been working as an assistant professor at Halmstad University in Sweden where he is collaborating with Volvo to develop intelligent autonomous vehicles.

During his Ph.D. and post-doc career, he heavily involved in various EU funded FP7-projects (e.g.  IntellACT, Xperience, ACAT, GARNICS) as well as in a FET-ProActive project TimeStorm. He is an Associate Editor in various robotics journals and conferences (e.g. IEEE RA-L and Humanoids) and also a committee member in different organizations (e.g. IEEE Tech. Comm. on Cognitive Robotics, RSS, CVPP, etc.). His research interests include semantic analysis of manipulation actions, computer vision, cognitive robotics, and imitation learning.