AASS seminar: Turn Left at the What? Landmarks as Shared Ground in communicating about environments

Who: Simone Timpf, Professor, University of Augsburg, Germany 
What: Seminar: "Turn Left at the What? Landmarks as Shared Ground in communicating about environments"
When: Thursday, November 19, at 13:00. 
Where: Hörsal T 
Remote attendance: https://oru-se.zoom.us/j/65096623293

Abstract: A robot that guides a visitor through a building, or follows the instruction “go past the fountain and turn at the noisy café,” has to solve a problem humans solve without effort: deciding which features of the environment count as landmarks, and which ones its human partner will recognise. Robot perception is good at detecting objects. It is much less good at judging which of them a person would actually choose to talk about.
This talk presents findings from human wayfinding research that can serve as design cues for human-robot communication. Landmark choice is not a fixed property of an object. It depends on the task, on the granularity at which the environment is reasoned about, and on the individual. I discuss a multidimensional and multi-granular salience model that adds environmental and personal dimensions. I then show newer work that moves landmarks beyond the visual: natural features in non-urban terrain, soundscapes as auditory landmarks indoors and outdoors, and first steps toward aquatic environments, where stable visual references are scarce.
For robots equipped with different sensors, these results point to multimodal, task-aware landmark selection. I close with open questions: can robots learn human landmark preferences, should they adapt to their listener, and how could they handle shifts in granularity within a single instruction?