OUR EVENTS

The Center for Technology and Social Behavior hosts a monthly speaker series that brings internationally renowned speakers to Northwestern University to meet with our researchers and present on a topic relevant to technology and social behavior. This year's lineup includes a brilliant collection of guests from around the world. You can also visit our CTSB Speaker Series Google Calendar for a complete listing of times and locations.

CTSB Lecture Series

Oct 27, 2009, 12pm
Barbara Rogoff, UC Santa Cruz
Cultural Aspects of Learning: Observation, Collaboration, and Multimodal Conversation
Frances Searle 1-483

Oct 29, 2009, 4pm
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University
It's Not You, it's Me: Automatically Extracting Social Meaning from Speed Dates
Frances Searle 1-421

Nov 12, 2009, 4pm
Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan
The Social Self and the Social Brain: A Perspective of Cultural Neuroscience
Frances Searle 1-421

Dec 10, 2009, 4pm
Cynthia Breazeal, MIT Media Lab
Robots as Social Learners
Ford 1.350 (ITW)

Jan 21, 2010, 4pm
Pamela Hinds, Stanford University
Situated Knowing Who: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work

Feb 18, 2010, 4pm
Fernanda Viégas, IBM Research
Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts

Mar 11, 2010, 4pm
Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo! Research
TBD

Apr 29, 2010, 4pm
Matthew Kam, Carnegie Mellon University
MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies

May 13, 2010, 4pm
Jenna Burrell, UC Berkeley
Evaluating Shared Access: Social Equality and the Circulation of Mobile Phones in Rural Uganda

Cynthia Breazeal
MIT Media Lab

Robots as Social Learners

Abstract:
As personal robots enter our workplaces and homes, it will be important for them to learn new tasks and abilities from a wide demographic of people. Ideally, people will be able to teach robots as naturally as one another. Consequently robots should be socially competent enough to take advantage of the same sorts of interpersonal cues and skills that humans readily use to teach and learn.

Our research seeks to identify simple, natural, and prevalent teaching cues and program robots with social-affective mechanisms to enable them to learn efficiently and effectively from natural interactions. In this talk, I present several social skills implemented on our robots and discuss how they address the challenge of building robots that learn from people. These skills include the ability to direct attention, to understand affect and intent, to express its learning process to the human instructor, and to regulate its interaction with the instructor. Through these examples, we show how social, emotional, and expressive factors can be used in interesting ways to build robots that learn from people in a manner that is natural for people to teach.