February 5: Daniel D. Lee
"Making a Robotic Dog See and Hear"
Abstract
Why is it that if computers have gotten so much faster and cheaper,
they have not become any better at understanding what we want them to
do? Some of the tasks we take for granted such as vision and language
are still too difficult for the latest supercomputers to handle. To
us, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a machine it's
just a seemingly random jumble of numbers. How can we program
computers to process this kind of information? Algorithms that mimic
the way our brains compute and learn may be the answer. We'll see
some examples of such biologically inspired computation applied to
controlling a small robot dog.
Reading List
"Eye and Brain", Richard L. Gregory, 3rd ed., McGraw-Hill: New York, NY
1978.
"The Language Instinct", Steven Pinker, W. Morrow: New York, NY 1994.
"The Computational Brain", Patricia S. Churchland and Terrence J.
Sejnowski, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA 1992.
"Mobile Robots: Inspiration to Implementation", Joseph L. Jones and
Anita Flynn, 2nd ed., A. K. Peters: Wellesley, MA 1993.
Biography
Dan Lee studied physics at Harvard and MIT before coming to Bell
Laboratories in 1995. He is now a member of the technical staff in
the Biological Computation department, trying to understand the
general principles that biological systems use to process and organize
information. He works on applying that knowledge to building better
artificial systems for vision, speech, language, and data
communications. Besides playing with his robots, he enjoys ice
hockey, scuba diving, and automating the apartment for his wife and
their cat.