COMPUTER SCIENCE
DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
Deb Roy
MIT Media Lab
Cognitive Machines Group

Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Computer Science Building, Room 151
4:00 PM

Faculty Host: Andrew Fagg

Meaning Machines

Computers don't grasp meaning in any deep, human sense. From a
computer's point of view, words are meaningless bits of information to
be processed with speed and precision, but without any genuine
interpretation of content. We envision a new class of machines that
understand the meaning of information in more human-like ways by
grounding knowledge in the physical world and in the machines' own
goals. Towards this long term goal, our group develops conversational
robots and other situated systems designed to communicate with human
partners using natural language. In this talk I will highlight recent
experimental results and applications in multimodal human-machine
interaction. I will also discuss an emerging theoretical framework for
connecting language, action, and perception which has relevance both for
designing situated systems and for cognitive modeling.