Presenter: Prof Xiaoping Cheng, University of Science and Technology, China (invited by Prof Mary-Anne Williams)

Abstract: The long-term Ke Jia Project focuses on intelligent service robots that communicate and cooperate with humans in natural ways, especially for complicated real-world applications. We identified a set of assumptions and requirements for the project. State-of-the-art, general-purpose Natural Language Processing (NLP), Commonsense Reasoning (in particular, Answer Set Programming), and Robotics techniques are integrated and implemented on the Ke Jia robot. Instead of command languages, small limited segments of natural languages (English and Chinese) are employed in spoken dialogue between Ke Jia and its users. The information in the dialogue is extracted, classified and transferred into the internal representation of Ke Jia’s NLP mechanism, and further used autonomously in Ke Jia's problem-solving and planning. A series of case studies were conducted with positive results, verifying its capacity to acquire knowledge through spoken dialogue with humans, autonomous solving problems by virtue of acquired causal knowledge, and autonomous planning for complex tasks.

Brief bio: Xiaoping Chen is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He received his PhD in CS from USTC, and a Master in EE and a BA in Mathematics from Anhui University. Prof. Chen is currently Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, USTC. He established, and has led the USTC Multi-Agent Systems Lab and robot team, WrightEagle, the first Chinese team to enter the international RoboCup competitions, the first Chinese legged robot team, and the first Chinese standard platform humanoid robot team, which serves as a platform for research on Intelligent Robots and Multi-Agent Systems, especially with decentralised POMDPs, NLP, and ASP. The team has won 4 champions and 7 runner-ups in RoboCup world championships. Prof Chen also set up, and has led, the Ke Jia Project, a long-term project on intelligent service robots that communicate and cooperate with humans in natural ways, in which speech recognition/synthesis, NLP, planning, common-sense reasoning, perception (through vision, LRF, etc) and manipulation are integrated into a single robot. Professor Chen is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Knowledge Engineering Review. He has been a trustee of the RoboCup Federation since 2008 and was a general co-chair of RoboCup'08, is a senior PC member of IJCAI'09, and a PC member of IJCAI'07, AAAI'05, AAMAS'10 and many other international conferences.