Aniket Bera, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Director of the IDEAS Lab, Purdue, will present "Designing AI-driven Behaviorally-intelligent Agents: Modeling Motion, Interactions, and Collaborations as part of the Neurotrauma and Diseases seminar series on Wednesday, November 6 at 4:00 p.m. in NLSN 1195.
Abstract: Recent advances in Robotic technologies are gradually enabling humans and robots to co-exist, co-work, and share spaces in different environments. AI-driven Robots and Intelligent Agents are increasingly required to navigate in socially-acceptable yet collision-free paths in a crowd in places such as campuses, airports, and shopping malls; to interact and understand people in their homes, workplaces, and hospitals; and to share responsibility for completing tasks, meaning that robots are becoming social partners and teammates with humans. In the future, these socially intelligent robots will likely enter almost all human domains, including healthcare facilities, factories, airports, warehouses, schools, etc.
In this talk, we will focus on our research on the development of autonomous systems to navigate complex and dynamic environments with a high degree of situational awareness and human-like adaptability. This work leverages deep learning and geometric reasoning to create behavior-aware navigation strategies, allowing robots to predict and respond to human movement patterns in real-time.
Bio: Dr. Aniket Bera is an Associate Professor in Purdue University’s Department of Computer Science. He directs the interdisciplinary research lab IDEAS (Intelligent Design for Empathetic and Augmented Systems) at Purdue, working on modeling the "human" and "social" aspects using AI in Robotics, Graphics, and Vision. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. Prior to this, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his Ph.D. in 2017. He is currently serving as the Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) in "Planning and Simulation", Conference Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 2022), and Outreach Chair for 22nd ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium for Computer Animation (SCA 2023). His core research interests are in Affective Computing, Computer Graphics (AR/VR, Augmented Intelligence, Multi-Agent Simulation), Social Robotics, Autonomous Agents, Cognitive modeling, and planning for intelligent characters. He has advised and co-advised multiple M.S. and Ph.D. students. His work has won multiple best paper awards at top Graphics/VR conferences. He also works with the University of Maryland at Baltimore Medical School to build algorithms and systems to help therapists and doctors detect mental health and social anxiety issues. His research involves novel combinations of methods and collaborations in machine learning, computational psychology, computer graphics, and physically-based simulation to develop real-time computational models to learn human behaviors.
This seminar is sponsored by Purdue's Center for Paralysis Research and Plexon.
