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SUMMARY:Co-emergence of perception\, action\, and embodiment
DTSTART:20160831T140000
DTSTAMP:20260513T015939Z
UID:940f0115bb0639006fdf1a293554dbac50c696ead762b59e0886784b
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Trish Nanayakkara\, King’s College London\nThe emerging 
 area of morphological computation views the body not only as a mere anatom
 ical structure\, but also as an important resource that contributes to the
  computation of perception and action. The nature of sensorimotor coupling
  and its implications on the very nature of computation of action-percepti
 on arbitration in soft robotics and biological motor control is not yet we
 ll understood. For instance\, the spindle sensors (provide position and ve
 locity) and tendons (provide force/torque) are physically embedded among m
 uscle fibres. That makes sensing entangled with action\, offering opportun
 ities to take control over haptic perception by changing action and vice v
 ersa. E.g.\, when asked to estimate the weight of an object\, one would ho
 ld the object and bob it up and down before arriving at a final estimate o
 f the weight. Similarly\, people probe several times when asked to mark a 
 hard area in a soft object.\nThis opens up an unexplored question as to ho
 w internal impedance of the embodiment should be controlled to arbitrate p
 erception and action as co-occurring phenomena rather than as a sequential
  phenomena where sensing conditions action. In other words\, optimization 
 of action and haptic perception has not been viewed as an integrated probl
 em where one imposes constraints on the other while at the same time impro
 ving the other.\nIn this talk\, I will show some results of the recent wor
 k in my “laboratory for morphological computation and learning” to sug
 gest the benefit of viewing the whole body as a unified computational mach
 ine. I will also pose a hypothesis we have been developing recently about 
 the possible connection from neural level plasticity to model the world an
 d the body to long terms morphological adaptations such as the shape of th
 e sliding surface of the knee joint whereby the resulting bodily adaptatio
 n releases the central nervous system from repetitive computation of contr
 ol action via feedback loops with long delays.\nBio: Dr. Thrish Nanayakkar
 a is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe)\, Depart
 ment of Informatics\, Kings College London (KCL). Thrish has been a Radcli
 ffe Fellow\, Harvard University\, USA\, and research affiliate at the Comp
 uter Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory\, MIT\, USA. His resea
 rch interests are in soft robotics and human-robot interaction. He has exp
 erience as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biomedical 
 Engineering\, Johns Hopkins University\, USA.
LOCATION:MEB110 http://plan.epfl.ch/?request_locale=fr&room=meb110&domain=
 places
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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