(1/4) Announcing the release of "Spoken Language Interaction with Robots: Research Issues and Recommendations", a report of research recommendations across speech, robotics, dialog, and #NLProc. Joint work with Carol Espy-Wilson, Nigel Ward, and the 26 U.S. National Science Foundation workshop participants.

"And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said." Done reading LOTR to my son!

James is amazing! Apply to Brown!

"We need a deeper network!" Daniel Ritchie's end of semester song for the deep learning course at Brown CS: youtu.be/ZwVa4MtPstw

I am super excited to help out with Realtime Robotic's partnership with Dematic! Logistics has so many opportunities for robotics. newswire.com/news/realtime-… Realtime Robotics

My student Nishanth Kumar was named a finalist for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award, 2021! cra.org/2021-outstandi…

I really enjoyed giving a talk at Laboratory Schools this fall! ucls.uchicago.edu/e-news-detail/…

What should I do during my sabbatical next fall? (Must stay in the Boston area.)

Super excited about this award! George's work is foundational for making strong AI a reality! The amazing connection between skills, machine learning, and formal planning!

This article gets it right. Simplify the vaccine rules, don't worry so much if the order isn't optimal, and get shots in arms now. nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opi…

It's so much fun working with the PCTA!

It's older work, but James Tompkin made a light field 3D display that lets you see 3D scenes by generating a light field through a lens array and projectors. It lets you see and interact with a 3D scene without a headset! jamestompkin.com/assets/project…

Prompt: AIs like GPT-3 are clearly not conscious. GPT-3 is not conscious because it does not exhibit any signs of sentience. It does not possess sapience, self-awareness, or any of the other qualities that would make it aware of its surroundings and its own existence.

Prompt: AIs like GPT-3 are clearly conscious. They are not merely simulating consciousness. They are conscious. ... GPT-3 is able to engage in complex conversations, understand natural language, and exhibit other signs of intelligent behavior.

I asked GPT-3 to write a bio for me. It got many facts wrong. (I went to MIT, not CMU; I never won PECASE or the Air Force award, but did win NSF Career and a DARPA Young Investigator.) It knows a lot about language, but not what is actually true in the external world.

Check out our latest CoRL paper, where we demonstrate "out of the box" language understanding for richly structured expressive commands. We make language understanding as easy to use as speech recognition! brown.edu/news/2023-11-0…

Submit to our #RSS2024 workshop on “Robotic Tasks and How to Specify Them? Task Specification for General-Purpose Intelligent Robots” by June 12th. Join our discussion on what constitutes various task specifications for robots, in what scenarios they are most effective and more!

How do robots understand natural language? #IJCAI2024 survey paper on robotic language grounding We situated papers into a spectrum w/ two poles, grounding language to symbols and high-dimensional embeddings. We discussed tradeoffs, open problems & exciting future directions!

We interact with dogs through touch -- a simple pat can communicate trust or instruction. Shouldn't interacting with robot dogs be as intuitive? Most commercial robots lack tactile skins. We present UniTac: a method to sense touch using only existing joint sensors! [1/5]

David Watkins and I wrote a book chapter for George Konidaris' forthcoming book, Designing an Intelligence.  It's a recapitulation of Rod's old paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess" for the age of LLMs.   whattotelltherobot.com/p/elephants-do…