research-interests.md 2.6 KB
Research Interests
Past Research:
I was selected for an NSF-funded undergraduate research experience at the University of Cincinnati. I and two other students researched novel stereovision filtering, computer vision, and obstacle avoidance algorithms on UC's intelligent ground vehicles.
As a graduate student at Drexel University, I participated in the DARPA Robotics Challenge and developed experience with the Hubo humanoid robot.
Past Areas of interest
Human-robot interaction
How can we ensure our robot-filled future is full of perceptive, helpful, friendly robots, rather than dumb, pesky, frustrating ones?
Why I'm no longer interested
As of 2012-2014, the technology is just not mature/reliable enough to do meaningful experiments with humanoid robots. The robots I had to work with were too dumb, pesky, frustrating for even me to put up with. And that's saying something.
Perception
How to make sense of the wealth of sensor data available to robots
Why I'm no longer interested
Actually, it would still probably be a pretty interesting field. But frankly, it looks like machine vision, 3D reconstruction from video, augmented reality physics, etc all seem to be coming along just fine.
Machine learning
How to organize and apply knowledge
Why I'm no longer interested
I'm a machine learning hipster. I was into it before it was a buzzword. After studying it for three years at university, I was kind of disappointed in a "this is it?" way. Then deep neural nets took off, and the tools became so plug-and-play that everyone and their dog can build an "app" that uses machine learning. While neural nets do indeed organize knowledge, to date the ML field has been obsessed with results/performance, without concerning itself with understanding how these nets are organizing that knowledge. It is a very shallow victory.
Machine ethics
What do we tell cognitive agents about how to behave? Can we define or enforce ethical robot / AI behavior?
Why I'm no longer interested
I don't believe it matters, because they can't be any worse than humans.
Continued areas of interest
Cheap hardware revolution
How can we best take advantage of game-changing cheap hardware, like the Kinect and Android phones?
Ubiquitous Computing
As the number of embedded computers increases, how can we keep the interface complexity from also increasing?
Disposable Computing
How cheap can computing get? Raspberry Pi Zero, unlimited free cloud deployments... could we start replacing our smartphones every week? Every day?